Elizabeth Warren: what went wrong?

[EJ24]

What do you think was the leading contributor?

[Mr. Illini]

It was a combination of a lot of things.

-More moderate voters that were supporting her became concerned about her electability.

-More progressive voters that were supporting her became concerned about her backing off of M4A (and Bernie's team successfully capitalized on it - "he's the OG," "fighting for single payer for decades," "she was a Republican").

-The attack on Bernie really sealed the deal with the more progressive crowd mentioned above.

-Her wonky approach was appreciated early on, but as we got closer to the first votes it isn't something that energizes people to go caucus or vote.

-Obviously there may be some deeper issues in play on this one, but for some people she struggled to come off as genuine.

[EJ24]

I voted the Bernie Sanders attack, which I think finished off her campaign as viable, but I for one never saw the appeal in her.

For how supposedly "wonky" she is, I thought Buttigieg destroyed her in the debate where she released her health care plan. She collapsed under the slightest bit of scrutiny, which immediately confirmed my suspicion that she would be toast against Trump and the GOP spin machine. If you can't defend yourself from a Democrat hitting you over that, you'll be destroyed in the general election.

Add to this how elitist and unlikeable she always came off to me. I'm a moderate Biden supporter, but despite my policy differences with Bernie, I can at least sense some authenticity from him and even from people like AOC. Warren seemed as phony as a $3 bill. That's the kind of thing many people didn't like about Hillary Clinton.

[ElectionsGuy]

Everything. She blew frontrunner status in early Fall by proposing an overcomplicated and impractical M4A plan and failed to adequately defend it. Then she decided to launch a smear campaign towards Sanders. The worst political instincts of all the 2020 candidates.

[SN2903]

Medicare for all, she has no personality , she comes across super smug and elitist

[ibagli]

- I'm not sure the "waffling" actually mattered. I think the damage was actually done before that happened. Like lots of figures in the party, she overestimated the breadth of the enthusiasm for M4A, which made her and other non-Bernie candidates (Kamala etc.) especially vulnerable to attack for their support of it, because their supporters weren't actually invested in it. Furthermore, healthcare reform is a policy area where details are always controversial, but Warren's whole Plan For That persona led to her getting the most pressure to come with a Plan and fast. And of course it got a skeptical treatment, like any detailed healthcare plan will (and I think the Moderate Lane isn't prepared for what's going to hit them on this), but she's the Plan candidate so a controversial Plan hurts her more than anyone else.

-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.

-I think a lot of the higher-info voters were spooked by the polls that showed her as not being as strong against Trump, especially once her name recognition rose. And electability is mostly just the sum of everything else, but there is a slice of the Democratic electorate that's skittish about nominating a woman, so it hurt her more.

-The "attack on Bernie" was irrelevant. That storyline lasted about 36 hours and the only people who even knew it happened were super-committed already.

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

Warren doesn't command even close to the same youth support that Bernie does. Bernie's appeal is less about his policies and more that he is seen as a genuine agent of change. Warren is not seen that way, and thus her support is mostly confined to loyal liberal white democrats.

[TML]

She tried too hard to please both progressives and establishment figures at the same time. People who do such things will often be perceived by voters as dishonest and/or inauthentic.

[Pollster]

Writing her obituary despite the fact that she is in a statistical four-way tie for first in Iowa is an extremely Atlas thing to do.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Having two Females running the nation is hard. At the time being Pelosi is Speaker, but indies and conservatives are cautious about her impeachment ambitions at the expense of legislation. Some will think it's a dual Prez, having a female as Prez with Speaker Pelosi. But, Dems will have a female Veep either Yates with Biden or Baldwin or Klobuchar with Bernie.

[ElectionsGuy]

Writing her obituary despite the fact that she is in a statistical four-way tie for first in Iowa is an extremely Atlas thing to do.

The question of the poll asks to explain why her poll numbers dropped. Nobody in this thread has said she's completely done.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

It seems like “what went right” would be a better question.  She has risen in the polls over the past year more than other candidate (from about 5% to 15%).   

Bernie and Biden are still mostly riding on name recognition from four or more years ago, Buttigieg’s bubble has almost entirely collapsed in national polling, and Bloomberg is just blatantly buying whatever meager and nominal support he has obtained. 

Warren is really the only one whose campaign this year has built a new and enduring coalition of voters.

[Arizona Iced Tea]

Warren doesn't command even close to the same youth support that Bernie does. Bernie's appeal is less about his policies and more that he is seen as a genuine agent of change. Warren is not seen that way, and thus her support is mostly confined to loyal liberal white democrats.

This pretty much sums it up. Almost all the Warren supporters were already Democrats and were going to vote blue no matter who the nominee was. Sanders however, is a mix of new Democrats and a lot of independents.

[GeneralMacArthur]

lol at all the Sanders supporters voting that the attack on Bernie brought her down.  Such self-gratifying wishful thinking.  Warren collapsed from 25% to 15% in November and her support has remained steady ever since.

In the late summer I remember there being tons of articles and news segments and stuff about what a brilliant campaigner Warren was, how she was working so so hard, releasing all these white papers, trying to bridge between the establishment and the progressives, and OH the SELFIE LINES that were such a media obsession.  It was pretty much 100% positive stories for months on end.

The portrayal of Warren as some sort of brilliant progressive wonk running a super-smart 21st century campaign led inevitably to her getting her chance in the sun, and as her support increased so too did the media coverage, which to my great frustration remained 100% positive even as Warren rolled out plan after plan that made absolutely no sense and betrayed the sham that was her "progressive wonk" image.

This lasted for about six weeks and the media kept expecting some sort of epic confrontation between her and Joe Biden.  But it never happened, Warren just kept cruising in the debates and hiding behind Bernie every time someone wanted to fight over progressive policies.  I think the media just got bored of her, to be honest, and started looking at this guy Pete Buttigieg and writing about him as an interesting character.  When they clashed on the debate stage, Pete won, and Warren's floundering attempt to recover in the subsequent weeks made her look like a fool.  That finally shattered the image (it was a pretty fragile image so it didn't take much) and she dropped back down to 15%, where she's stayed ever since.

What's most surprising to me is that she hasn't dropped more, I was expecting a Kamala Harris trajectory with a slow decline.  But she's managed to keep that 15% together.

[Rookie Yinzer]

Tying herself to Bernie Sanders's disastrous M4A plan. That really gave me pause in the fall, and drew me back towards Harris, but Harris dropped out, and Warren came back and said it would be more incremental but I think it did lasting damage.

Sanders going nuclear on her for repeating what he said sealed the deal.

[Xing]

I think it was a combination of her decision to release her M4A plan and her decision to go more negative on Sanders. While I’m glad that she made an effort to make M4A a reality, she did open herself to a lot of criticism (it’s much easier to point out what’s wrong with someone else’s plan than come up with your own), and I don’t think she did a good enough job responding to the criticism. Her decision to go after Sanders was also an unforced error, and while her polling might not have dropped off, Sanders has gained significantly since then.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Can anyone point out to me, on this chart, the moment when Warren suicided her campaign by attacking the mighty and invincible Bernie Sanders?

[Statilius the Epicurean]

She sold herself as the "I have a plan for that" candidate...and then it turned out that she didn't have a healthcare plan.

[Hermit For Peace]

She's just not the one. That's all.

[Warren 4 Secretary of Everything]

The moderates all trained their fire on her in October and November, conveniently ignoring Sanders and inadvertently helping him rise, while she failed to counterpunch effectively. Mayor Pete attacked her in an attempt to pull away her voters, and it worked sadly.

[Mr. Smith]

Same problem with Ted Cruz's campaign, too much wonk, and not much read of the electorate, very much based on a long-term, in-the-shadows sorta campaign.

The only difference is Warren's fell apart sooner because she got scrutinized sooner. She was always going to fall short once she was the penultimate standing.

But of these options, political instinct comes to closest.

[Xing]

Can anyone point out to me, on this chart, the moment when Warren suicided her campaign by attacking the mighty and invincible Bernie Sanders?

As I said, Warren's numbers didn't cave (though they went down a bit), but Sanders's numbers have clearly gone up since the attack.

[SInNYC]

A campaign needs a theme, not a plan - plans are easy to attack and besides everybody knows that no plan by any Democrat will ever actually happen. She offered the latter until very recently with her anti-corruption theme. Unfortunately, the recent theme has been accompanied by a Hillary-esque 'vote for me because i'm a woman'  message (which is the exact opposite of Obama's approach).

Her plans were somewhat needed to pivot away from the Pocahontas silliness months back, but she should have thought ahead to what comes next when the plans get attacked

[dw93]

I think the Sanders jab was the nail in the coffin. There were a variety of factors that were causing her to flame out before "I think you called me a liar on national TV" happened. With hindsight, Trump hitting her with "Pocahontas" left and right after she declared was the earliest sign that she buckles under pressure when attacked, and I say this as someone that, for the most part, supported her despite that, until around November or December and now support Sanders.

[Crumpets]

-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.