A political columnist is blaming rampant “fear and misogyny” for Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s current place in the Democratic primary for president.
Will Bunch wrote a nearly 2,000-word column for the Philadelphia Enquirer on Saturday announcing his endorsement of Warren for president in 2020. Bunch flipped to Warren from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016.
“If the stakes were high in 2016 — when I naively and foolishly believed that Donald Trump’s campaign was the last throes of a doomed white supremacy, and that America was ready then for a political revolution — then they are off the charts in 2020,” Bunch wrote.
Bunch conceded that Sanders “could be a great president” but said that “times change, and changing times have changed me.”
“My perceptions about what’s wrong with America and how to fix it are different than they were in 2016,” Bunch wrote. “I believe the candidate who will get us there is Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.”
Warren is currently polling 3rd nationally in the Democratic primary with 14.8% of the vote, according to the RealClearPolitics national polling average. She trails former Vice President Joe Biden at 29.3%, and Sanders at 20.3%. Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is the closest behind Warren at 7.5%.
Acknowledging that Biden’s support roughly doubles Warren’s, Bunch said that if the Democratic Party could overcome widespread “fear and misogyny,” Warren would be the front-runner.
“In politics, the second most dismaying thing so far about 2020 — after Trump’s growing instability — has been the fear bordering on a paralyzing panic that has overcome the Democratic electorate,” Bunch wrote, attributing that fear to potentially losing to Trump in 2020.
Bunch said that fear has warped voters’ perspectives of the Democratic candidates.
“No one has suffered from this exercise more than Elizabeth Warren,” Bunch said. “Her experience is written off as old age (despite boundless energy and mental acuity), her policy chops downgraded as schoolmarmish wonkery, and her enthusiasm for the campaign sometimes described as dorky. A lot of this can be boiled down to one word, or maybe two. Sexism. Or, misogyny.”
