Elizabeth Warren’s once-surging Democratic presidential nomination bid is losing steam.
After largely shunning national television interviews, the Massachusetts senator, 70, appeared on Sunday morning news programs and MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. She also unveiled a scarce endorsement from a former rival for the 2020 Democractic presidential nomination, hosting a rally this week with Julian Castro, 45, in New York. And she bounded into the New Year with campaign trips to Iowa and New Hampshire.
But, while she’s built a strong organizing network of paid field staff and volunteers in the states hosting the first two nominating contests, she’s making her final push ahead of the start of the primary season with soft polling and fundraising numbers. She was even outraised in the final quarter of 2019 by former Vice President Joe Biden, 77, whose own struggles with donors have been well documented.
“There are three tickets out of Iowa and New Hampshire. You need to finish top three in one of those states, unless we are looking at a brokered convention, which is a possibility, given the fluidity of this race,” Christopher Hahn, Aggressive Progressive podcast host and former Democratic strategist, told the Washington Examiner.
Warren faces one big hurdle in Iowa and New Hampshire that could stop her from becoming the Democratic Party’s next standard-bearer: managing the expectations game.
Warren has to overcome expectations in Iowa’s caucuses on Feb. 3, set high because of the strength of her ground game, in a state where a weaker-than-anticipated performance can blunt any candidate’s momentum heading into New Hampshire’s primary on Feb. 11. In New Hampshire, she has the added pressure of being a senator from a neighboring state, whose media market spills over the border, boosting her name recognition.
In response, she’s ratcheted up her attacks on her Democratic opponents. Although she’d been reluctant to swipe at her competitors in the past, toward the end of last year she sharpened her political knives for Pete Buttigieg, 37, over his lack of transparency about his work for management consultancy firm McKinsey and Company and his private fundraisers, such as the “wine cave” event in California’s Napa Valley.
And, this week, Warren released a plan to “fix” the country’s bankruptcy system, picking at the scab of an old clash she had in 2005 with Biden in the final years of his 36-year Senate career representing Delaware, a credit card industry hub, who opposed her suggested reforms.
She’s also backed off her advocacy of Medicare for All, a key campaign plank for 2020 Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, a socialist Vermont senator who favors the proposal that would effectively end private health insurance in favor of a government program. Warren initially pitched herself to liberal voters by declaring she was “with Bernie on Medicare for All.” But, under pressure to reveal how she’d finance her vision of single-payer healthcare, she rolled out a more pragmatic transition proposal than the one suggested in Sanders’s signature legislation.
“We need to get the votes. And we need to give people some experience with it,” Warren said when pressed on the change this weekend in Iowa.
New Hampshire state Rep. Tim Egan shied away from the word “desperate,” but he said it was unusual for Warren to “change oars in the middle of the river.”
“They are trying a lot of things that they normally wouldn’t have tried if their campaign had solid growth,” he told the Washington Examiner.
Egan attributed the popularity drop-off to other hopefuls having “much more resonance” with a broader swath of Democrats, including Buttigieg.
“The combination of Sanders and Buttigieg not going away doesn’t let her solidify, ‘Oh, it’s me and Joe Biden,’” he said.
For University of New Hampshire professor Dante Scala, Warren “obviously” would prefer to emerge victorious in both Iowa and New Hampshire “and be crowned the front-runner by the media.”
“But, at the least, Warren has to emerge from Iowa and New Hampshire as the most viable candidate for progressive Democrats. That means finishing ahead of Sanders not once, but twice,” he said.
That won’t be an easy task. Sanders, who has the advantage of running for president in 2016, has amassed a war chest of more than $73 million. In comparison, Warren has raised $60 million. The campaigns are due to disclose how much cash they have on hand by Jan. 31.
Similarly, Sanders outpaces her in the polls. Sanders leads the pack in Iowa with an average of 22% of the vote, followed by Buttigieg with 21.7%, Biden with 20.3%, and Warren with 15.3%, according to RealClearPolitics data. In New Hampshire, Sanders has an average of 22.7% support, trailed by Biden with 18.7%, Buttigieg with 17.7%, and Warren with 14.7%.
And that’s before the field competes in the more racially diverse states of Nevada and South Carolina, home to segments of the primary electorate with which Sanders bests Warren, who fares better with college-educated, white voters.
Warren returns to both Iowa and New Hampshire this weekend.
