IOWA CITY, Iowa — Elizabeth Warren has come up on the short end of her disagreement with 2020 Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, deflating the Massachusetts senator’s presidential campaign at the most inopportune moment.
The attacks between the two furthest-left major Democratic candidates started last week, when Warren, 70, said she was “disappointed” to hear about a leaked memo that instructed Sanders’s campaign staff to tell Iowa voters that she wasn’t capable of building a broad coalition to win a general election against President Trump. The situation escalated when Warren’s team, in return, leaked a story to CNN the night before a Democratic debate alleging that Sanders, 78, told her a woman couldn’t win the White House.
Sanders flatly denied making those remarks, but the issue spilled over to the debate and ended in a tense exchange between the two after the event’s close. Those close to Sanders say the Warren campaign’s leaking of the story was an act of desperation but acknowledge the senator was foolish to think a detente would last through the first primary contests.
“Warren’s comments remind me of a sign I saw on a beach I saw this summer about throwing trash in the ocean,” said consultant Brad Bannon. “My version is: ‘The candidate you trash now may be the nominee you have to swim with in the fall.'”
But polling shows that voters in Iowa were also affected by Warren’s gambit, as she began hitting new lows in recent national polls. A survey released by Monmouth last week found Warren’s support at 14% nationally, 9 points behind Sanders and 16 points behind former Vice President Joe Biden.
“She would be better off making the best possible case for herself instead of getting in a pissing match or name-calling contest with Bernie,” Bannon said. “Democratic primary voters want their candidates to focus their fury towards Trump, not beat up on each other.”
Most tellingly, Warren saw a 15-point drop in her net favorability rating from the previous month. Her approval is now underwater with Democratic voters at plus 46 points. That’s down from her November high of plus 70.
In Iowa, her numbers remain stronger. Voters say that’s because she has made an aggressive push to humanize herself and largely avoid the topic of Sanders altogether.
Still, some voters, such as Debby Tillson, 44, who saw former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg speak in Cedar Rapids on Tuesday, said that Warren’s bickering with Sanders made her move toward a candidate with a central message of unity, rather than partisan division.
“Just hearing Pete speak about bringing America together, which is what we need, really made a difference,” she said about the 38-year-old Harvard graduate, Rhodes scholar, and McKinsey consultant. “We can’t keep having these ideological battles in the party.”
Biden supporters say Warren’s decline was inevitable and point to her polling after she repeatedly declined to take a position on whether her Medicare for All plan would likely raise taxes on the middle class. In November, when she finally announced the details of her health proposal arguing only the rich would pay for it, Warren saw her numbers rapidly drop in states including Iowa.
Her support in Iowa hasn’t budged much since then, with RealClearPolitics averaging her at 16.7% support.
“I don’t think that episode with Bernie helped Elizabeth. It probably hurt Warren more than Sanders. But it’s not the same thing as saying you’re in favor of getting rid of private health insurance,” said former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. “The spat over who told what to whom wasn’t good for either of them. But the damage she’s done to herself was on Medicare for All, looking disingenuous and not being honest with the American people.”
