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Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign stumbled out of the gate, before rising steadily to briefly become a front-runner only to stumble again as key actors from both the left and mainstream wings of the Democratic Party decided they’d rather go for broke than settle on Warren.
Having sunk to third place in national polls with Michael Bloomberg nipping at her heels and Pete Buttigieg doing well in the early states, it seems like her campaign’s in trouble.
On both the upswing and the downswing she’s positioned a bit betwixt and between. She draws votes from people who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 and from people who supported Hillary Clinton. Her events feature a lot of suburban mom #resistance energy but also promise “big structural change” on the economy. She’s on the left but she’s not a socialist. And she’s got a lot of plans.
“Hard-working people are up against a small group that holds far too much power, not just in our economy but also in our democracy,” Warren said in February while making her campaign official in a former mill town with historic ties to the labor organization movement. “We are here to take on a fight that will shape our lives, our children’s lives, and our grandchildren’s lives, just as surely as the fight that began in these streets more than a century ago.”
After getting elected to the Senate in 2012, Warren quickly made a name for herself as the major intellectual leader among progressives on Capitol Hill. She then naturally became the preferred recruit of progressives who wanted to see Hillary Clinton face a strong challenge for the 2016 nomination. But she stepped aside, Bernie Sanders stepped up, his primary run turned him into a national political celebrity with a substantial following, and now the 2020 field features two progressive insurgents rather than just one.
Warren seemed early on like she had an ideal opportunity to take what Sanders had built and expand on his coalition — offering a somewhat younger, female face for left-wing politics and adding to it better personal relationships with members of Congress and a sharper mind for policy detail. Instead, her early handling of a DNA test related to her Native American ancestry attracted widespread criticism and helped spark wider doubts about her “electability.” Many women entered the 2020 race, and first former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and then South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg captured the imaginations of many college-educated liberals. Sanders, meanwhile, who almost certainly would have stepped aside in favor of Warren in 2016, did nothing of the sort in 2020.
But Warren ground away, tapping a wide and slightly unorthodox network of advisers and academics to release a rapid-fire set of major policy proposals that both attracted attention on their own terms and earned her a clear persona as the woman with a million plans. Then bit by bit, selfie by selfie, she started climbing back in the polls based on the same qualities that made her a star in her first term in the Senate — a devoted team of loyalists, a strong presence in small rooms, a tireless work ethic, a solid ideological core, and an eye for detail.
Yet back in October when she overtook Sanders in the polls and began to threaten Biden’s lead, she had a problem — rather than leftists bandwagoning her to beat Biden or the establishment bandwagoning with her to beat Sanders, both flanks attacked simultaneously and her numbers sunk. Now she wants to sell herself as the antidote to factional feuding who can bring the party together, but for that message to work voters will have to decide they actually want to transcend factionalism.
Who is Elizabeth Warren?
Joe Biden first became a US senator nearly 50 years ago. Bernie Sanders was running statewide third-party campaigns before most of his core supporters were even born. And though Buttigieg and O’Rourke are much younger than Biden and Sanders, they’ve both been running for office essentially their whole careers.
Warren isn’t like that. She was the stay-at-home mom of a 2-year-old in New Jersey by the time she enrolled in law school, and after graduating, she taught at fairly unglamorous public universities for years before getting an offer from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987.
Eight years later, she moved to Harvard, where she was a nationally recognized expert on bankruptcy law. Mike Synar, a former Oklahoma Congress member who knew Warren from growing up, came to chair the National Bankruptcy Commission and in 1995 brought Warren on as an adviser. Congress — led by Biden — ultimately wound up taking bankruptcy reform legislation in the opposite direction from Warren’s preferences.
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Warren was then recruited into politics by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who tapped the professor to lead Congress’s oversight of the big bank bailout that took place in the final months of the George W. Bush administration. After that, she was brought back to Washington by Barack Obama to serve as a special adviser charged with getting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau up and running. But facing stiff opposition to her confirmation as CFPB director — and a lack of enthusiasm for her among other Obama administration economic policy advisers — Obama didn’t pick her to lead the agency. Instead, she ran for Senate in 2012, beat Scott Brown, and spent most of Obama’s second term as the intellectual leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
But the 10-year fight over bankruptcy legislation is what originally brought her into politics and defines her worldview.
She’s an academic and a believer in the value of scholarship and technical expertise.
But her read of the bankruptcy fight is that the wisdom of technical experts like her lost out not because of the madness of crowds or the popular passions of excessive democracy, but the raw political power of concentrated economic interests. She has very much a technocrat’s obsessions — picking fights over things like swaps regulation and an undersecretary of Treasury nomination — but a profound belief in the overarching significance of power rather than technical arguments to carry the day.
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What’s the strongest argument for each leading Democratic candidate? Read all of the entries in our series:
Power and corruption are at the center of her worldview
Warren has released many policy proposals on many topics, but her signature initiative and top priority addresses political corruption, which she sees as the connective tissue linking many social ills.
“The reason the United States is where it is on climate is corruption,” Warren spokesperson Chris Hayden told Vox’s Umair Irfan when he was reporting a story on her climate agenda. “We need to rein in the economic and political power of Big Oil to get serious about addressing climate change — which is why the first thing Elizabeth would do as president is pass her anti-corruption bill, which would end lobbying as we know it.”
Working on bankruptcy, Warren came to see corruption more than bad ideas as driving bad bankruptcy policy. And having served some years in Washington, she now sees that same corruption everywhere — infecting everything from climate policy to bank regulation to antitrust law to white-collar crime and beyond.
Even her first major foreign policy speech was on some level fundamentally about corruption; she argued that “beginning in the 1980s, Washington’s focus shifted from policies that benefit everyone to policies that benefit a handful of elites, both here at home and around the world.”
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As Ezra Klein writes, this singular focus on the cycle between the accumulation of wealth and the transformation of wealth into political power that begets more wealth gives her agenda a narrative unity that was lacking in Hillary Clinton’s grab bag of policy proposals. Critics, however, find it off-putting — in Warren’s world, the people on the other side are patsies and shills on the take, not people who disagree in good faith and who you work with to forge compromises.
Warren is, of course, hardly unique among prominent politicians in pressing a fairly black-and-white worldview. But the fact that she is such a precise and detail-oriented thinker contrasts with most other users of populist rhetoric. In her best moments, this gives her a unique combination of moral zeal and intellectual rigor that’s won her many fans. But the risk is that this combination of exacting precision and stark moralism can be subtractive rather than additive. After all, given the sheer number of “plans” Warren has put out there, few people are actually going to agree with 100 percent of her ideas.
You win elections by getting the votes of lots of people who don’t agree with you about everything. And many Democrats aren’t sure Warren has what it takes.
Warren is haunted by “electability” narratives
Worries about Warren’s electability can take many forms, from specific concern about her handling of the Native American ancestry controversy to generalized angst about the disadvantages women may face in presidential politics.
But there is also a much more concrete concern about Warren’s electoral track record.
In 2012, Barack Obama won Massachusetts with 60 percent of the vote. Warren that same year won her Senate seat with 54 percent of the vote in Massachusetts. A swath of Massachusetts voters, in other words, liked Obama but didn’t like Warren. That may have simply meant that Scott Brown was an unusually effective politician. But six years later, Warren won reelection with 60 percent of the vote — the exact same share as Hillary Clinton received in 2016. Nobody should sneer at 60 percent of the vote, but Massachusetts is a distinctly bluer-than-average state, and most other Democratic senators outperformed Clinton that year.
Jacky Rosen picked up a Senate seat in Nevada by running 2 points stronger than Clinton. Kyrsten Sinema gained one in Arizona by running 5 points stronger than Clinton. And those were challengers. Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp both lost their races in tough red states, but they ran 8 and 17 points ahead of Clinton. The only Democratic incumbent who ran weaker relative to Clinton than Warren was Bob Menendez, who labored under a cloud of criminal charges.
Warren’s home state approval rating of 49 percent, similarly, is underwhelming, with Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, and Amy Klobuchar (along with about a dozen men, including her fellow Bay State senator, Ed Markey) all faring better even though New Hampshire and Minnesota are less red than Massachusetts.
Her campaign thus far has done a better job of shouting down these electability doubts than of actually addressing them, giving journalists a huge raft of policy to chew on rather than dwelling on her home-state favorability rating.
What are Elizabeth Warren’s policies?
Elizabeth Warren has a universal child care plan. She has a plan to crack down on corruption in defense procurement. She wants to make it legal to indict a sitting president. She has an ambitious reproductive rights agenda, and a plan to break up big technology companies; that plan is actually separate from her larger idea to rework antitrust policy. She also has an expansive “economic patriotism” agenda. And a big plan for free college and student debt cancellation. Much of this would be paid for by a big new tax on large accumulated fortunes.
That’s to say nothing of her plan to end shareholder supremacy in corporate America, her expansive housing agenda, her plan on private prisons, her plan to reduce racial disparities in maternal mortality, her climate plan, or her plan for rural America.
Most of these plans, in turn, have many moving parts and Vox’s individual explainers on them are long enough that the overall Warren policy agenda somewhat defies summary. The big picture, however, is that if jointly enacted, the influence of private sector business groups over the government would be greatly reduced; at the same time, the influence of wealthy shareholders over the conduct of private business would be greatly reduced. The United States would have a more expansive welfare state, but also a fundamentally different economic structure in which major decisions are made by a balance of investor and labor priorities with a large and somewhat autonomous bureaucratic sector exerting a heavy guiding hand.
In the real world, there is no way legislation of this scope is going to be enacted regardless of who prevails in 2020. As a result, the proliferation of plans is in some regards more of a branding exercise than a real guide to what America would look like under a Warren administration.
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A bigger clue to how Warren would likely govern is probably her intense interest in the minutiae of Obama administration appointments and her frequent invocation of the Reagan-era conservative mantra that “personnel is policy.”
Warren would aim to staff an administration that is much more rigorously separate from — and adversarial to — the business community rather than repeating the Obama-era pattern in which many key figures revolved between Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. But in light of Obama’s extraordinarily high popularity with rank-and-file Democrats, she’s largely avoided voicing this criticism during the course of the campaign, even though it probably expresses the clearest concrete stakes that are actually at issue in the campaign.
This whole vast policy rollout happened largely while Warren was flying somewhat under the radar. As her campaign gained steam, she naturally began to attract more scrutiny — especially on the topic of health care, which is critical to voters but less central to Warren’s worldview — and her popularity seemed to somewhat buckle. Sanders opened up a space that was distinctly to her left on a number of issues, and his supporters attacked any sign of moderation from Warren. But moderate Democrats continued to find her completely unacceptable. The resulting news cycles ate away at Warren’s polls and left her campaign in what’s currently a somewhat desperate situation. But she also has a clear pitch to make as everyone’s second choice and a potential compromise pick in a divided field.
