Keller @ Large: Is Super Tuesday The End Of The Line For Elizabeth Warren?
BOSTON (CBS) - Is Super Tuesday the end of the line for Elizabeth Warren's campaign?
As she voted Tuesday morning at Cambridge's Graham and Parks School – fittingly named after two other persistent female political activists, longtime Cambridge City Councillor and State Representative Saundra Graham and the late civil rights icon Rosa Parks – Warren's prospects looked bleak.
According to a Real Clear Politics summary of Super Tuesday state polling, Warren is competing for victory in just one state, Massachusetts, where she's in a virtual tie with Bernie Sanders. And any wagering on her winning here should be approached with caution – don't forget that a Suffolk University poll taken in the fall of 2018 showed an eye-popping 58-percent of likely Massachusetts voters didn't want her to run for president.
Warren is in the mix for a 15-percent showing that would result in a share of the delegates in 13 of the 14 states, and her campaign officially holds out hope that she could be a force at a contested Democratic National Convention where no one has the delegates for a first-ballot win. But that is a long shot at best.
What happened to Warren, who rose steadily throughout the summer of 2019 to briefly hold front runner status?
Running for president involves many factors, but primarily it is an exercise in mass marketing – establishing a popular brand and selling it in a crowded marketplace. We've seen no less that three major developments in the Warren campaign's brand over the past 14 months, none of which have survived intact:
• At the core of Warren's political career dating back well before she entered the Senate in 2013 was her fighting spirit, her passion for her beliefs and critique of the status quo and her willingness to get in the trenches and fight. This brand was memorably summarized in her trademark slogan "nevertheless, she persisted," the pathetic critique offered by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell after he and his fellow Republicans voted to silence Warren's criticisms of then-Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions. But when it became clear early on in the race that Warren's path to the nomination was blocked by Bernie Sanders, she made the curious decision not to draw even the most gentle contrasts with him, instead making the fateful choice to jump on his Medicare for All bandwagon. For instance, during a WBZ-TV interview with Warren in early January, she announced she would vote for the USMCA, the replacement plan for NAFTA, on the grounds that while it was a flawed deal, it would provide much-needed relief to the economies of states (such as Iowa and New Hampshire) reliant on international trade and suffering from the Trump administration's tariff wars. But when asked to compare and contrast her position with that of Sanders, who had vowed to vote against USMCA, Warren passed. Only recently has she drawn the distinctions between herself and Sanders that needed to be laid out much earlier and more aggressively.
• Then there was her well-received branding as the candidate smart and bold enough to lay out specific plans for a wide range of important issues. "She has a plan for that" played to Warren strengths – intelligence, policy mastery – and appeared to be a key catalyst of her 2019 rise. But at the October debate, it was made clear that Warren didn't have a plan for the most important issue of all, health care. And when she reacted to sharp criticism and softening poll numbers by hustling out a plan founded on questionable math, poof went this leg of the campaign's branding. Legitimate objections to the fact that the Sanders health plan, devoid of even questionable math to justify its assumptions, seemed to escape the same degree of scorn can't mitigate the damage done to Warren by the whole fiasco.
• And on New Hampshire primary night, a third branding effort was put front and center in her concession speech – that Warren would be the candidate who could unify the party and maximize the chances of beating Trump. But this claim ignored her history of dismissive comments about competing party factions – concerns by moderates about Medicare for All were "Republican talking points," Pete Buttigieg was a creature of "wine cave" billionaires – and was almost immediately crushed by her strafing of other candidates in the two debates that followed New Hampshire.
Three brands, all stepped on by the brander herself. And let's add one more.
As the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts and one of the strongest female voices in Washington in recent years, Warren's candidacy was seen by many Democrats as the best chance yet to break through the misogynistic political culture. The leading role of women in retaking the House for the Democrats in 2018 seemed a sign of progress. And Warren expertly wove feminist themes into her campaign, while her supporters justifiably called out sexist double-standards when they arose.
But Warren never drew the level of support from women she needed to win early caucuses and primaries. And while she took to co-branding with Amy Klobuchar during TV debates (even as her and Klobuchar's poor showings belied her premise that "when women run, we win"), when Klobuchar finally dropped out Monday, she endorsed a man.
Perhaps the sight of two old white men as the party's front runners will so infuriate women and feminist men across the country that they'll come out in unexpected numbers to lift Warren Tuesday. If not, it's the end of the line for Elizabeth Warren.