Elizabeth Warren’s Year of Plans Faces Judgment Day in Iowa
The caucuses will give her first opportunity to learn whether her plan-driven strategy can draw in undecided and moderate voters.
(Bloomberg) -- Senator Elizabeth Warren prides herself on having a plan for everything, yet that isn’t translating to a strong showing in the polls a week before the nation’s first nominating contest.
Throughout the primary campaign, she embraced her wonky image and tried to set herself apart from her Democratic rivals by rolling out dozens of policy plans focusing on voters’ biggest concerns. She offered road maps for restructuring the entire American economy, from health care to education to the tax system.
Yet Warren heads into the Iowa caucuses trailing both Senator Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, locked in a close battle for third with Pete Buttigieg.
The Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses will give her the first opportunity to learn whether her plan-driven strategy can draw in undecided and moderate voters, whose support any candidate must have to win the White House.
“For most voters, it’s not going to come down to ‘I like her plan,’” said Kathleen Dolan, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and co-editor in chief of the American Journal of Political Science. “The vast majority of voters don’t vote on plans. In a primary process, they often vote from affective feelings: Do they like somebody, or do they dislike somebody.”
For Warren, the detail-heavy proposals that made supporters see a super-prepared visionary, made her seem entrenched and unrealistic to others, including many moderate Democrats.
Also, in politics as elsewhere, the devil is often in the details, and Warren’s specificity gave ammunition to critics from both the left and right.
“I appreciate Elizabeth’s work,” Senator Amy Klobuchar said at the October Democratic presidential debate. “But, again, the difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something that you can actually get done.”
In November, after weeks of pressure from her rivals, voters and reporters, Warren issued details of how she would keep her promise to pay for her Medicare For All plan without raising taxes for the middle-class.
Buttigieg had castigated Warren because she hadn’t released details of her plan. When she did, Biden said in a PBS interview that “She’s making it up.”
The $20.5 trillion proposal included a wide-ranging menu of financing options, particularly taxes on large corporations and the wealthy.
“We need plans, not slogans,” Warren wrote, firing back at rivals, and challenging them to come up with a better one.
“Every candidate who opposes my long-term goal of Medicare for All should put forward their own plan to make sure every single person in America can get high-quality health care and won’t go broke -- and fully explain how they intend to pay for it. Or, if they are unwilling to do that, concede that their half-measures will leave millions behind,” she said.
For Warren’s supporters, much of her appeal springs from her ability to communicate even the most complex policies in an accessible way. Questions on issues ranging from gun control to the environment to maternal mortality rates were more often than not received with the same response: “I have a plan for that.”
“Let’s do some questions, that way we get as many as we can, and I hope I get to talk about a bunch of the plans because I really do have a plan for that,” Warren told the crowd at a town hall in Muscatine, Iowa, on Saturday. “I put a lot of plans out there, every one of them -- I try on all these -- to show how we’re going to pay for them and not on a single one do we have to raise taxes on middle class families.”
Amy Rost, a 29-year-old teacher from Johnston, Iowa, who decided to vote for Warren after she attended a town hall in nearby Grimes, said, “It’s important not to just throw ideas out there but to be able to back them up because everyone just wants to say, ‘That’s never going to work’ and Warren is like, ‘Actually, it can, and here’s how.’”
“I think that can swing a lot of voters over toward her because she actually has something to show and say ‘sit down for a second and read this,’” Rost added.
No other candidate dug into health-care policy specifics as much as Warren did, including her progressive rival Sanders, who boasts that he “wrote the damn bill” for Medicare for All. She took the specifics on the campaign trail and spent months pitching it. But when Iowa voters were asked which candidate had the best health-care plan in a Jan. 26 Emerson College poll, Warren came in third, well behind Sanders and Biden.
In another poll, only 18% of likely caucusgoers thought she’d would be best at improving health care, compared to 32% for Sanders. Apparently, while Warren had detailed plans, voters might not have been paying attention to the details.
All told, in the section on her website that reads “WHAT ELIZABETH WILL DO,” are links to the 70 policy proposals the Warren campaign has compiled over a year of her quest for the Democratic nomination.
That is 53 more than the “Joe’s Vision” tab on Biden’s website and 37 more than Sanders’.
Collectively, Warren’s plans would roughly cost an estimated $30 trillion over a decade, which she has proposed paying for through changes to the tax system that would see America’s wealthiest families and largest companies paying more.
Sanders has not been pressed on the specifics of his plans and has provided few details. Asked about the costs in an interview with CBS News last week, he said, “You don’t know. Nobody knows. It’s impossible to predict.”
But for some voters, Warren’s specifics are a flaw, because they make her seem entrenched and inflexible.
“In today’s world, every plan is great but when shots are fired, I think you’ve got to be willing to compromise, rather than go in with a specific plan and not be flexible,” said Scott Hook, 49, a teacher from Ankeny, Iowa, who is deciding between Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and Warren. “It’s not going to do us any good to get into the White House and die on a hill of ideals and not get anything done. But I like that she’s not just about platitudes and her plans are very well thought out.”
To fight her professorial persona -- she was a Harvard law professor after all -- Warren has worked hard to connect with voters on the trail.
She became famous for her “selfie lines” spending hours taking pictures with voters and answering their questions. When speaking with them, she’d talk about her family’s struggles when she was growing up in Oklahoma. She rarely mentioned Harvard.
But when New Hampshire voters were asked which candidate was most likable, Warren, a senator from neighboring Massachusetts, placed seventh with only 4%, behind Sanders, Buttigieg, Biden, Andrew Yang, Klobuchar and Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.
In the run-up to the caucuses, Warren has been largely stuck in Washington to be part of the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, leaving her unable to go back on the trail and try to convince voters that she is the woman who can defeat the incumbent.
In the most recent Iowa poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College, Warren came in fourth behind Sanders, Biden and Buttigieg, a 7 point drop from the same poll in October. That said, 40% of voters said they could be persuaded to back another candidate, an indication of the volatile state of the race even as reckoning time approaches.
And in three major polls out this week, Warren maintained one advantage: She was the second-choice candidate and could get support from people who first throw their weight behind lower-polling candidates. In Iowa’s quirky caucus system, that could be enough to earn a ticket out.
(Disclaimer: Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)
To contact the reporter on this story: Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou in Washington at megkolfopoul@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Magan Crane, John Harney
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