Why did Warren preform so bad in MA on supertuesday?

[Canis]

Warren only stayed in on supertuesday due to in large part because she wanted to carry her home state of Massachusetts according to people around her campaign she knew on super tuesday she only had a chance of winning MA all the other states were completely out of reach for her campaign most of the polling before the election showed MA as a close three way race between Bernie Warren and Biden obviously on election day Warren came in third getting only 21.69% of the vote and Biden won the state fairly easily. But why did the state that according to most polls approve of Elizabeth Warren and has elected her twice to the Senate reject her so overwhelmingly?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Paul Ryan: "He's Irish"


Also probably as the strongest not-Sanders candidate at that point, helped him consolidate a lot of support.

[H. Ross Peron]

Because most Massachusetts voters knew she had no chance of winning by Super Tuesday. Warren's never overperformed in Massachusetts btw-her wins are in line Democrats in Massachusetts but not substantially better. It's natural working-class and/or nonwhite voters preferred Biden or Bernie.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

She performed badly in general and was only kept around until Super Tuesday by a SuperPAC that knew that she was useful in denying Bernie the nomination.

[TML]

By Super Tuesday, many voters viewed her as a careerist/opportunist who lacks the consistency/honesty that Sanders had. Her trying to appeal to both the Sanders and Biden wings at the same time ended up pleasing neither of them, as both of them mostly went to their respective default candidates.

[Stranger in a strange land]

She performed badly in general and was only kept around until Super Tuesday by a SuperPAC that knew that she was useful in denying Bernie the nomination.

I'm actually not so sure about that in retrospect: Warren supporters only broke about 60/40 for Bernie in the two-way race. Plus she and Bernie had pretty different bases of support despite having similar policies.

[Sol]

She wasn't a good candidate.

[Obama-Biden Democrat]

She wasn't a good candidate.

Liz Warren in theory was a perfect candidate ideologically. She was halfway between Biden and Bernie, but she lacked charisma and was a Harvard professor.

[H. Ross Peron]

She wasn't a good candidate.

Liz Warren in theory was a perfect candidate ideologically. She was halfway between Biden and Bernie, but she lacked charisma and was a Harvard professor.

She could have run as a non-socialist economic populist that would have had mass working-class appeal but instead went all in on the PMC vote at the expense of the multiracial working-class.

[Kamala's side hoe]

She wasn't a good candidate.

Liz Warren in theory was a perfect candidate ideologically. She was halfway between Biden and Bernie, but she lacked charisma and was a Harvard professor.

She could have run as a non-socialist economic populist that would have had mass working-class appeal but instead went all in on the PMC vote at the expense of the multiracial working-class.

I supported her because I thought she’d be a more effective economic populist than Bernie, and wouldn’t get slaughtered among nonwhite immigrants in a general election. Still voted for her in the primaries anyway as a protest against the two-way race between two almost-80-years-old men that the race boiled down to.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

She performed badly in general and was only kept around until Super Tuesday by a SuperPAC that knew that she was useful in denying Bernie the nomination.

I'm actually not so sure about that in retrospect: Warren supporters only broke about 60/40 for Bernie in the two-way race. Plus she and Bernie had pretty different bases of support despite having similar policies.

60/40 after she called Bernie a sexist in the middle of a debate.

[Big Abraham]

She performed badly in general and was only kept around until Super Tuesday by a SuperPAC that knew that she was useful in denying Bernie the nomination.

I'm actually not so sure about that in retrospect: Warren supporters only broke about 60/40 for Bernie in the two-way race. Plus she and Bernie had pretty different bases of support despite having similar policies.

Warren was always more of a Hillary/Biden-lite than she was Bernie-lite

[Indy Texas]

She wasn't a good candidate.

Liz Warren in theory was a perfect candidate ideologically. She was halfway between Biden and Bernie, but she lacked charisma and was a Harvard professor.

She could have run as a non-socialist economic populist that would have had mass working-class appeal but instead went all in on the PMC vote at the expense of the multiracial working-class.

That is what she ran as! She was basically a 21st century version of the anti-monopoly, trust-busting Progressive Republican. The problem is she was getting flack from the left for allegedly having a healthcare plan that was too stingy (remember, if you don't unreservedly support Bernie's specific M4A plan lock, stock and barrel, you literally want people to die), and the Democratic Establishment had been throwing the kitchen sink at her every time she started doing well in the polls.

The market share she was left with ended up being the graduate degree-holding, debt-burdened nonprofit foundation program analyst. The barista in the corner cafe who makes her latte in the morning was voting for Bernie. The overpaid Boomer foundation director in the corner office was voting for Biden.

I think part of the problem is that on some level, there's really nothing that a well-educated, high-achieving, credentialed woman can say that will not be written off as "lecturing" or "nagging."

[Big Abraham]

She wasn't a good candidate.

Liz Warren in theory was a perfect candidate ideologically. She was halfway between Biden and Bernie, but she lacked charisma and was a Harvard professor.

She could have run as a non-socialist economic populist that would have had mass working-class appeal but instead went all in on the PMC vote at the expense of the multiracial working-class.

That is what she ran as! She was basically a 21st century version of the anti-monopoly, trust-busting Progressive Republican. The problem is she was getting flack from the left for allegedly having a healthcare plan that was too stingy (remember, if you don't unreservedly support Bernie's specific M4A plan lock, stock and barrel, you literally want people to die), and the Democratic Establishment had been throwing the kitchen sink at her every time she started doing well in the polls.

Her campaign was drunk on idpol, so that's patently untrue. Also your statement about her health care plan doesn't make any sense: the candidate with the least "state run" health care model, that gives the most leeway to private insurance, won the primary in a landslide, so this idea that Warren was targeted by Democratic voters because it wasn't M4A is absurd. The Democratic establishment took to her candidacy very well, hence why she was endorsed by the NYT and every major news organization lamented the suspension of her campaign as some kind of death knell for equality of the sexes. Sounds to me like you're projecting your anti-Bernie sympathies here more than anything else

[Citizen (The) Doctor]

She wasn't a good candidate.

Liz Warren in theory was a perfect candidate ideologically. She was halfway between Biden and Bernie, but she lacked charisma and was a Harvard professor.

She could have run as a non-socialist economic populist that would have had mass working-class appeal but instead went all in on the PMC vote at the expense of the multiracial working-class.

That is what she ran as! She was basically a 21st century version of the anti-monopoly, trust-busting Progressive Republican. The problem is she was getting flack from the left for allegedly having a healthcare plan that was too stingy (remember, if you don't unreservedly support Bernie's specific M4A plan lock, stock and barrel, you literally want people to die), and the Democratic Establishment had been throwing the kitchen sink at her every time she started doing well in the polls.

The market share she was left with ended up being the graduate degree-holding, debt-burdened nonprofit foundation program analyst. The barista in the corner cafe who makes her latte in the morning was voting for Bernie. The overpaid Boomer foundation director in the corner office was voting for Biden.

I think part of the problem is that on some level, there's really nothing that a well-educated, high-achieving, credentialed woman can say that will not be written off as "lecturing" or "nagging."

This is the correct answer. A Republican version would probably work if they hunted, but that essentially it.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

She wasn't a good candidate.

Liz Warren in theory was a perfect candidate ideologically. She was halfway between Biden and Bernie, but she lacked charisma and was a Harvard professor.

She could have run as a non-socialist economic populist that would have had mass working-class appeal but instead went all in on the PMC vote at the expense of the multiracial working-class.

That is what she ran as! She was basically a 21st century version of the anti-monopoly, trust-busting Progressive Republican. The problem is she was getting flack from the left for allegedly having a healthcare plan that was too stingy (remember, if you don't unreservedly support Bernie's specific M4A plan lock, stock and barrel, you literally want people to die), and the Democratic Establishment had been throwing the kitchen sink at her every time she started doing well in the polls.

The market share she was left with ended up being the graduate degree-holding, debt-burdened nonprofit foundation program analyst. The barista in the corner cafe who makes her latte in the morning was voting for Bernie. The overpaid Boomer foundation director in the corner office was voting for Biden.

I think part of the problem is that on some level, there's really nothing that a well-educated, high-achieving, credentialed woman can say that will not be written off as "lecturing" or "nagging."

This is the correct answer. A Republican version would probably work if they hunted, but that essentially it.

I think a more refined version of the take is that if you're a well-educated, high-achieving, credentialed women, your base is going to be predominantly well-educated, high-achieving, credentialed social progressives (and mostly women), and you will naturally bend/cater your campaign to them in a way that will naturally preclude support from other parts of the electorate. Over the course of her campaign, as health care puritanism and celebrity endorsements brought young people to Sanders and electability doomering brought center-lefties back to Biden/Buttigieg/Klobuchar, the highly educated credentialists were all who were left because Warren basically appealed to them on identity grounds.

This thread is a fascinating Rorschach test though. Some of these (garbage) takes are quite obviously sour grapes from Chapo/Bruenigland.

[Figueira]

Everyone by that point knew it was Bernie vs. Biden. Also, because she was mostly unknown prior to 2012, she doesn't have a natural home state advantage the way most Senators do. Outside of Harvard University, no one thinks of her as a "local hero" or anything like that. What advantage she does have is because her brand of politics is a good fit for some in the state.

[Sol]

She wasn't a good candidate.

Liz Warren in theory was a perfect candidate ideologically. She was halfway between Biden and Bernie, but she lacked charisma and was a Harvard professor.

Elizabeth Warren's campaign didn't fail due to charisma--have you seen her debate performances? I don't think she was a great candidate (as said above) but what kept her shambolic campaign going until Super Tuesday was her excellent public speaking and ability to connect with people.

The failure of her campaign (which tbh was also the death of basically every other candidate except Biden and Buttigieg, but very egregious in Warren's case) was that she or her staffers made the error of conflating Twitter and journalists with Democratic primary voters.

Rolling out endless plans earned her a wave of press goodwill for a while, but cultivating an academic image designed to appeal to the Twitterati meant that she mostly ended up with a coalition which resembled those people--degreed white young professionals and professors. Not exactly a winning demographic in a primary where she had to win a diverse coalition.

Plus blinking when Buttigieg came for her over healthcare was incredibly dumb.

[Blair]

I think generally the bigger the state is the harder it is win in a multi-state primary when you're doing extremely poorly. Rubio in Florida is the other example but you basically get blown away; laregly I imagine by relatively non-political voters.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Everyone by that point knew it was Bernie vs. Biden. Also, because she was mostly unknown prior to 2012, she doesn't have a natural home state advantage the way most Senators do. Outside of Harvard University, no one thinks of her as a "local hero" or anything like that. What advantage she does have is because her brand of politics is a good fit for some in the state.

The "Bernie vs. Biden" take I think hits at another truth (that I've hit on a lot here) which is that: Bernie was always going to seize the left in this race because his team centered the 2020 primaries around health care way before the campaign even started. This is why a lot the pivotal plotlines of the race centered around health care, and every single debate started with a protracted and often repetitive relitigation of M4A vs. other options.

Bernie laid the ground work from 2017 onward in a really smart way! It was a great strategic move. Warren's surge in mid-late 2019 was hard work on her part but it was mostly made possible by the fact that the designated heir to the left was running a weak campaign. Once his campaign was humming again there was really no way for Warren to syphon them off as long as the campaign was centered around Sanders's pet issue.

[Senator Incitatus]

She's really not well-liked here. I believe polling consistently shows she's the least popular elected Democrat-among-Democrats in at least my lifetime, other than Coakley (who is mostly hated for losing). She ran about 10 points behind the baseline Democratic vote in 2018.