There’s no shame in losing a presidential primary run. Many fine people have. But the way Elizabeth Warren lost hers, the steep descent from high expectations and one-time near frontrunner status to the complete wreckage of Super Tuesday, was jarring.
How did Warren fall so far so fast? It’s a compelling question, and one that supporters and pundits alike are struggling to make sense of.
Understandably, the feminist left has strong feelings, with a deluge of pieces in the New York Times and elsewhere viewing Warren’s withdrawal strictly through the “sexist/misogynist” lens.
Of course sexism is in the mix when it comes to presidential politics. It’s a worthy topic for discussion.
But as an overarching explanatory device for why Warren ultimately failed? Nonsense.
Warren’s own campaign staffers seem to understand this. As Politico reported, most of the Warren advisors and allies they spoke with acknowledged that “sexism doesn’t capture the entire story.”
Okay, getting warmer. More from Politico: “Some [Warren staffers] argued [sexism] is just a distraction to paper over missteps.”
Uh-huh.
“Warren was the Democratic frontrunner for weeks in the fall, they noted, and victory slipped through their grasp.”
Now we’re getting somewhere.
So, what, exactly, was the problem?
If you really want to understand why Warren failed in 2020, you have to start with this: she didn’t run in 2016.
Despite considerable clamoring for her to run as the progressive foil to the more centrist Hillary, Warren took a pass. Quite likely this was part of the larger attempt to clear the path for Clinton in 2016, with Warren being deferential, not wanting to step on the toes of the presumptive first female president.
(One wonders, if the 2016 Democratic frontrunner had been a man, would Warren have run? It’s an interesting question. If the answer is yes, then hyper gender-awareness may have been her original sin.)
Either way, of course, Bernie Sanders seized the moment and filled the void on the left. In so doing, he firmly established himself as the leader of the progressive wing of the party, generating a pre-existing political condition that would cause headaches galore for the 2020 Warren campaign.
As Warren commented after dropping out, “I was told at the beginning of this whole undertaking that there are two lanes, a progressive lane that Bernie Sanders is the incumbent for and a moderate lane that Joe Biden is the incumbent for and there is no room for anyone else in this. I thought it was possible that that wasn’t the case, that there was more room, and more room to run another kind of campaign. But evidently that wasn’t the case.”
Correct. In fact, the collapse of the 2020 Warren campaign might be viewed as a series of errors they were forced into by their increasingly frantic attempt to somehow reshuffle the deck, to distinguish themselves from the stubbornly intractable Bernie machine assembled in 2016 while Warren sat and watched.
Many have cited Warren’s healthcare plan rollout in November of 2019 as a misstep that robbed her of early momentum. Here she seemed to try and split the difference between the medicare-for-all purists on the left and public option proponents in the center. In practice, she only seemed to alienate voters in both camps.
While she did take a dip in the polls at this point after previously emerging as a frontrunner, Warren remained very much in the hunt alongside Bernie, Biden, and possibly Buttigieg through December and into the new year. Still, her campaign grew increasingly frustrated by their inability to overtake Sanders in the progressive lane. While they were in line for a respectable showing, the path to the nomination appeared in jeopardy.
With Iowa and New Hampshire looming, and with the growing realization that she could not overtake Bernie on the basis of her progressive economic agenda alone, Warren turned in near-desperation to the one remaining thing that distinguished her most sharply from the competition: her gender.
In a series of moves throughout January and February, she lurched in the direction of identity politics. In a mid-January debate, she claimed that Sanders once told her in a private meeting that a woman could not win the presidency. This was followed by a hot mic confrontation after the debate in which Warren refused to shake her rival’s hand.
Regardless of whether her accusation was true, it did not achieve the desired effect. Quite the contrary, Warren immediately dipped in New Hampshire polls. After regaining some momentum in subsequent weeks, she nevertheless continued to play identity politics. At the end of January she doubled down on a previous suggestion that a nine year-old transgender child should interview and approve any prospective nominee for Secretary of Education.
Mark this down as the point where the 2020 Warren campaign officially jumped the shark.
By early February, Pete Buttigieg, a gay man who, like Barack Obama previously, had eschewed the path of highlighting identity difference, was now surging in New Hampshire while Warren sputtered.
Black voters in South Carolina appeared particularly unimpressed with Warren’s shift towards the woke left. In December the Massachusetts Senator had been at 19% in polls there. By February she was in single digits, which is right where she wound up.
Later in the month, still hopeful of making a comeback splash on Super Tuesday, Warren attempted yet another identity-fueled grand gesture with her spectacular attack on Michael Bloomberg in a February 20 debate. While this may well have succeeded in effectively ending Bloomberg’s campaign, it did nothing to help Warren’s.
It may be hard for Warren’s feminist supporters to wrap their minds around this, but hectoring the man for using the phrases “fat broads” and “horse-faced lesbians” over thirty years ago won her no new converts.
As they did throughout the primary season with virtually every candidate who went there, rank and file Democratic voters rejected identity politics, never more decisively as they did with Warren.
And here it is important to clarify: this rejection of identity politics is not itself a mark of sexism. It is, in fact, a justified and predictable response to a tactic that is essentially divisive and hostile towards large chunks of the electorate.
As David Brooks noted on PBS, Warren did not have a gender gap problem. She had an education gap problem. In the end, she was unable to extend her appeal beyond a relatively small group of highly educated predominantly white voters. Though her gender-based attacks may have appealed to these woke left elites, they alienated pretty much every other segment of the electorate, steadily whittling down her base rather than extending it as any winning politician must do.
To the extent that the feminist left wants to lash out at the sexist injustice of it all, let’s keep in mind who they are lashing out at: Democratic voters, working class people, many of them women, black, and Hispanic. These are the people who turned away from Liz Warren.
Should we now have a bunch of highly educated and economically privileged white people lecturing these folks on how sexist and misogynist they are? How ignorant and, yes, maybe even deplorable?
Not a good look.
Here’s an alternate suggestion: take a page from the Obama/Buttigieg playbook. Instead of emphasizing your differences and your victimhood (what else can we call it?), set your identity aside. Reach across the divide. Yes there is sexism out there. But it’s not as entrenched and decisive as you think. People are essentially good. (Even working class white males.) Believe it. Appeal to it. There are connections to be made.
Each time Elizabeth Warren prioritized gender politics over her fundamentally unifying progressive economic message, she moved further away from making that connection.
Admittedly, the bar is higher for women. This is unfair. It may take a female candidate with Obama-esque charisma and personal appeal to eventually break the presidential glass ceiling.
But it will also take one with his ability to resist the fool’s gold of identity politics in order to build a winning coalition.