Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential candidacy ultimately failed because voters saw right through her.
Warren’s career, as I have detailed, has been built on a series of cons dating back to her time as an academic peddling dubious medical bankruptcy research. In the run-up to her 2020 campaign, she attempted to lean into her false claim of Native American heritage. On the campaign trail, she told whoppers about having been pushed out of a teaching job for being visibly pregnant and told charter school advocates her kids went to public school (while hiding that she sent one of her children to private school).
She was an unconvincing panderer, actually generating phrases such as, “Black trans and cis women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are the backbone of our democracy.”
But the heart of her campaign was her long list of policy proposals. Though they drew glowing reviews from her fans in the media, they did not stand up to much scrutiny.
Her wealth tax, for instance, promised to raise $3.75 trillion if ultra-rich individuals pitched in just a few cents, to fund free childcare, free college, student debt forgiveness, her K-12 education plan, and part of her healthcare proposal. But experts across the political spectrum noted that it would raise a fraction of the promised amount, be impossible to administer, and would more likely than not be declared unconstitutional.
She vowed to tackle the problem of climate change but also promised to ban fracking (which has reduced carbon emissions in the United States) and to phase out nuclear power (which most climate experts say will have to dramatically increase to meet emissions goals).
After steadily surging in polls for months, Warren’s campaign began to unravel in the fall as rivals challenged her ludicrous claim that she could finance a $34 trillion plan to provide generous health coverage to all Americans without raising middle-class taxes.
Under pressure, she finally released a plan that she said proved that she could make the math work. In reality, it claimed a payroll tax that would fall on middle-class Americans didn’t count as a tax increase, relied on a series of unrealistic assumptions that dramatically understated spending and overstated revenues — and still came up $14 trillion short of what independent experts have estimated would be needed to finance a plan with as many benefits as she promised.
Emory health finance expert Kenneth Thorpe told me at the time that the plan’s claimed administrative savings were “unrealistically low” and that the promised cuts to drug prices “would be the end of any type of research and development and innovation in this country.”
Her declaration that “I’m with Bernie” on the need to eliminate private insurance lumped the two of them together in the minds of many voters, putting more moderate Democrats out of reach. But at the same time, she created suspicions among Bernie Sanders supporters who came to view her as insincere.
In her home state of Massachusetts, where she finished a humiliating third, she lost the voters who wanted to replace private insurance with a government plan by 12 percentage points to Sanders but also lost those who opposed getting rid of private coverage by 25 percentage points to Joe Biden. She even lost liberal voters there.
In earlier contests, in addition to alienating voters of all ideological stripes, she lost ground among affluent college-educated white voters to Pete Buttigieg, who adopted a more moderate tone and unifying message.
The shredding of her credibility among many voters created ongoing problems for her candidacy. By the time she claimed in the final debate before the Iowa caucuses that Sanders privately told her before the campaign that a woman couldn’t be elected president (a claim that he denied), few were willing to take her account at face value.
As Warren racked up one distant loss after another in February, she flip-flopped on campaign financing. After spending most of her campaign sanctimoniously attacking the influence of super PACs, as things got desperate, she decided to welcome the support of a major one spending money to promote her candidacy.
Warren’s campaign failed spectacularly despite the fact that the media spent the whole campaign desperately trying to boost her candidacy. Reporters oohed and ahhed over her unrealistic and dishonest policy proposals, and when she was down, questioned why she wasn’t getting more traction. But it’s impossible to sell a product that nobody wants.
The campaign is now coming down to a contest between front-runner Biden, who consistently ran on a traditional liberal message, and Sanders, who is the genuine socialist.
Warren couldn’t even fool liberals in her home state.
