Elizabeth Warren campaign autopsy

[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.