Elizabeth Warren campaign autopsy

[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.

[brucejoel99]

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?

I mean, Katie Porter, though, of course, her pre-political mentor was Warren, whom she literally named her daughter after.