This weekend, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., officially kicked off her campaign for president. Prior to doing so, she had already been out on the trail in Iowa and trying to “up” her presence through beer-swilling and Acela-riding videos.
Some conservatives have been quick to pooh-pooh her as a candidate, not least because she’s very liberal and America, we are told, is a “center-right” country. Others have been pointing to her “unlikability,” something that Warren has responded to by suggesting that “unlikable” is political code for “female.”
But Warren’s critics, of which I am one, shouldn’t be so quick to assume she will lose either the primary or, if nominated, the general election. Warren may not be our cup of tea, but she has a lot of strengths as a candidate, at least if you consider the electorate as it is, rather than how you might wish it were.
Let’s stipulate right up front that whatever rules used to apply in politics, ever since Donald Trump won the presidency, those rules are now out the window. People you think have no hope of winning elections can indeed win them. That is especially the case when said people can grab a metric ton of free TV coverage every single day by doing things like tweeting, making out-there statements (about policy or anything else), or holding massive rallies that people line up for, for hours in the rain or snow or extreme heat.
In 2016, that was Trump, and in 2020, it could easily be Warren. Her Iowa “kickoff” was well-covered by cable news, especially all-important-in-Democratic-primaries MSNBC. Her Instagram video featuring her knocking back a beer also got a ton of free media. So did the Acela video, even if half of it, like at least half of Trump’s free media, was negative. Time will tell if she truly is as deft as Trump at getting cable and broadcasters to give her literally multiple hours of unpaid-for airtime a day. But so far, she looks like she might be. It’s not as if Warren doesn’t have a history of grabbing TV attention before now anyway.
Warren is also not entering this contest as a complete unknown who must build her name ID from scratch.
Don’t forget, back in 2004 she appeared on “Oprah” to talk about personal finances.
She’s been a staple at campaign events across the country in prior contests before. Alison Lundergan-Grimes and Natalie Tennant, running respectively in not-liberal Kentucky and West Virginia, made the calculation in 2014 that a Warren appearance was not a liability for them. In 2018, Warren’s endorsement of Democrat Andrew Janz, running against Rep. Devin Nunes in a deep-red district, was suspected to be a potential death knell by California GOP strategists. Yet, Nunes only won with 52.7 percent of the vote.
This is all setting aside her enormous popularity with what used to be known as the “netroots” — progressive activists online, whose support may not make or break a candidacy but certainly helps, especially when it comes to winning primaries.
Warren will also be a fundraising powerhouse. Last year, she was up for re-election in a race she was a sure bet to win. Nonetheless, she raised about $35 million according to OpenSecrets.org. Only $8.3 million of this came from donors who gave more than $200. As of the end of the first quarter of 2018, almost 99 percent of her donations amounted to less than $100; 82 percent were for $25 or less. In the first 15 hours after announcing her presidential exploratory committee, Warren reportedly raised about $300,000.
Now, she’s in the presidential race early. That means she not only has a massive existing pool of small dollar donors to tap, she also has the benefit of there being many, many months between now and the Iowa caucuses, during which they’ll be chipping in their $5 or $10. That’s an advantage that many other Democrats won’t have, either because they lack the fundraising strength or they’ll enter the race later.
Contrary to what fans of Warren assert, there’s not much evidence to support the theory that money buys results in politics. But it can buy ads and more of that treasured cable news and social media exposure, just to ensure that if the public at-large isn’t already seeing enough of Warren as a matter of unpurchased, free media coverage, they will once her advertising operation is in full swing.
But what of the criticisms that Warren is too liberal? To be sure, she is quite far left on the ideological spectrum. But her positions on matters such as trade, Afghanistan withdrawal, and drug prices barely deviate from Trump’s. To the extent they do, Warren is more trade-skeptical and pro-sticking it to Big Pharma than Trump has proven to be in office.
October 2018 Pew data has only 35 percent of the public saying they think the U.S. has “mostly succeeded” in Afghanistan. Not even 50 percent of Republicans, generally the more hawkish party, apparently think we’re winning.
December polling from advocacy group Patients for Affordable Drugs Now also suggests the general public agrees with measures designed to bring down drug prices that are less than pure-free market, the kind of measures that Trump and Warren seem to favor.
Trade skepticism is actually a potential hurdle for Warren in the Democratic primary. Per the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, counties that went to Hillary Clinton in 2016 were responsible for about 60 percent of all U.S. exports. Pew data from 2018 shows that 67 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners have a positive view of free trade agreements between the U.S. and other countries. About 63 percent oppose raising tariffs on steel and aluminum. Meanwhile, June Quinnipiac polling shows Republicans to be the only demographic that supports tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.
But this underlines the point: To the extent voters vote on issues, a not-uncontested proposition, Warren has the potential to grab at the votes of trade-skeptical independents and even disaffected or disillusioned Republicans (heck, as was recently re-reported by Mediaite, she was a Republican until 1996). By 2020, many of those will not be libertarian-or neoconservative-inclined “Never Trumpers,” but rather people who enthusiastically supported Trump in 2016 because they like economic populism, but by that time are feeling let down — especially if an economic slump occurs.
Warren actually is not full-on crazy on literally everything. While Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., are advocating a very costly and impossible to achieve as written “Green New Deal” as a way of improving our environmental footprint, Warren is calling for (wait for it) publicly traded companies to disclose their carbon emissions. While there are constitutional and conceptual flaws with her government ethics package, voters rarely understand the nuance of these things and tend to view government as corrupt. That will especially be the case one presidential cycle after Crooked Hillary was continuously invoked, fairly, on many Democratic voters’ minds, and after Trump, who has ethical scandals aplenty himself, was elected.
It would be nice if conservatives could just laugh off Warren’s candidacy, because she does have genuinely objectionable ideas on a range of things, perhaps her worst was a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that she deliberately designed to be unaccountable to elected officials. But the truth is, she could win the Democratic nomination and the 2020 general election.
Liz Mair (@LizMair) is the founder, owner, and president of Mair Strategies LLC and a GOP political consultant. She is a longtime critic of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
