What went wrong with Warren? Aside from the wonderful, pulsing alliteration of that sentence, that is a question that I, a fan and strong supporter of Elizabeth Warren have been grappling with for several weeks now. Now that the campaign is officially pulled up by the roots and tossed into the fireplace, the articles about it are everywhere, and you can bet every staffer with an axe to grind is now grinding it on the skulls of their former co-workers.
It’s a complicated question. I don’t want to write a book about it, but I probably will write too much about it, so to make it easy to digest let’s first break it down to components: the mistakes of the candidate, mistakes on the left, and the mood of the electorate. In the add, all the failures go back to Warren. I am very clear on this. I hold Bernie accountable for the pitiful way his campaigns are run and his ineffective national progressive vehicle, OurRevolution, and I don’t hold Warren to a separate standard just because I like her more.
Disclaimer: Of course sexism played a deep and abiding role in this failure. Sexism and patriarchy. 100%. This is so obvious and pervasive that it goes without saying. But I want to talk about the other things that played a role. Sexism is a blight on the country, but it exists and anyone woman running for President needs a plan for how to deal with it and overcome it, and Warren didn’t have a strategy for that.
“A Once in a Lifetime Candidate”
Those are the words of Umair Haque and many others. Warren was a dream candidate, a political outsider, someone from a lower middle class Oklahoma family, a progressive activist, a woman who persisted, who fought for consumer protections against banks and rich oligarchies and was going to get what she wanted or there would be blood and teeth on the floor. Even more, Warren was a highly accomplished and educated Law Professor at the world’s most elite educational institution, and she as an activist and a Senator and a Candidate, showed she knew better than perhaps anyone running in our lifetime, exactly how the system was fixed, broken, and exactly what legal and legislative strategies, as well as well as policy programs, were needed to correct it. She was so smart and so informed on minuscule details that she made Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, two incredible minds, look dull by comparison. She had the passion, the empathy, the sincerity, the mostly progressive outlook, and man, she did she have the ideas. How did all that go to waste?
On March 29, 2019, I was hiking with a friend on Mt. Daibousatsu in Kofu Prefecture, scrambling up a narrow ridgeline covered in melting snow and talking loudly in between breaths about the Democratic Presidential primary, particularly Biden’s entrance. We’d seen fresh black bear markings on trees, and that anxiety made me more irritable than usual, so as we talked (to scare off and not surprise any bears nearby), I gave my hot take on the primary field: I fucking hated everyone for different reasons. Pete wasn’t even a thing at the time, but I laid into each candidate. Surprisingly, looking back, most of the complaints and worries I had about each candidate ended up coming to fruition.
When it came to Warren, I said something along the lines of “I like Warren a lot, like she is the closest candidate to me politically, both in style and policy, but she has the political sense of a fucking badger.” Specifically, with more expletives, I ripped into her inability to own up to the Native Heritage crap, and the way she stumbled right into Trump’s provocation and laughably released a DNA test as she was preparing for a Presidential run (I also went back to the 2012 Senate race). Warren tends to walk right into the traps set by her political opponents and hostile press. When met with the blatant sexism that exists in politics, media and American culture, she tends to react with shock, like she’d never ever expected to meet it, like it was the one thing she didn’t have a plan to deal with. Against Brown too, she struggled with a hostile media and a deeply rooted old-boys club that dominated MA politics. For much of the campaign she basically let Brown turn into a race between “moderate (disclaimer he wasn’t) blue collar suburban dude in a truck, and out of touch Harvard Professor.” He baited her in debates, losing them in substance but coming out looking sympathetic. Scott Brown managed to run way ahead of Obama in virtually all the more working class areas of the state and many suburban areas, Warren won and ran an excellent campaign, one capable of raising the money and volunteers to overpower the then Rockstar Scott Brown, but she struggled, and in a Presidential election where Obama won the state with high turnout and a 25 point margin, it was hard not to feel like that made the difference for her.
The biggest issue was branding
To be more specific, Warren had a plan for everything. That was her slogan. She was basically running on competence. Which is great, and it’s a powerful potential message. However, her campaign had no direction, no focus, no brand. Haque had a very nice way of putting it in his article:
There’s a kind of Very Smart Person who thinks that branding and marketing don’t matter — and the result is that they tend to lose political contests, whether individually or organizationally. Of course they matter. They matter more so when you’re being erased. And they matter even more in societies like America — where people are drained cognitively and emotionally to begin with, so they have to take their cues from brain-dead bro-pundits. Who has time to really understand the news — when you’re being worked to a slow, painful decrepitude, 18 hours a day, and you still can’t make ends meet. That’s when you need to distill what you stand for into a crystalline essence — so sharp it cuts any sword attacking you right in half.
I couldn’t put it better than that. Obama had a simple brand, Hope, but also the idea of transformative change and universal opportunity in America. Obama took it, and it was sharp as the sword Anglachel, which Turin used to slay Glaurung in The Silmarillion. He even took his weakness going in, the fact he was a Black Man in a racist country, and powerfully manipulated it to his every advantage while anticipating the ways that racism might hold him back or give him issues a White Man would not. Warren had no plan to deal with sexism or take advantage of her gender even in a society that resolutely tries to prevent women from doing so. Hillary Clinton in 2016 is unfairly maligned, but her campaign, particularly for the primary, was well-run. She weaponized listening, she ran on a simple theme of stability and competence, moving forward on the legacy the incumbent Democratic president had built. She was hit with a lot of sexism by the Press and by the political system, but she was prominent enough and ubiquitous enough that she could not be erased, especially with her establishment backing. Warren’s campaign was often invisible, and they have no one to blame but themselves. It’s hard for a progressive to get glowing media coverage the way a corporate hack like Pete or a cantankerous ex VP does, and its even harder for a woman. You can’t make the playing field or pick your opposing team’s starting line-up, but you can make a strategy for the things that are going to hold you back.
To continue with the sports metaphor, say you are a football team. The deep pass is the explosive, exciting play that electrifies fans and can immediately get you a lot of yards or even a touchdown if it succeeds. The problem is it’s also risky, for interceptions and sacks or dropped passes. Warren’s campaign knew coming in they were going up in a field that was, unlike real football, steeply uphill. They knew their receivers would be slower, that it would take more time to pass. They knew the opposing team was going to sack the quarterback and was good at it, and that their cornerbacks were good too. They knew, and they stubbornly decided their game plan was going to be just be to repeatedly throw deep passes. The idea of strategizing, focusing on a no-frills run game mixed with complex short-passes and options, with the occasional deep pass thrown in, never occurred to them.
The result was that Warren had a lot of plans, but no brand, no buzzwords, and her purely wonky persona played right into sexism that she knew was going to face going in. She made it easy for the patriarchy to erase her. She made herself inaccessible and alienating to low information voters and working class voters too, by turning her brand into the sheer amount of policy and systematic criticisms she was presenting.
Branding, and talking to working class voters and people of color
Warren and her campaign made many key mistakes.
First, her campaign was vastly too optimistic on their fundraising potential, and they hired way too many organizers and volunteers too early, based on those rosy fundraising figures. This meant, going into Iowa and New Hampshire, her campaign had nowhere near the budget they planned for, for media advertising. It meant she had a huge volunteer and organizing team in both states, one that was truly admired by all the other campaigns, but she was getting buried in advertising.
Joe Rospar, among others Warren tapped to run her campaign, decided to focus solely on the competence angle. Warren’s intensity and passion were instead tamped down, they wanted Bailey (her dog) and quirky grandmother, not hard-hitting activist. This made it substantially harder for Warren to gain widespread support from the party’s left wing, and arguably did little to help her with working class voters. In line with Haque’s critique, the Warren campaign didn’t do focus group testing, didn’t employ a pollster (um, what?!?) and did all their ads themselves, which is unheard of for a campaign (and her campaign ads were, um, lacking to say the least).
But the biggest mistake is twofold. One, Warren’s campaign falsely believed in the old momentum model of politics. The 2016 primary already showed that momentum was almost meaningless in the primary and all that mattered were demographics, and Biden has shown the same thing in 2020. Practically speaking, this meant Warren’s campaign focused the vast majority of their resources, both time and money, on Iowa and New Hampshire. If they could just do well in those two states, the thinking went, they’d have money and momentum to surge for Nevada, then Super Tuesday. What it actually meant was that Warren and her campaign were inordinately obsessed with reaching mostly white voters in two of the whitest states of America, many of them rural white voters.
Two, her message was terrible coordinated for working class voters more generally, and Black voters more specifically. I won’t and can’t write about what Black voters are looking for. I can and will write about my experience as a White man, talking to Black people, and the mistakes and advice I have gotten over the years.
There’s no two ways about it, Warren’s “I have a plan for that” (the closest thing she had to a slogan and a brand) comes off as smarmy and condescending to many people. Had she done focus groups her campaign might have realized that. But one thing in particular I have experienced growing up in the South and also doing a Masters degree at Ole Miss and learning about the fraught relationship between the Humanities academia and many marginalized groups, and that is that I have been cautioned or told off many times for “lecturing” even where I haven’t been intending or indeed even thought of myself as lecturing.
Black people have had a long history of being told by White people what’s best of them or what they should do. I had the experience of engaging in what was perceived as an insulting micro-aggression once on Facebook, when I outlined a tax plan and gave details of how much the ACA helped lower income voters, using what I thought was neutral academic language and various references to information. What I learned, over time, is that listening, not talking, and giving space for people from that community to talk, is the best way for a White person to talk politics and be involved with politics, with Black community. You listen, then you work your ideas into the other person’s concerns and perspective. Similarly, door-knocking and phone-banking is pretty ineffective for reaching PoC but social events and public places are. But Warren’s campaign never had any sense of strategy, and neither did it seem like it had the time for Warren to devote to Black communities and Black spaces, the way it did for her endless Iowa and New Hampshire events and massive staffs there.
Black working class voters and White working class voters are very similar in this regard too: they are worried about big systematic changes (because who do you think really suffers the most in revolutions, revolts, and massive systematic changes?) and they are looking for a candidate who connects with them, not a candidate who talks at them. For too many White working class voters this means racism and petulant anger, as such Trump’s success comes partially just from being a human microphone for all their darkest, basest irritations and resentments being validated and praised. In the Democratic primary, it’s why Biden, who has almost no campaign platform or policy to speak of, is doing so well creating a trans-racial working class coalition. You can have competence, push your competence and having a ton of detailed policy plans is a huge plus for a candidate, but they aren’t a campaign. As Obama said, you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Warren was trying to campaign in prose. There were similar issues that led to many of her surrogates and campaign officials in Nevada, mostly younger Hispanic women, leaving the campaign in protest, as the older White men and women in charge also weren’t listening to their concerns. It’s why the brand is important, it’s why avoiding sweeping speeches about vast global and systematic issues and focusing on everyday people, stories from campaign volunteers and your own life, and very simple denunciations of the system are important. You have to create a campaign where people feel comfortable, people who aren’t highly educated white professionals, can feel comfortable, feel engaged, and feel like they are a part of, like they can buy into culturally and morally without having to first go through and buy into a 100 different policy plans.
Other notes on Warren’s faults
Briefly, Elizabeth Warren is not a good politician. That’s always been my estimation of her. She’s not a bad politician, but she isn’t a good one. She is a wonderful stump speaker, her long-selfie sessions were a brilliant retail politician touch. She does very well in retail politics situations and small groups and everyday spaces. Much better than Hillary Clinton. She’s less out of touch, more approachable, and more comfortable in those spaces. She has something of Obama’s touch (though no one matches Obama there, at least no one running this year), in doing retail politics, even if she did it with a bad strategy. But she’s not a political thinker, she’s not a campaign organizer either; she’s an issues advocate and issues campaigner, and those are different beasts from being a candidate. Whereas Obama revolutionized the way we run campaigns, bringing in younger, cutting edge theorists and a new generation of campaign managers who had a clear vision of the details of the campaign, and just how to out-hustle their opponents, Warren picked a slapdash group of visionless politicos, and her campaigns only innovations were stupid ones that deprived it of good data and direction. It feels like Warren didn’t have a clear understanding or vision for how her campaign was supposed to work, and for what kinds of talent she needed to cultivate for it, (like Obama and Plouffe), and the results speak for themselves.
Perhaps the most unforgiveable flaw though, is that Warren royally bungled most of the debates. She was either electrifying and unstoppable, or she was invisible or being clobbered and unable to handle the attacks. The October 15 single-handedly stalled her fundraising and momentum, the fact she decided to be a non-presence at the NH debate helped propel Klobuchar and denied Warren the chance at an impressive showing there. She was also sort of “just there” for the South Carolina debate. Her debate performances throughout this campaign were very hit or miss.
Healthcare
The real turning point for Warren was the debacle that was her healthcare plan. As a candidate whose slogan was “I have a plan for that” Warren did not have a plan for the most important issue for the left wing of the party, healthcare. She squirmed and danced around the issue. Slate magazine put it very well:
But above all, Warren seemed to get bogged down in the politics of health care. Instead of creating her own proposal from scratch, Warren attempted to win over the left wing of the party by wholeheartedly embracing Bernie Sanders’“Medicare for All” plan. But while Sanders freely admitted during debates that he would raise middle-class taxes in order to pay for his legislation, Warren awkwardly danced around the question of how to finance it. As a result, the issue dogged her. There was that cringey Stephen Colbert interview and a wince-inducing debate performance in which she would only say that overall costs for families would go down. Eventually, Warren released a detailed plan for how to pay for single payer without any middle-class tax hikes, but few experts or pundits found it particularly realistic. By mid-November, she backpedaled entirely and released a new plan, dropping single payer in favor of an ambitious public-option bill that she claimed would help “transition” the country to Medicare for All. Amid all the waffling, her poll numbers sank and sank.
This was understandable, Warren was trying to consolidate support from the Left at the time, while not alienating many of the educated suburban voters she also needed to win the nomination, and many of whom were skeptical of MFA but favorably inclined to her candidacy. But in life, and in politics most of all, you can’t have your cake and eat too, unless you are Donald Trump, in which case you can have your cake and eat it too, only the cake never existed in the first place, and actually you’re just jacking off on the toilet saying you’re eating cake, while tens of millions of people applaud you and assault anyone who says you are not eating cake but are in fact masturbating. You’re welcome for that image, by the way.
Warren lacked the confidence to simply release her own plan and defend it to both the Left and to suburbanites. As such she pleased no one, and her poll numbers steadily sank from there.
The Left and the Electorate
I mean it is very hard for me not to blame the Left here a bit. We had a chance for an unabashed leftist, pro-regulations, anti-banks, out and about leftist to be President, a wide swath of the Left wing sank it into propping up and fanning the Bernie candidacy. I know people working on Bernie’s campaign who even described the AOC endorsement moment in summer of 2019 (right after Bernie had had a heart attack and was also sinking in the polls as Warren soared), a “campaign saving moment.” Ocasio-Cortez and the left flocked to the anti-establishment socialist, with a limited base of appeal, rather than compromising just a little, just a tiny bit, and working to a get a leftist who wasn’t a self-identified socialist but was in the party’s far left wing and still had establishment friends and a wider potential electoral appeal. The Left in America always overplays their hand and always thinks they have more masses of support (particularly in the working class) than they do. I’m getting into that in my next piece on this election, but let it suffice to say, Warren’s loss is in big part because the Left refused to coalesce around her early on. The lack of Leftist support is why she kept having to engage Bernie in a pissing match for the maybe 36-38% of the Democratic primary vote that is stridently and solemnly committed to progressive politics. Again and again the Left in America proves they would rather lose being 100% right and getting nothing changed, than win and maybe not be 100% right but make substantial progress in the direction they want.
The Warren MFA fiasco? Warren trying to compete with Bernie while not eliminating her chances of winning the primary. Bernie could safely ignore Warren and it his campaign was so secure in the Left wing they didn’t have to defend it, he was the incumbent there. Warren couldn’t. She was constantly trying to take that Left Wing while not completely alienating other swaths of the electorate, and it 100% did hamstring her campaign in Fall of 2019 and through this winter to early primary results that were a miserable failure in every respect of the word. Warren was as left-wing as you can be and have a path to victory in the Democratic primary (since the Democratic party is not a left-wing party, but a wide umbrella of people from different classes, ethnicities, and political backgrounds united against reactionary conservatism and neo-fascism, not on the basis of everyone having the same policy platform), even with the Left lane, Warren would have struggled, and given her failures as a candidate, the Left would likely have still lost. But I resolutely argue Warren could have grown a broader coalition than Bernie did, had she gotten the Left lane in summer of 2019 and been able to focus on winning the broader electorate and maintaining frontrunner status.
The last reason, is that Warren failed to read a core part of the electorate’s mood. The most important issue to the vast majority of Democrats isn’t even a policy issue. It’s beating Donald Trump. People are literally “College debt relief and Medicare for All? That’s awesome, but hey, let’s make sure we beat Trump and get children out of cages and keep the reactionary far-right from controlling the judiciary for 30 years.” Warren, much like Bernie, spent almost no time talking about how she was going to beat Trump. On the other hand, Biden’s campaign is (in Stephen Colbert fashion) “Vote for me, I’m Joe Biden. I’m gonna beat Donald Trump like a drum, and don’t you believe any of that other malarkey about me. Woo! Let’s bring dignity back to the U.S. Senate.” Biden doesn’t seem very sharp any more, but he does seem to understand the mood of rank and file, low-information voters in a way Bernie and Warren seemed oblivious to. Warren didn’t really talk about electability, didn’t aggressively defend her ability to win the election and do the roh-rah Let’s Win! I think that was the time to go “blood and teeth on the floor” and show yourself as a fighter who is focused on taking the fight to Trump and beating him. It’s why Warren’s single best campaign moment was her too late murder of Bloomberg on live television in Nevada. My friends who were dreading Bloomberg amassing the centrist vote and pushing Biden out to go head to head with Bernie and beating him? They thank Warren, because if what Chris Christie did to Marco Rubio was the Red Wedding, she was Ramsey Bolton—she tortured that man on national television and she enjoyed it, and exposed Bloomberg as an incompetent empty suit, sinking his campaign for Super Tuesday. That’s what she should have been the entire campaign, but directed towards Trump.
Now? I guess Joe Biden is the nominee, unless something explosive changes in the race and Bernie is able to win in Georgia and Florida (where he is currently waaaay down in the polls in) and the sweep the rest of the states. Warren was the candidate who slowly won me over, and it’s a shame she is gone because is the one candidate in the field that I actually thought had the knowledge and savvy to actually execute an agenda. However, the fault for that, lies with Elizabeth Warren and the campaign she ran.