Elizabeth Warren might have been the Democrat with the best chance of beating Hillary Clinton in 2016, but a group trying to draft the Massachusetts senator for president has conceded defeat.
The “Run Warren Run” campaign is closing up shop after six months of cultivating grassroots momentum, having ultimately failed to cajole Warren into the race.
Next week the group will deliver its final petition of 365,000 signatures to Warren’s Washington office and then officially suspend the campaign.
The campaign to convince the Democratic Party’s liberal darling to run for president set up nine field offices in New Hampshire and Iowa, recruited hundreds of volunteers, drew endorsements from dozens of state legislators and signed up thousands of supporters before its eventual collapse. Warren was touted as an appealing, progressive alternative to the scandal-ridden Hillary Clinton.
“By the time other candidates began entering the race, we’d already built the kind of campaign infrastructure a candidate aims for in the final months before a caucus or primary,” Run Warren Run organizers Ilya Sheyman and Charles Chamberlin wrote in Politico. “And our talented field team did all of this without an actual candidate in the race.”
Clinton has adopted much of Warren’s rhetoric on income inequality and economic populism, speaking of how “the deck is stacked for those at the top” and promising to change that.
“So I think if Warren would have declared she would have been the most competitive [with Hillary] in a fairly noncompetitive race,” Brookings Institute fellow John Hudak told the Washington Examiner. “Not to say she would have beat Clinton but she would have had a better chance than [Bernie] Sanders or [Martin] O’Malley.”
Clinton has worked hard to appeal to progressives, Hudak noted. Her campaign intro video emphasized cultural liberalism. A gay couple planning their wedding, a single mother sacrificing for her child’s education and two Hispanic brothers starting their own business take the spotlight before she does.
Clinton is an overwhelming favorite for the Democratic nomination over more liberal opponents like Sanders and O’Malley. But recent polling also suggests the public is starting to view her less favorably.
“I think that if you are an individual working for Run Warren Run you had some distaste for Clinton as a candidate, and that continues for some of them,” Hudak said. “If you can’t have Warren as a nominee it would make sense to go to other campaigns, like Sanders’ or O’Malley’s, as this whole thing was born out of a non-Clinton push.”
