The 2020 election is the Democratic Party’s race to lose.
It increasingly looks like they’re choosing to do just that.
Despite presiding over the lowest unemployment rate in half a century and the longest bull market in history, President Trump cannot win favor beyond his base. His approval ratings have remained far underwater. As evidence mounts that he pressured Ukraine’s president to dig up dirt on domestic political foes by threatening to withhold aid, nearly every Democrat in the country has come around to supporting impeachment.
Trump’s base, the segment that promises they’ll stick by him no matter what, is stagnant at one-quarter of the electorate.
Democrats really, really hate Trump, and many Republicans still refuse to embrace him. Yet, by two historically predictive metrics, state polling and economic predictions, Trump will handily win reelection if Democrats choose Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as their candidate.
As it turns out, the only Democratic front-runner who can hold together the Obama coalition — high minority turnout and northern white voters — is President Barack Obama’s beloved veep, Joe Biden. Since long before he announced his third bid for the White House, Biden has maintained a double-digit lead in head-to-head polling against Trump.
Warren, the only candidate other than fourth-place South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg to make any meaningful gains in primary polling, has also held consistent leads over Trump outside the margin of error. But as those of us following state polling and job reports have been warning for months, she’s both the media’s favorite candidate and the one most uniquely situated to replicate Hillary Clinton’s historic electoral failure.
Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes, or just over 2% of the total vote share, but she lost the Electoral College by a combined margin of 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. This gave Trump a critical 46 electoral votes and the Oval Office.
New polling of likely voters from the New York Times hints that Warren could easily win twice Clinton’s popular vote margin and still lose the electoral college. This would involve her losing all three of those states, Florida, and North Carolina. The only place where she appears destined to outperform Clinton is in Arizona, where she and Trump are tied.
Astoundingly, a whopping 6% of the country would vote for Biden but not for Warren.
Trump has never been as politically vulnerable as he is right now, yet swing states haven’t turned on him. Even as his favorability in those states hasn’t improved, impeachment remains politically toxic in swing states. Even if those farmers harmed by his trade war and suburban women who gave Democrats the House in 2018 out of disgust with Trump still dislike him on a personal level, they won’t vote to triple our annual deficit and crash their 401(k) plans thanks to a crisis in consumer and investor confidence spurred by a President Warren. Furthermore, Warren has failed to appeal enough to minority voters, the backbone of the Democratic electorate.
Clinton, in losing, won a nearly 80-point margin among black voters in 2016. Warren is currently polling more than 10 points behind where she was in this category. Warren is also underperforming Clinton among Hispanic voters, winning by 24 points compared to Clinton’s 35 points. Among other nonwhite voters, Clinton earned an 11-point lead, whereas Warren leads by only 3 points.
Biden, in contrast, polls just as well as Clinton among minorities while increasing his support among both college and non-college-educated white voters.
Unlike Clinton, Warren hasn’t spent a quarter of a century as the enemy No. 1 of the Right. The skeletons in her closet — embellishing her background, questionable scholarship, past corporate hypocrisy — are of the normal politician’s ilk and are unlikely to overshadow Trump’s scandals.
But her top-line plans for a $52 trillion “Medicare for all” program and punishing middle-class tax hikes are not the way to excite black Democrats, who are significantly more moderate than her media cheerleaders and also less likely to turn out for someone they dislike.
And in a time of relative domestic stability and prosperity, Warren’s radicalism undercuts the easiest and most obvious case against Trump. The country may be tired of constant chaos in the White House, but if the alternative is planned chaos that will destroy your retirement savings, then suddenly those Twitter tirades become a lot easier to stomach.
The clock is ticking down to the Iowa caucuses, and a late-breaking uptick in polling for Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar may prove promising to moderates looking for an alternative to the septuagenarian Biden. But if Democrats are serious about taking down Trump, they would be wise to coalesce around Biden. They nominate Warren at their own peril.
