Sen. Kamala Harris’s loss is Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s gain.
At least, that is what the Massachusetts senator’s primary team seems to believe.
The Warren campaign sent out a fundraising email Tuesday evening, just hours after Harris ended her 2020 candidacy, seeking to capitalize on the exit of yet another female candidate from the Democratic primary.
There is a lot of lip service in the email about solidarity with women, but the real purpose of the email is obvious. Warren, who is herself experiencing the sort of free fall in polls that preceded Harris’s exit from the race, is stripping the California senator’s defunct campaign for parts.
“Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand — two women senators who, together, won more than 11.5 million votes in their last elections — have been forced out of this race, while billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg have been allowed to buy their way in,” the email reads.
“Forced out”? No shadowy group or higher power forced anyone out of the 2020 Democratic primary. The winners and losers are being decided by Democratic primary voters (or at least the ones getting polled), and they do not want Gillibrand or Harris. They made that perfectly clear. No one responded well to Gillibrand’s Hillary Clinton-esque pandering or Harris’s contrived stunts and shameful policy flip-flops. No one was interested in substance-free campaigns run by people who struggled to explain why they were running for president.
Warren and her team are smart enough to know all of this. Which is to say, the fundraising email is not about protesting an injustice so much as it is about field dressing a dead campaign for salvageable cuts. Warren, who is struggling in the polls, is looking for a boost and Harris’s supporters are ripe for the picking. Warren’s campaign is operating on the belief that stirring up unrest with an identity-based complaint suggesting female candidates are being treated unfairly by rich, white men will win her those voters.
As opposed to what Warren threatens to do to the economy if she does get her way?
The email, which was paid for by Warren for President, continues, arguing that the senator is above “big donors,” the “wealthy,” and “fancy fundraisers.”
She absolutely is not above any of those things.
Warren is “in this fight for working people. We’re going to root out corruption in Washington right at the source — and level the playing field for working people in this country,” it continues before asking readers outright for donations.
The really fun part will come later this month at the next Democratic primary debate, for which both Steyer and Warren have qualified. Let’s see if the senator has the guts to repeat even half of her fundraising pitch to Steyer’s face.
