Elizabeth Warren, once a front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, is running out of time to salvage her campaign.
Warren’s disappointing finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, states where her ground game was expected to boost her White House ambitions, has narrowed her path to become her party’s standard-bearer because she has so far struggled to woo minority Democrats that dominate the primary electorates in Nevada and South Carolina, the next two contests on the calendar.
The problem is the Massachusetts senator, 70, doesn’t fare too well in some Super Tuesday states, either. Despite a lengthy memo circulated by her aides laying out her plan to seize the presidency, she’s at 5% support in Virginia, a crucial general election battleground state, in a poll released on Tuesday. Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, where she grew up before earning a Harvard Law School professorship, she pulls 8% of the vote in another survey put out on Tuesday.
As she tries to resuscitate her bid, she’s lashed out at the media coverage and her rivals over their positions, including front-runner Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 78, with whom she had a nonaggression pact, given their ideological overlap.
In Nevada, she told NBC News in Las Vegas on Monday that Sanders “has a lot of questions to answer” regarding his fans’ harassment of Culinary Union members who came out against Medicare for All due to fears it will affect their healthcare insurance coverage. Warren, to a lesser extent, was also criticized by the powerhouse union ahead of this Saturday’s caucuses in the state.
“That is not how we build an inclusive Democratic Party, and it is not how we beat Donald Trump. We do not build on a foundation of hate,” she said.
Though she regularly rips Michael Bloomberg, 78, over the former New York City mayor’s billionaire status and his use of nondisclosure agreements to button-up allegations concerning his company’s toxic work environment, she’s upped her attacks on opponents, such as former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, for cavorting with wealthy donors.
“What do you call a gathering of over 100 Wall Street big shots and wealthy donors at a restaurant in Manhattan?” her team emailed last Friday. “A Joe Biden fundraiser. And he hosted two of them just last night.”
The team added, “He’s expected to have raised at least $1 million in just one night. That will pay for a lot of campaigning in critical Super Tuesday states.”
Her backers at the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, who usually target Biden and Buttigieg, expanded their list to include Klobuchar this week. In a Monday email to its membership of almost a million people, the organization called Klobuchar “not prepared” after failing to remember the name of the Mexican president and criticized her for voting to confirm many of President Trump’s judicial nominees.
Meanwhile, Warren has raised approximately $3.5 million since New Hampshire, when she set herself the goal of bringing in $7 million to sustain her grassroots organizing from Nevada through to March 3, or Super Tuesday, when 14 states weigh in on the race at the same time. In preparation for the juggling act, she, along with Buttigieg, 38, who is similarly faltering, will leave Nevada on caucus day for a rally that night. The senator’s schedule will take her to Seattle while the mayor will end up in Aurora, Colorado.
Although she’s stagnated in the polls, Warren, who lost her voice last week as she fought off a cold, hasn’t mixed up her message after she came under scrutiny in the fall for her proposal to pay for her version of Medicare for All. Before Iowa, she attempted to paint herself as the “unity candidate” and leaned into the historic nature of her candidacy as a female contender.
“You know, my job is to get out and fight the fight I believe in, and, for me, it’s never been about a bunch of consultants. I didn’t need somebody to tell me what I believed because it polled well,” she told reporters in Las Vegas on the weekend when asked why her narrative wasn’t breaking through.
In fact, she recycled parts of her original stump speech in Henderson on Monday, highlighting the plight of the middle class and how her mother kept their family out of poverty by getting a minimum wage job at Sears.
“2020 is the moment in history that we have been called to, the moment that will determine not the next four years, not the next eight years, but generations to come,” she said.
Warren averages 14.5% support in Nevada, behind Sanders at 30% and Biden at 16%, according to RealClearPolitics data.
