{"id":2455397,"date":"2020-03-05T09:02:30","date_gmt":"2020-03-05T16:02:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=322100"},"modified":"2020-03-05T09:02:30","modified_gmt":"2020-03-05T16:02:30","slug":"elizabeth-warren-ends-2020-presidential-bid-after-poor-super-tuesday-performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/elizabeth-warren-ends-2020-presidential-bid-after-poor-super-tuesday-performance\/","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Warren ends 2020 presidential bid after poor Super Tuesday performance"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., speaks during a primary election night rally, Tuesday, March 3, 2020, at Eastern Market in Detroit.<\/strong>
AP Photo\/Patrick Semansky<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 Elizabeth Warren, who electrified progressives with her \u201cplan for everything\u201d and strong message of economic populism, dropped out of the Democratic presidential race on Thursday, according to a person familiar with her plans. The exit came days after the onetime front-runner couldn\u2019t win a single Super Tuesday state, not even her own.<\/p>\n

The person wasn\u2019t authorized to speak about Warren\u2019s intentions and talked to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n

Warren\u2019s exit extinguished hopes that Democrats would get another try at putting a woman up against President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

For much of the past year, the Massachusetts senator\u2019s campaign had all the markers of success, robust poll numbers, impressive fundraising and a sprawling political infrastructure that featured staffers on the ground across the country. She was squeezed out, though, by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had an immovable base of voters she needed to advance.<\/p>\n

Warren never finished higher than third in the first four states and was routed on Super Tuesday, failing to win any of the 14 states voting and placing an embarrassing third in Massachusetts, behind former Vice President Joe Biden and Sanders.<\/p>\n

Her exit from the race following Sen. Amy Klobuchar\u2019s departure leaves the Democratic field with just one female candidate: Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who has collected only one delegate toward the nomination. It was an unexpected twist for a party that had used the votes and energy of women to retake control of the House, primarily with female candidates, just two years ago.<\/p>\n

Warren\u2019s campaign began with enormous promise that she could carry that momentum into the presidential race. Last summer, she drew tens of thousands of supporters to Manhattan\u2019s Washington Square Park, a scene that was repeated in places like Washington state and Minnesota.<\/p>\n

She had a compelling message, calling for \u201cstructural change\u201d to the American political system to reorder the nation\u2019s economy in the name of fairness. She had a signature populist proposal for a 2% wealth tax she wanted to impose on households worth more than $50 million that prompted chants of \u201cTwo cents! Two cents!\u201d at rallies across the country.<\/p>\n

Warren, 70, began her White House bid polling near the back of an impossibly crowded field, used wonky policy prowess to rocket to front-runner status by the fall, then saw her support evaporate almost as quickly.<\/p>\n

Her candidacy appeared seriously damaged almost before it started after she released a DNA test in response to goading by Trump to prove she had Native American ancestry. Instead of quieting critics who had questioned her claims, however, the test offended many tribal leaders who rejected undergoing the genetic test as culturally insensitive, and it didn\u2019t stop Trump and other Republicans from gleefully deriding her as \u201cPocahontas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Warren also lost her finance director over her refusal to attend large fundraisers, long considered the financial life blood of national campaigns. Still, she distinguished herself by releasing dozens of detailed proposals on all sorts of policies from cancelling college debt to protecting oceans to containing the coronavirus. Warren also was able to build an impressive campaign war chest relying on mostly small donations that poured in from across the country \u2014 erasing the deficit created by refusing to court big, traditional donors.<\/p>\n

As her polling began improving through the summer. Warren appeared to further hit her stride as she hammered the idea that more moderate Democratic candidates, including Biden, weren\u2019t ambitious enough to roll back Trump\u2019s policies and were too reliant on political consultants and fickle polling. And she drew strength in the #MeToo era, especially after a wave of female candidates helped Democrats take control of the U.S. House in 2018.<\/p>\n

But Warren couldn\u2019t consolidate the support of the Democratic Party\u2019s most liberal wing against the race\u2019s other top progressive, Sanders. Both supported universal, government-sponsored health care under a \u201cMedicare for All\u201d program, tuition-free public college and aggressive climate change fighting measures as part of the \u201cGreen New Deal\u201d while forgoing big fundraisers in favor of small donations fueled by the internet.<\/p>\n

Warren\u2019s poll numbers began to slip after a series of debates when she repeatedly refused to answer direct questions about if she\u2019d have to raise taxes on the middle class to pay for Medicare for All. Her top advisers were slow to catch on that not providing more details looked to voters like a major oversight for a candidate who proudly had so many other policy plans.<\/p>\n

When Warren finally moved to correct the problem, her support eroded further. She moved away from a full endorsement of Medicare for All, announcing that she\u2019d work with Congress to transition the country to the program over three years. In the meantime, she said, many Americans could \u201cchoose\u201d to remain with their current, private health insurance plans, which most people have through their employers. Biden and other rivals pounced, calling Warren a flip-flopper, and her standing with progressives sagged.<\/p>\n

Sanders, meanwhile, wasted little time capitalizing on the contrast by boasting that he would ship a full Medicare for All program for congressional approval during his first week in the White House. After long avoiding direct conflict, Warren and Sanders clashed in January after she said Sanders had suggested during a private meeting in 2018 that a woman couldn\u2019t win the White House. Sanders denied that, and Warren refused to shake his outstretched hand after a debate in Iowa.<\/p>\n

Leaning hard into the gender issue only saw Warren\u2019s support sink further heading into Iowa\u2019s leadoff caucus, however. But even as her momentum was slipping away, Warren still boasted impressive campaign infrastructure in that state and well beyond. Her army of volunteers and staffers looked so formidable that even other presidential candidates were envious.<\/p>\n

Just before Iowa, her campaign released a memo detailing its 1,000-plus staffers nationwide and pledging a long-haul strategy that would lead to victories in the primary and the general election. Bracing for a poor finish in New Hampshire, her campaign issued another memo again urging supporters to stay focus on the long game \u2014 but also expressly spelling out the weaknesses of Sanders, Biden and Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in ways the senator herself rarely did.<\/p>\n

Warren got a foil for all of her opposition to powerful billionaires when former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg entered the race. During a debate in Las Vegas just before Nevada\u2019s caucus, Warren hammered Bloomberg and the mayor\u2019s lackluster response touched off events that ended with him leaving the race on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

For Warren, That led to a sharp rise in fundraising, but didn\u2019t translate to electoral success. She tried to stress her ability to unite the fractured Democratic party, but that message fell flat.<\/p>\n

By South Carolina, an outside political group began pouring more than $11 million into TV advertising on Warren\u2019s behalf, forcing her to say that, although she rejected super PACs, she\u2019d accept their help as long as other candidates did. Her campaign shifted strategy again, saying it was betting on a contested convention.<\/p>\n

Still the longer Warren stayed in the race, the more questions she faced about why she was doing so with little hope of winning \u2014 and she started to sound like a candidate who was slowly coming to terms with that.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not somebody who has been looking at myself in the mirror since I was 12 years old saying, \u2018You should run for president,\u2019\u201d Warren said aboard her campaign bus on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, previewing a ceasing of campaigning that wasn\u2019t yet official. \u201cI started running for office later than anyone who is in this, so it was never about the office \u2014 it was about what we could do to repair our economy, what we could do to mend a democracy that\u2019s being pulled apart. That\u2019s what I want to see happen, and I just want to see it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

She vowed to fight on saying, \u201cI cannot say, for all those little girls, this got hard and I quit. My job is to persist.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even that seemed impossible after a Super Tuesday drubbing that included her home state.<\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., speaks during a primary election night rally, Tuesday, March 3, 2020, at Eastern Market in Detroit.AP Photo\/Patrick Semansky WASHINGTON \u2014 Elizabeth Warren, who electrified progressives with her \u201cplan for everything\u201d and strong message of economic populism, dropped out of the Democratic presidential race on Thursday, according to a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2455397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-18 12:07:12","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2455397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455397\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2455397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2455397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2455397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}