By forming an exploratory committee, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has all but declared she is a candidate for president in 2020. As she informally launches her bid, however, she does so in a dramatically weakened position.
The Massachusetts Democrat was once a rock star on the Left. As a Harvard Law professor, Warren gained notoriety as critic of abusive practices by credit card companies. When Republicans blocked her appointment to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, she leveraged her martyr status in a Senate bid in 2012. When she was running, a video of her arguing that businesses got rich thanks to infrastructure paid for communally went viral and eventually helped inspire former President Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech.
When 2016 rolled around, liberals were begging for her to challenge Hillary Clinton by presenting a bold, transformative agenda that took on the establishment to contrast Clinton’s incrementalism and ties to Wall Street.
Since then, however, a number of things have happened to change the hold that Warren once had on the hearts and minds of liberals.
[Also read: 45 Democrats jostling to challenge Trump in 2020]
She chose not to run in 2016, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., jumped into the fold, galvanizing liberals on an anti-corporate message similar to the one on which Warren built her career. Since then, other Democrats have come along to compete for the affection of liberals, including Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and more recently, Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas.
The prospect of her running has been greeted with much less fanfare on the Left than it would have been four years ago. Her hometown paper, the Boston Globe, which had urged her to run in 2016, wrote earlier this month that she “missed her moment” and shouldn’t bother this time around.
In the lead up to 2016, liberal activist groups MoveOn and Democracy for America spent millions trying to draft Warren to run. This time around, their members are much more divided.
A MoveOn straw poll taken earlier this month had Warren in fifth place among what should be her base, drawing just over six percent, while a more recent Democracy for America poll found her in fourth place, with under 8 percent support. In both polls, she trailed Sanders and newcomer O’Rourke.
Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy of America, was welcoming but noncommittal in response to the Warren news, emphasizing the buffet of choices for liberals this time around. “Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s formal entrance into the 2020 race for president today helps launch what we believe will be a vibrant discussion of bold, inclusive populist ideas in the Democratic primary, and we look forward to the wide array of progressive candidates that we expect to join her in it in the year ahead,” he said.
Among the broader Democratic electorate, Warren starts off in an even worse position. A December CNN poll found her in a three-way tie for seventh place, with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. All three candidates were at 3 percent — actually trailing the survey’s margin of error. In October, the same poll found her at 8 percent.
Warren also displayed terrible political instincts by allowing President Trump’s “Pocahontas” attack on her claims of Native American heritage to get under her skin, prompting her to release a DNA test that backfired badly, drawing not just mockery from conservatives, but a harsh rebuke from Cherokee Nation.
To be sure, none of this is to say that Warren can’t win. As I’ve written repeatedly, the Democratic nomination battle is incredibly wide-open and fluid, with no clear front-runner. It’s quite possible that Warren could build momentum over time and emerge from a crowded field. Once she does that, in a two-person race against an unpopular president, she certainly has a shot to win.
While keeping that in mind, it’s also clear that Warren is not entering the race from a position of strength.
