A Surging Elizabeth Warren Becomes a Target in the 2020 Race
A Surging Elizabeth Warren Becomes a Target in the 2020 Race
(Bloomberg) -- Elizabeth Warren has been on a steady upward trajectory for six months, raising big money from small donors, drawing huge crowds, and rising from also-ran to top-tier. And a new Iowa poll has her in first place.
But now she’s a target.
Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, has risen to the point where voters and reporters are both scrutinizing her record. She’s also becoming the focus of attacks from rivals concerned about her momentum.
Unaffiliated Democrats say Warren’s campaign has consistently impressed them.
“She’s just doing a lot of the right things,” said J.D. Scholten, a Democratic congressional candidate from Iowa’s Fourth District.
“She’s run an almost perfect campaign,” said Kathy Sullivan, a former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair.
“There’s an energy at her events that’s very appealing,” said Judy Reardon, a veteran Democratic strategist in New Hampshire.
Warren’s rise has been due to her discipline. She sticks to her stump speech, avoids being dragged into frivolous debates and maintains a cheerful can-do persona even while indicting the American political system. Until recently, however, she has mostly avoided hard questions, especially about her Medicare for All plan.
Her rivals hope to change that.
In a Sept. 19 CNN interview, Pete Buttigieg attacked Warren for being “extremely evasive” in explaining how she’d pay for her health-care plan. Even late-night comedian Stephen Colbert pressed her on whether middle-class taxes would rise to finance that proposal.
Other campaigns have urged reporters to scrutinize Warren’s work as a consultant to large corporations such as Dow Corning, in hopes of tarnishing her reformer image. Some Wall Street analysts have begun warning that Warren’s rise represents a serious market risk.
While she is personally popular with Democrats, many voters harbor doubts about some of her positions. A Sept. 22 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found 62% oppose providing government health insurance to undocumented immigrants and 56% oppose switching to a single-payer health care system that eliminates private insurance.
Beyond DNA Tests
That’s a sharp change from a year ago, when Warren drew widespread criticism for releasing the results of a DNA test intended to prove her American Indian ancestry and plummeted in the polls.
“It looks she’s finished,” President Donald Trump told Fox News in March. And on April 15, a Los Angeles Times/USC poll showed her at 4% support.
But she wasn’t. Since then, Warren and her campaign have engineered a series of successes.
On April 19, citing the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Warren became the first major Democratic candidate to call on the House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings against Trump — a move that brought her a fundraising bonanza and presaged a shift in Democratic sentiment toward supporting impeachment.
A week later, Warren was the consensus standout at the She the People forum in Houston, a presidential gathering attended by women of color, impressing attendees with detailed plans to address issues such as maternal mortality.
Throughout the summer, Warren kept up a hectic campaign schedule.
“She’s been here a lot,” Sullivan says of Warren, who returns to New Hampshire again this week. “And when she’s here, I’ve never seen her have a bad speech or be flat — she’s always good, she’s always on message.”
By contrast, many of her Democratic rivals have had bad days amid the good. Front-runner Joe Biden has committed a string of gaffes and seen his record on race and criminal justice issues attacked by challengers, and now Trump. Beto O’Rourke had an Icarus-like fall. Kamala Harris reset her campaign strategy last week to overcome her self-described “summer slump.”
Poll Numbers Climb
As Democrats flocked to the Polk County Democratic Party Steak Fry on Saturday, a new Des Moines Register/CNN poll of Iowa voters found that Warren has risen to a two-point lead over Biden, with room to grow her support. More respondents, 71%, said they were considering supporting her than any other candidate in the field. Biden was second with 60% considering him.
But Warren could have trouble extending her good-times stretch, which one veteran strategist likened to a hitting streak in baseball. “It gets harder when you’re a front-runner because there’s a target on your back,” Sullivan said. “Other candidates who feel they’re in need of a boost may come after you.”
In a recent call with reporters, a Harris aide made an obvious allusion to Warren when criticizing “strict ideological candidates who, I believe, will contribute to the partisan rancor that we’ve seen in Washington.”
Biden’s allies are pushing the notion that Warren, despite her momentum, is unelectable. Former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell said her health care plan “dooms her in a general election. It is death, in the fall, to be for eliminating private insurance.”
Although Warren has improved her standing with many demographic groups, she still draws only meager support from African Americas, a critical voting segment that heavily favors Biden.
“Warren’s biggest challenge moving forward is convincing Democrats that she’s electable,” say David Wasserman, of the Cook Political Report. “To a lot of Democrats, she represents a risk.”
With an eye on changing that and extending her momentum, Warren’s campaign announced Tuesday that it would soon launch an eight-figure digital and television ad buy in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. It also plans to hire more organizers in the states whose contests follow.
Early state Democrats like Scholten say Warren’s recent run of success will only matter if she can carry it through to the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3. “Traditionally, the Steak Fry is the turn of the corner,” he said. “Everything speeds up from here.”
That’s true in New Hampshire, as well, which will hold the first Democratic primary a week later, on Feb. 11th. And it’s no mystery what voters will be looking for when they go to cast their ballot.
“Most people’s top concern is beating Donald Trump, period,” Reardon said. “The biggest risk to Elizabeth is anything that happens between now then that brings her electability into more question than it already is.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Joshua Green in Washington at jgreen120@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Gregory Mott
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.