I have a confession to make at the very top. I like Elizabeth Warren, and I very much want her to be president. There was a three-way tie between her and Sanders and Julian Castro for my top choice going into these primaries. And no that Castro has endorsed her, a Warren-Castro ticket is the stuff of my fanfictions. That said I recognize that she has no realistic route to the nomination. Or rather, she had no path to outright nomination in the primaries.
Warren is a candidate who advocates for a strong progressive agenda of economic reform and regulations on Wallstreet. And she had a track record of accomplishing that through her work with the FCC, Bureau of Consumer Protections, and her push to criminally prosecute executives at banks like Wells Fargo for criminal financial corruption. She is gaining major endorsements from the aforementioned Julian Castro to celebrities like Jack Black and John Legend. Her debate performances have consistently made powerful impressions and shown a competent and feisty candidate. Yet her campaign hasn’t gained traction in this voting stage, and she has failed to make a significant showing since the Iowa caucuses. Her polling for Super Tuesday voting makes it seem doubtful she will pick up the majority in any state, including her own. This is baffling to her large, emphatic base of supporters, and seemingly her campaign. She has run on the progressive track, the unity track, and the policy wonk track, and none seem be have been more successful than the last.
I am not here to diagnose why Warren is not doing better. As I state at the beginning, I really wish she were. But with the race in the state it is, what is her angle? There is a clear progressive choice who is currently the front-runner of the race in Bernie Sanders. While he is divisive and many within the party have reservations around him as a candidate, he has been the face of many of the progressive policies Warren supports for years. He is also facing a major challenge from moderate Democrats who are consolidating behind Joe Biden, and a party establishment and corporate donors who seem to be desperate to have anybody else in the general election. This has left many Sanders supporters and general progressive wondering why Elizabeth Warren has not dropped out and endorsed Sanders.
As her supporters have pointed out, she is not running for Vice President to a man, she is running for President. But in order to get there, you need to win actual delegates, which she has failed to do in a meaningful way, and seems unlikely to start now. Warren memorably said in an early democratic debate that “Women win” pointing out that her and Klobuchar were the only candidates on stage who had not lost a major election. That may be true, but it did not change the fact that those candidates were not winning. The media is very much treating this as a two candidate race, and even if that is a false narrative, it is one that is reinforced when voters see that before they go to the polls. Perhaps Warren is waiting for a last minute boost, and if it comes I will be happy to see it and support that narrative wherever I can. But the writing on the wall is there, and it is leaving her name out.
So I ask again, what is her angle? Has she been waiting for Super Tuesday hoping to make a significant enough showing in enough states to be viable? Were Warren to win a significant amount of Super Tuesday states, and ride the momentum of that to take later primaries, she could feasibly win an outright nomination. But no recent polls have her gaining much traction in Super Tuesday states, and even if she outperformed expectations, it is a less than 1% chance she would be able to gain enough delegates for an outright nomination. Is she so afraid that Sanders is too divisive, too disliked as a candidate, that it would be party suicide to nominate him? If so her campaign should be flinging attacks against him for his toxic online following or bad reputation in congress. As both campaigns seem to averse to attacking each other (despite what their twitter following suggest) it seems she is reluctant to bring his campaign down at all, and that there is some solidarity among them in the progressive agenda. It also suggest she is still hoping to win over some Sanders supporters, who right now are unlikely to abandon their front runner candidate.
Perhaps Warren will drop out after Super Tuesday if her results are mediocre enough. In doing so she can suspend her campaign, which allows her to hold onto her delegates, and advise them to vote for Sanders later, and so still support him. But with the way she continues to present herself as a unity candidate, one who can win against Trump (though she is not winning in the primary) and continuing to spend money and pick up steam, I wonder if she is really taking a different angle. Warren may be waiting of a contested convention, possibly even counting on it.
Many of her supporters are already admitting the goal is to get her enough delegates to be a viable option at a contested convention. And with Sanders having a strong lead and high polling, being threatened by Biden’s swelling support, it is not an unlikely scenario that we will go into the Democratic convention without a clear winner. Moderates have made it clear they intend to stop a Sanders nomination at any cost. And it we get to the convention and he has a plurality of delegates, but not a majority, it is likely the party will step in to nominate somebody, anybody else.
Enter Elizabeth Warren. In the case of a contested convention where Sanders is ahead, Biden would almost certainly be in second. He would be the clear choice for the party. But if the DNC handed the moderate Biden the nomination against the will of the majority of the party, it would split the party in two. While many Sanders supporters cried foul in 2016, Hillary Clinton still had the clear majority. In a case where Sanders had it but didn’t get the nomination, there would be outright revolt. Sanders large base of hardcore supporters would almost certainly refuse to support Biden, in a magnitude that dwarfs whatever democrats might not be able to stomach voting for Sanders against the most incompetent, corrupt Republican president in history. While some party officials may be okay with this result, it must be clear they could not win the general election like that.
However if there were a contested convention with Sanders in the lead, and Warren were a viable option, the party may be willing to nominate her as a middle ground. Sure she would not have as many delegates as Biden, but in theory she is a candidate that Sanders voters could get behind, and moderate voters could stomach. Perhaps this is the calculus Warren is making. And she may not even be intended to snatch the nomination from Sanders or Biden from behind, but to save the progressive future of the party from an establishment that will block Sanders no matter what.
I am no political expert and I can’t read tea leaves, but to me that seems to be the best explanation for her continued candidacy, particularly if she stays in the race past Super Tuesday. And if that is the case, here’s why it will not work.
While Warren may seem like the more acceptable progressive than Sanders, mainly because of his championing of Democratic Socialism which supposedly scares so many voters, we have seen that she is not. Her track record of being effectively progressive is just as much a knock against her as it is a merit. It has brought the wrath of corporate donors and rich voters just as it did against Sanders. If the establishment is really looking to appease these special interests, they cannot turn to Warren.
It is also unlikely that a bulk of Sanders voters would accept, at least not very easily. While I don’t think the online “Bernie Bros” are representative of the bulk of his support, they are certainly loud. And an establishment endorsement would only make them cry foul against her as a “snake” and “sleeper Republican” more than they would against a professed moderate. I am on of the progressive voters that would take either candidate with a smile. But Warren has consistently failed to win over any of Sanders massive following, so it is hard to see how they would happily accept her now.
What’s more, is that the very idea of a contested convention would most likely doom Democrats from the outset. In the history of political primaries, there have been four contested conventions. None of them have ever resulted in the nominee who came out of the convention winning. One of them resulted in mass protests and clashes with police in the case of the Democratic convention of 1968, and it would not be hard to see that being repeated if we were to have a convention that blocked Bernie Sanders this year. It is almost impossible to see how a contested convention would result in a nominee that would beat Donald Trump, or even leave the Democratic party intact. I respect Elizabeth Warren as a candidate, and want a progressive agenda to be passed more than anything. This is an exciting election for that very possibility. But I would take Joe Biden winning the nomination outright, over a contested convention that would leave the party in tatters, Trump with a free ride to a second term, and democracy in America being taken off life support.
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