The real reason Elizabeth Warren is toast
Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy for president died on the vine on Super Tuesday, after she failed to win a single state, and failed to pick up more than a smattering of delegates. It’s up to her if or when she wants to drop out, but it’s clear that she now has absolutely no mathematical path to getting more than 50% of the delegates. So what went wrong?
Far-left progressives tend to vote for whichever Democratic candidate espouses the leftmost ideas, regardless of whether that candidate would ever be able to get anything done for the left once in office. Mainstream liberals tend to vote for whichever Democratic candidate comes off as the most savvy, because that’s the person who could actually get the most done as far as moving the country to the left. Elizabeth Warren is the rare candidate who is both far-left and politically savvy, so she should have been the favorite. She appealed to both groups. If she’d been the nominee, she could have united the party.
But to win the nomination, Warren was going to have to score a good number of votes from the progressives, and a good number of votes from the mainstream liberals. Right out of the gate, most of the progressives lined up behind Sanders. This was mystifying to the rest of us, because Warren is just as far to the left, and she’s five times smarter and savvier than Sanders will ever be. But again, competence isn’t a factor for far-left voters, and they’d already spent four years being told by the media that they were the cool ones for supporting Sanders, so they largely ignored Warren and stuck with dead-end Sanders.
Mainstream liberals would have been just fine with Warren being the nominee. Yes, she’s further to the left than most Democratic voters. But they could see that she was smart and savvy and realistic, so it’s not as if they had to worry that she was going to accidentally drive the nation off a cliff while trying to drive it to the far left. The thing is, mainstream liberals are realists, who want a candidate who can actually win. Once they saw that the progressives were foolishly rejecting Warren, and that she wasn’t going to have a path to the nomination, they decided not to get behind her either.
Coming into Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren’s only path to the nomination was if no one got anywhere close to 50% of the delegates and we ended up with a brokered convention. If Biden and Sanders each entered with something like 35% of the delegates, and Warren had something like 20%, then there might have been a slight chance that the progressives and the mainstream liberals would compromise by getting behind the one candidate they could both live with.
But with the field now thinning by the day, Mike Bloomberg turning out to be a non-factor in the delegate count, and the increasing odds that Biden and Sanders will grab perhaps 85-90% of the delegates between them, it’s difficult to imagine Warren going into a brokered convention with 10% of the delegates in her pocket and pulling off the nomination. We’ll see if she drops out soon or not. But the progressives tanked her candidacy, because they weren’t willing to pick the one progressive candidate that the mainstream liberals would have been willing to rally behind.
