Elizabeth Warren campaign autopsy

[Alben Barkley]

A lot of people seem to have forgotten that in late 2019, Elizabeth Warren was widely regarded as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination and was leading many polls. But before the Iowa caucus, she collapsed; Bernie Sanders seemed to have picked up most of her progressive support while even candidates like Pete Buttigieg overtook her. The funny thing is she was considered a potentially strong candidate precisely because she was supposed to bridge the divide between the party's progressive and establishment wings; many here and elsewhere thought she had a good shot at the nomination for that reason. But the nomination ultimately came down to the two old guys who embodied each wing (Sanders and Biden) while she was shut out in the middle.

What went wrong?

Was it simply bad timing? Concerns about her electability? A problem of "jack of all trades, master of none" so that she didn't appeal strongly enough to either side of the party? Too "wonky" so that her appeal was limited mostly to college-educated whites despite her pretty populist platform?

She still pulled in strong fundraising numbers and was widely praised for her debate performances (aside from eyeroll-worthy moments like saying "Latinx"), all the way up through the end basically.

Ultimately I'm glad she didn't win the nomination as I don't think she could have beaten Trump. But at the time I was a little surprised she rose and fell so fast, and I haven't seen a ton of discussion since on exactly why that happened. Was there something she could have done different to maintain her lead and win the nomination?

[Never Made it to Graceland]

She gambled that moderating her position on healthcare would pick her up a lot of centrists without sacrificing progressive support. Wrong on both counts, and that bizarre takedown she attempted to do of Bernie didn't help. Also, trusting Joe Rospars, the worst campaign strategist in American history, was a bad idea. He replaced her policy-driven focus with "Big Structural Bailey." Ultimately she spent a lot of her career fighting Credit Card Joe on various consumer issues and she's the reason he sailed through to the nomination.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

She gambled that moderating her position on healthcare would pick her up a lot of centrists without sacrificing progressive support. Wrong on both counts, and that bizarre takedown she attempted to do of Bernie didn't help. Also, trusting Joe Rospars, the worst campaign strategist in American history, was a bad idea. He replaced her policy-driven focus with "Big Structural Bailey." Ultimately she spent a lot of her career fighting Credit Card Joe on various consumer issues and she's the reason he sailed through to the nomination.

I'd say this is accurate. She sacrificed her credibility in a major way. I'd been leaning towards supporting her before that because of the belief that she'd do a better job of unifying the party then Bernie but I switched to him afterwards just because I saw him as more consistent and principled.

[Alben Barkley]

She gambled that moderating her position on healthcare would pick her up a lot of centrists without sacrificing progressive support. Wrong on both counts, and that bizarre takedown she attempted to do of Bernie didn't help. Also, trusting Joe Rospars, the worst campaign strategist in American history, was a bad idea. He replaced her policy-driven focus with "Big Structural Bailey." Ultimately she spent a lot of her career fighting Credit Card Joe on various consumer issues and she's the reason he sailed through to the nomination.

LOL no, that is definitely not true. Are you seriously still propagating this myth? Warren dropping out would not have saved Bernie. Even if he took all her votes AND Bloomberg didn't drop out, Biden still would have dominated Super Tuesday. If Bloomberg (who got more votes than Warren) had dropped out too, Biden would have just dominated even harder.

Biden did not win because of Warren; Bernie was always doomed in a contest that came down to him and almost any other single candidate, simply because he was a factional candidate who banked his entire strategy on being able to win a plurality of ~30% of voters, never seeming to take into account the possibility that Democrats would learn from the 2016 GOP primaries and consolidate around one candidate against him.

If anything, a two-way Biden vs. Warren contest probably would have been closer. She would have kept most of the progressive support and gotten more moderate/establishment support than Bernie ever could have.

Plus, in what way did Warren moderate her position on healthcare? She also supported Medicare for All, she just offered more details on how she actually wanted to do it than Bernie. Is providing details and plans rather than just shouting your demands considered "selling out" to socialists or something?

[TML]

Her standing slipped after her campaign hired staffers from the Hillary Clinton 2016 and Kamala Harris 2020 campaigns. They advised Warren to focus more on identity politics and less on economic issues. That was what caused Kamala Harris to tank previously, and it repeated itself with Warren. Additionally, Warren could have taken Biden down by continuously highlighting the fact that her entry into politics was motivated by policies that Biden had supported - but she instead pulled her punches with Biden and allowed him to skate by mostly unscathed (if she had taken a page from Obama’s 2008 book against Hillary Clinton, she could have sunk Biden for good and prevented him from being the establishment’s choice candidate - if it was Sanders and Warren polling at 1 and 2 with others polling well behind those two, the establishment would have coalesced around Warren against Sanders).

[EJ24]

In short, she had all the weaknesses of Bernie Sanders and none of the strengths.

Bernie's strength is that he comes off as authentic, never changing his principles, even if you disagree with them. He's been preaching the same sermon for the past 35 years, and he's always fought for the little guy, even as Mayor of Burlington.

His weakness is that a large portion of his platform is easy to decry as "socialist" or "Big government", two things that generally don't play well to the American electorate. Easy fodder for the GOP.

With Warren, her platform is similar to Sanders, but she comes off as very inauthentic and contrived, almost in the same manner as Hillary Clinton did to lots of people. Mostly due to the fact that she's a former Republican, and did things like accuse Sanders of sexism without proof.

Bernie was perceived as the "real thing" to progressives, while Warren was considered the dollar store version. The moderate lane was taken up by Biden and Buttigieg, they had no interest in nominating Warren. So she collapsed.

Then the DNA test thing, which did more harm to her than most realize. She played into Trump's hand there, and looked horrible for doing it.

[Motorcity]

Warren was the flavor of the month. The media had a fascination with anyone but Biden and Bernie. Pete and Harris had their moments. The difference with Warren was she wasn't a mere flavor, she had the momentem, cash, and platform to be a front runner. But she couldn't capitlize on it. At her height, she made several blunders but also had things out of her control

First, she released a detail plan on Medicare for All that made sense, but progressives were ready to jumo on her for anything just because she wasn't Bernie

Second, Bernie Sanders had a heart attack, giving him lots of sympanthy

Third, she did a bad job when all the nobodies attacked her. This is more Biden being lucky it didn't happen to him tho

[Alben Barkley]

In short, she had all the weaknesses of Bernie Sanders and none of the strengths.

Bernie's strength is that he comes off as authentic, never changing his principles, even if you disagree with them. He's been preaching the same sermon for the past 35 years, and he's always fought for the little guy, even as Mayor of Burlington.

His weakness is that a large portion of his platform is easy to decry as "socialist" or "Big government", two things that generally don't play well to the American electorate. Easy fodder for the GOP.

With Warren, her platform is similar to Sanders, but she comes off as very inauthentic and contrived, almost in the same manner as Hillary Clinton did to lots of people. Mostly due to the fact that she's a former Republican, and did things like accuse Sanders of sexism without proof.

Bernie was perceived as the "real thing" to progressives, while Warren was considered the dollar store version. The moderate lane was taken up by Biden and Buttigieg, they had no interest in nominating Warren. So she collapsed.

Then the DNA test thing, which did more harm to her than most realize. She played into Trump's hand there, and looked horrible for doing it.

See I actually thought that should have added to her appeal. The narrative of “I used to be a Republican, but then I saw how they were screwing over ordinary people so I changed” was a potentially powerful one. And hell, Reagan used to be a Democrat, as did Trump! So clearly the right has no problem at all rallying around people who used to be “impure.” Pure speculation now, but perhaps that’s because so many believe in the whole “born again” Christian transformation/redemption thing and see a political conversion in a similar light.

But in any case, I don’t get the leftist fixation on absolute purity from the cradle to the grave. It’s just setting yourself up for disappointment because all humans, certainly politicians, are flawed and will never live up to the ideals in your head. I would argue it’s overhyped and mythologized in Bernie’s case anyway; he’s shifted significantly on more issues than people like to admit, including guns and immigration, and he voted for the very same crime bill his supporters bashed Hillary and Biden for. Honestly it doesn’t exactly help the sexism allegations that he can get away with all that and maintain this Messianic image while his female opponents are seen as “fake” and raked over the coals for any perceived impurities.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Erstwhile Warren supporter here: Warren was my first choice from circa March 2019 until about February 2020. I spent February-March 2020 split between Warren and Sanders and decided (with pain in my heart) to vote for Sanders on Super Tuesday to strategically block Biden.

I've posted my opinion on this before here but not for a while. With that said: the fight for the progressive lane was always going to be an uphill climb because Sanders cornered the market in 2017. When Sanders posited an M4A bill and got more than half of his Senate competitors to sign on to it he basically ruined any of their odds of seriously challenging him for the bulk of the progressive vote. M4A was turned in to a litmus test, earning the first 40 minutes of every debate, and it was undoubtedly his issue based on the 2016 campaign. If you sign on to your opponent's bill and it becomes one of the centerpieces of the campaign, it's very hard to differentiate yourself from that. Atlas loves to drag candidates but hates to acknowledge when candidates pull strategic mastery; the inter-election strategic moves to consoldate the progressive vote on M4A was an example of this and it would take a very strong challenge to beat.

The summer-fall 2019 boomlet was real but, with Bernie's stranglehold on a decent portion of the progressive base since 2015, it was fighting for a small number of reliable voters in a very competitive atmosphere. When the boomlet ended, all that was left was post-college hypereducated social progressives (of course when push comes to shove, the smart professor's base will be smart professors and their children). The lean into girlboss-feminism (including the leak about The Conversation) was basically circling the wagons to ensure these voters stayed in camp, and most of them did. But with Bernie taking the final boomlet of 2019 there wasn't much room to move beyond that base in crunch time.

The idea that Warren "cost" Sanders the nomination is, of course, absurd. The candidate who had been bleeding support for four months could not have rescued Bernie Sanders. The candidate whose voters had the highest trust in/support for the eventual Democratic nominee could not have saved the candidate who was running his second insurgent campaign against the DNC. It's true that Warren's campaign spent too much time courting activists, entertainers, academics and figureheads; the consequence as we all know is that the support never trickled down to rank and file voters. Not only were these voters not available for Warren to transition to Sanders; as we already know, outside of a few demographics (Hispanics the most notable one) they were already voting for Biden.

[Crumpets]

I stand by my analysis from this post at the time:

-There's an element of pure randomness. She was a flavor of the month, and unfortunately the month wasn't February. Maybe if we run the simulation again, the media doesn't pay as much attention to the selfie lines or whatever, so she doesn't get puffed up as the hot new commodity until later and there's not enough time for the news cycle to bore of her before Iowa. Or maybe the debate moderators on Earth-2 don't spend half an hour of the first few debates on the minutiae of healthcare reform, so she never gets pushed to make a Plan.

All of the reasons people have mentioned have played some small part, but I think this is the best description.

All summer and into the early fall, Warren was getting a steady drip-drip of good media coverage and endorsements. Bernie had his heart attack on October 4th, which you can see on the polling charts corresponded to a sudden boost for Warren as hesitant Sanders supporters flipped to her. Bernie recovered quickly, and performed well at the next debate on October 15th, which you can see on the 538 chart, was Warren's peak day and marked the start of her decline as those hesitant supporters flipped back to Bernie.

Now, any normal person would look at that series of events and say "yeah, makes sense." But unfortunately in America today, this then leads to a series of discussions of "is the Warren surge over?" "Is Warren collapsing?" "What is Warren doing wrong?" that becomes a vicioius circle of self-reinforcing negative publicity without any of the candidates actually doing anything or changing anything about their campaigns.

It's worth noting that Warren is polling exactly where she was in August right now, and better than she was at any point before that. She still has her core base of support with plenty of additional hangers on as the field has narrowed. The problem now is that Sanders has pulled away from her, and that's not something she can control without going even more negative on him, which is something I think she genuinely doesn't want to do, whatever the haters may say.

Full disclosure, I'm a Warren supporter.

[Pericles]

She fit a great profile for the kind of candidate Democrats SHOULDN'T nominate for a general election, a white female professor (with that kind of intellectual vibe) from Massachusetts who was seen as far-left. Unfortunately, underperforming Hillary in her 2018 Senate race confirmed the Senate race. In another year, she might have had a shot-she would have been a good President imo-but 2020 was an electability year and so it was absolutely the wrong year for her.

[John Forbes Kerrygold 🧈]

She gambled that moderating her position on healthcare would pick her up a lot of centrists without sacrificing progressive support. Wrong on both counts, and that bizarre takedown she attempted to do of Bernie didn't help. Also, trusting Joe Rospars, the worst campaign strategist in American history, was a bad idea. He replaced her policy-driven focus with "Big Structural Bailey." Ultimately she spent a lot of her career fighting Credit Card Joe on various consumer issues and she's the reason he sailed through to the nomination.

LOL no, that is definitely not true. Are you seriously still propagating this myth? Warren dropping out would not have saved Bernie. Even if he took all her votes AND Bloomberg didn't drop out, Biden still would have dominated Super Tuesday. If Bloomberg (who got more votes than Warren) had dropped out too, Biden would have just dominated even harder.

I know it’s anecdotal, but I was a Warren supporter who switched to Biden after she dropped. I know a LOT of people who did the same thing. I’d be really interested to see the breakdowns on how many Warren-to-Biden versus Warren-to-Sanders voters there were, but my suspicion is that everyone who wanted to support Bernie were already doing so.

[Crumpets]

She gambled that moderating her position on healthcare would pick her up a lot of centrists without sacrificing progressive support. Wrong on both counts, and that bizarre takedown she attempted to do of Bernie didn't help. Also, trusting Joe Rospars, the worst campaign strategist in American history, was a bad idea. He replaced her policy-driven focus with "Big Structural Bailey." Ultimately she spent a lot of her career fighting Credit Card Joe on various consumer issues and she's the reason he sailed through to the nomination.

LOL no, that is definitely not true. Are you seriously still propagating this myth? Warren dropping out would not have saved Bernie. Even if he took all her votes AND Bloomberg didn't drop out, Biden still would have dominated Super Tuesday. If Bloomberg (who got more votes than Warren) had dropped out too, Biden would have just dominated even harder.

I know it’s anecdotal, but I was a Warren supporter who switched to Biden after she dropped. I know a LOT of people who did the same thing. I’d be really interested to see the breakdowns on how many Warren-to-Biden versus Warren-to-Sanders voters there were, but my suspicion is that everyone who wanted to support Bernie were already doing so.

I can just add that I was also a Warren supporter who ended up filling in the bubble for Biden, but only after a week or so of genuine undecidedness. One of the main tiebreakers for me was always going to be who was polling better in matchups against Trump, and Biden almost always had an advantage against Sanders in this regard, both nationally and at the state level. Both Sanders and Biden had an advantage over Warren, though, so it's hard to say how many soft Warren supporters might have gone to Biden on that same logic.

[Beet]

As one of the biggest Warren supporters, I was puzzled and befuddled at the behavior of her campaign.

There were a couple of very low hanging fruits and gifted layups she could have done to help herself, but, inexplicably, she didn't. If she had just said that her health care plan would raise taxes but that it would be worth it, she would have put her biggest liability away. Instead she dragged the issue out and released two more unnecessary plans that just focused on a weak area for her.

Her campaign also refused to actively campaign on Twitter. This was important for her because her campaign was largely focused on activists. During the Spring, Warren and Bernie were competitive on Twitter in terms of who was the most active and getting the most impressions. But by the fall there were some days where Bernie would have 5 or 6 tweets for every Warren tweet. Social media was free media which Trump and Bernie understood but Warren didn't utilize it. She didn't have Biden's built in base of low info voters so she needed to milk this medium.

[Motorcity]

She gambled that moderating her position on healthcare would pick her up a lot of centrists without sacrificing progressive support. Wrong on both counts, and that bizarre takedown she attempted to do of Bernie didn't help. Also, trusting Joe Rospars, the worst campaign strategist in American history, was a bad idea. He replaced her policy-driven focus with "Big Structural Bailey." Ultimately she spent a lot of her career fighting Credit Card Joe on various consumer issues and she's the reason he sailed through to the nomination.

LOL no, that is definitely not true. Are you seriously still propagating this myth? Warren dropping out would not have saved Bernie. Even if he took all her votes AND Bloomberg didn't drop out, Biden still would have dominated Super Tuesday. If Bloomberg (who got more votes than Warren) had dropped out too, Biden would have just dominated even harder.

I know it’s anecdotal, but I was a Warren supporter who switched to Biden after she dropped. I know a LOT of people who did the same thing. I’d be really interested to see the breakdowns on how many Warren-to-Biden versus Warren-to-Sanders voters there were, but my suspicion is that everyone who wanted to support Bernie were already doing so.

I can just add that I was also a Warren supporter who ended up filling in the bubble for Biden, but only after a week or so of genuine undecidedness. One of the main tiebreakers for me was always going to be who was polling better in matchups against Trump, and Biden almost always had an advantage against Sanders in this regard, both nationally and at the state level. Both Sanders and Biden had an advantage over Warren, though, so it's hard to say how many soft Warren supporters might have gone to Biden on that same logic.

I voted for Bernie in the Tennessee primary, a Super Tuesday state

I voted on Feb 12, first day of early voting. I didn't think my vote really mattered. It was the day after New Hampshire

I assumed two things were going to happen. Biden will win my state, or Bernie was on track to win all 50 states. I voted for Bernie because of loyalty from 2016, my first campaign and also Warren was dead at that point.

[Interlocutor is just not there yet]

I guess I'm one of the weird ones who was all-in on Warren for most of 2019 and then solidly flipped to Bernie by the Iowa Caucus. She lost me after the waffling on health care & lack of consistency.

[JGibson]

I was a campaign volunteer for Warren, and stuck through until she dropped out. I switched to Bernie when she dropped out and voted Sanders in the primary. In retrospect, she would have lost to Trump.

[Motorcity]

I guess I'm one of the weird ones who was all-in on Warren for most of 2019 and then solidly flipped to Bernie by the Iowa Caucus. She lost me after the waffling on health care & lack of consistency.

I have been supporting Bernie since 2015

He was my top choice, followed by Warren and Biden. Beto was #4 until he proved to be an idiot. I was also a fan of Sherrod Brown, but he wisly didn't run because of his senate seat.

(I couldn't stand Harris, Buttigieg, Yang, Booker, Klobuchar, or Bloomberg)

Anyway, back in September 2019 I was starting to move towards Warren. But she failed to gain contiuned momentum. So I stayed with Bernie all the way to Super Tuesday.

The day after Super Tuesday, I accepted Biden would win the nomination and was content. Biden is a good man and if Bernie and Warren didn't run, he would have been my first chocie. In hindsight, he was the best choice

[GeneralMacArthur]

Lots of weird history and selective memory going on here.  I vividly remember what actually happened.

Warren was all the way up to 60% on PredictIt and seemed like the almost-prohibitive favorite to win the nomination.  She'd been doing very well in the debates and getting a lot of positive attention for her selfie campaigning and detailed white papers.

But there was a problem.  Medicare For All was becoming a big issue, and Bernie was the face of M4A, so he was getting all the credit whenever M4A did well in the discourse.  But it was Warren who was always jumping in to defend it, and a lot of the other candidates were targeting Warren (whose support seemed much softer than Bernie's) with their M4A-based attacks.  If Warren's going to spend all her time defending M4A, she should be seen as the M4A candidate, not Bernie, and maybe she could then pull some of his support and consolidate her lead.  That was the Warren thought process.

So she comes out with this detailed plan, trying to explain how we could do M4A.  And the idea is, now I have a real, detailed plan, and Bernie doesn't, so instead of talking about Bernie's vague M4A promises, we can now talk about the Warren M4A Plan.  Sounds good right?  Problem is, once you put all the specific details out there, that's just blood in the water for everyone to attack.  Bernieland picked apart her proposal for anything that was "moderating" and spread it all over social media to hit her for being more moderate/corporate than Bernie.  And the rest of the world was able to attack her for some of the quite ludicrous details required to make M4A work.  In particular, the financial math didn't add up at all.

Warren did an OK but not great job of defending herself from these attacks on stage, and at a couple points she got very flustered and frustrated.  But the media just tore the plan to shreds and her campaign wasn't able to push back at all.  That ruined her image of an indefatigable wonk, and made her look vulnerable, because if she can't win this fight with Democrats how is she going to win it with Republicans?

This is entirely the reason why she collapsed.  Before the M4A Plan ordeal she was riding high.  Afterwards, she dropped precipitously.

[ProudModerate2]

... The day after Super Tuesday, I accepted Biden would win the nomination and was content. Biden is a good man and if Bernie and Warren didn't run, he would have been my first chocie. In hindsight, he was the best choice

I still can not believe how close the general election was, after all Americans experienced four years of a Clown Show on the national and international stage with trump.
It should have been a landslide-ish victory for the Dems.
If Bernie or Warren would have been the Presidential Dem candidate, we could very well be under continued trump Fascist rule, as we speak.

[brucejoel99]

Lots of weird history and selective memory going on here.  I vividly remember what actually happened.

Warren was all the way up to 60% on PredictIt and seemed like the almost-prohibitive favorite to win the nomination.  She'd been doing very well in the debates and getting a lot of positive attention for her selfie campaigning and detailed white papers.

But there was a problem.  Medicare For All was becoming a big issue, and Bernie was the face of M4A, so he was getting all the credit whenever M4A did well in the discourse.  But it was Warren who was always jumping in to defend it, and a lot of the other candidates were targeting Warren (whose support seemed much softer than Bernie's) with their M4A-based attacks.  If Warren's going to spend all her time defending M4A, she should be seen as the M4A candidate, not Bernie, and maybe she could then pull some of his support and consolidate her lead.  That was the Warren thought process.

So she comes out with this detailed plan, trying to explain how we could do M4A.  And the idea is, now I have a real, detailed plan, and Bernie doesn't, so instead of talking about Bernie's vague M4A promises, we can now talk about the Warren M4A Plan.  Sounds good right?  Problem is, once you put all the specific details out there, that's just blood in the water for everyone to attack.  Bernieland picked apart her proposal for anything that was "moderating" and spread it all over social media to hit her for being more moderate/corporate than Bernie.  And the rest of the world was able to attack her for some of the quite ludicrous details required to make M4A work.  In particular, the financial math didn't add up at all.

Warren did an OK but not great job of defending herself from these attacks on stage, and at a couple points she got very flustered and frustrated.  But the media just tore the plan to shreds and her campaign wasn't able to push back at all.  That ruined her image of an indefatigable wonk, and made her look vulnerable, because if she can't win this fight with Democrats how is she going to win it with Republicans?

This is entirely the reason why she collapsed.  Before the M4A Plan ordeal she was riding high.  Afterwards, she dropped precipitously.

Yeah, it really was her hedging her bets on M4A that precipitated her candidacy's downfall in the end, & so stupidly too: for daring to understand that it'd have a hard time getting through the Senate & thus coming up with an alternative strategy of getting it as a result, she got dragged through the coals by the progressives who'd previously held her up as an icon of theirs, thereby causing her to lose a significant sum of progressives to Bernie & be left without a clear place between him & the moderates. That wasn't a failure of her campaign, though, so much as it was a failure of the movement - based off political purity - mandating that anybody who dared to challenge Saint Bernie was an enemy who deserved to be crushed.

[Warren 4 Secretary of Everything]

SNIP

SNIP

As a former Warren supporter I agree, by-and-large, with these assessments. I stuck with her until she dropped out and even voted for her in GA’s primary as a protest against being stuck with two geriatric white guys. Her problem was that she was a super-competent legislator and understood government exceptionally well; but she was a terrible politician who didn’t have great instincts.

When the Buttigieg-Klobuchar “moderation for moderation’s sake” tag-team of her on the debate stage happened she didn’t go for the jugular or defend herself well. Bernie did his best to try and help her out, but the relentless focus on M4A by the media, moderators, and centrists did her no favors. Even if her plan itself was good.

Then the sexism conversation leaked. I’ll never understand how it got framed in such a combative way. I 100% believe Bernie told her that a woman would have a harder time or couldn’t beat Trump that year. Whether the media or activists wanted to admit it, that was a pretty common feeling among rank and file Dem voters (particularly in the black community).

A lot of the older blacks in my family (who only wavered on Biden after Iowa and jumped to Booomberg briefly) we’re CONVINCED that it would take an old white guy to beat Trump because they couldn’t trust white America not to mess it up with anyone else. The Warren Campaign and media’s framing it as Bernie being sexist was a huuuge misstep, especially when it was plain to see Bernie was only acknowledging the electorate’s own racism and sexism.

So in short, Warren failed because she and her campaign lacked good political instincts; a skill that it seems everyone in that wing of the party but AOC seem to lack.

[GP270watch]

 She's too smart for Americans.

 Whenever I described her policies to normal people they were like great "who is this?" but then ended up mostly voting for someone else based on personality. To be The President of The United States sadly takes a certain amount of personality and charisma as a politician that she might not have. Yes she is well liked and respected by people who know her best but at the end of the day, presidential politics are in part a stupid popularity contest.

  M4A didn't sink her campaign because this is something most Americans support. If we held a majority rules national referendum on M4A tomorrow it would win and probably in all 50 states. On top of the personality issues, the corporate media also did a hack-job on her. I've never seen a Presidential candidate that actually struck fear into Wall Street and the ultra wealthy and it was a personal fear about how they continue to get over, not fear of the country being "ruined" despite how they tried to frame critiques against her. She instilled this fear because unlike Bernie they actually feared her competency and ability to achieve the things she talked about.

[Geoffrey Howe]

A popular story is told about Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965) when he was running for president in 1952 (or in 1956).

Someone heard Stevenson’s impressive speech and said, “Every thinking person in America will be voting for you.”

Stevenson replied, “I’m afraid that won’t do—I need a majority.”

Compounding the trouble, Warren's campaign was targeted more at midwits and Intellectuals Yet Idiots than at "thinking people." Far from being too smart for Americans, she was simultaneously bookish and ignorant, issuing policy platform after policy platform for the sake of showing that she had "done her homework" without bothering to acknowledge that the homework was done poorly.

But the most important criticism would hold even if her policies had not been a mess of pandering, bad math, shoddy research, and false certainty regarding costs and benefits. Mass politics is not about doing your homework.

e:Also -

6. "Big structural Bailey" will go down in history as a campaign-defining moment on the level of Monkey Business or the Canuck Letter.

Intellectuals Yet Idiots. Great phrase - will make sure to remember!

[GP270watch]

A popular story is told about Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965) when he was running for president in 1952 (or in 1956).

Someone heard Stevenson’s impressive speech and said, “Every thinking person in America will be voting for you.”

Stevenson replied, “I’m afraid that won’t do—I need a majority.”

Compounding the trouble, Warren's campaign was targeted more at midwits and Intellectuals Yet Idiots than at "thinking people." Far from being too smart for Americans, she was simultaneously bookish and ignorant, issuing policy platform after policy platform for the sake of showing that she had "done her homework" without bothering to acknowledge that the homework was done poorly.

But the most important criticism would hold even if her policies had not been a mess of pandering, bad math, shoddy research, and false certainty regarding costs and benefits. Mass politics is not about doing your homework.

e:Also -

6. "Big structural Bailey" will go down in history as a campaign-defining moment on the level of Monkey Business or the Canuck Letter.

  Who in elected government has a better grasp of issues plaguing the average American family than Elizabeth Warren and her couching tree? This is not a rhetorical question! I would be interested in knowing who ya'll think understands the areas of bankruptcy, medical debt, student loan debt, deregulation and consolidation in banking, and racist/class/gender based economic disparity than Warren. Maybe there are a few politicians who have expertise in some of these areas but who actually understands and is working towards fixing all of them?