What happened to Elizabeth Warren? She finished fourth in the New Hampshire Primary. She came in third in the Iowa debacle. She’s gone on a precipitous decline for a woman who is trying to portray herself as the left-wing version of Trump. The party’s base is supposedly more left-wing. No, it is—Sanders is now the frontrunner which confirms the party’s lurch to Lenin. So, with Lie-a-Watha pushing Medicare for All, you’d think the progressive Left would at least give her a shot to eclipse Bernie Sanders, right? Nope. She’s falling off a cliff, losing liberal voters.
The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman noted that he believes the NYT/Siena poll showing Warren as the worst candidate to face off against Trump as the turning point for the Warren camp and the start of her decline:
My Warren theory: a significant (and negative) turning point for her was the release of the @UpshotNYT/Siena poll showing her doing worse vs. Trump than Biden/Sanders in six critical states.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) February 10, 2020
Who made up Warren’s base? Empirically-minded @nytimes readers desperate to beat Trump.
This poll result (and accompanying @Nate_Cohn story) may have had a legitimate impact on the race itself. https://t.co/5dQ6oQ6Muq
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) February 10, 2020
Having watched Warren up close today, there’s no one in the field better at using his/her life story to build the case for his/her candidacy. She does it superbly well.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) February 10, 2020
But she’s also shown the least willingness/ability to switch up tactics when things aren’t going well.
Michael Graham of Inside Sources also tracked her decline, where her support had dropped by 50 percent in New Hampshire prior to Election Day. What’s going on? Well, he lists good reasons for why Democratic voters would be hesitant to vote for Warren whose health care plan might be appealing to the rabid Left but know the ‘won’t raise middle-class taxes’ portion is bunk. She lied about her heritage. And she just comes off an inauthentic. He, like Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel, also noted the one thing she said that might have raised eyebrows from the progressive Left—and that was a “transition period” for her health care plan. It looked like and sounds like an escape hatch and while in keeping with the hardcore liberal wing of the Democratic Party—it’s not a revolutionary overhaul of the health care system which is what the far left wants.
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From Strassel’s November 2019 column:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren admitted...that she had made a colossal, potentially fatal, campaign error—and immediately proceeded to make it worse. If the Warren presidential bid flops, this will be the moment to mark.
That admission didn’t come in so many words. It came instead in the form of a major update to Ms. Warren’s Medicare for All plan. The Massachusetts senator now proposes a two-year “transition” period, in which Americans would be able to opt into Medicare. Put another way, Ms. Warren now calls for the same sort of public option as her “moderate” competitors. She says that she will wait until the third year of her presidency to abolish private insurance.
Graham added, a lot of her fall has to do with health care:
..it’s part of a growing list — her claims of Native American heritage, her debunked story about being fired over a pregnancy, her misleading statements about her children attending public school and her backtracking on Medicare For All — that suggests Warren is willing to say whatever it takes to get elected.
“She started off as a candidate with a strong message: ‘I want to fight for you, I’m going to take on corruption.’ She sounded like someone who knew exactly what she wanted to do,” Democratic strategist Joel Payne told InsideSources.
“Now she sounds like a candidate who’s still looking for a message, and that’s not good.”
Some Democrats disagree. “I don’t think the Native American thing or these other stories are hurting her. I think she’s got an explanation for all of them,” said Bob Shrum, director of USC’s Center for the Political Future and a veteran of multiple presidential primaries. “I think it’s one thing: Medicare For All.”
That’s a common explanation for Warren’s weakness. Democrats and pundits point to the release of Warren’s poorly-received $52 trillion healthcare plan as the moment her campaign began to founder. “It’s not true that New Hampshire Democrats don’t like Warren,” one senior Democratic Granite State source told InsideSources. “They just hate her Medicare For All plan.”
Well, the plan does eliminate 150+ million private health care plans. That includes millions of union households and working people. I could see why there was a backpeddle on the revolutionary overhaul, but now she looks like a less charismatic, robotic version of Hillary Clinton.
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