Hillary Clinton WAS the last Democratic Presidential nominee…
She WAS able to beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes from Americans…
Warren had her own issues as a factor in her loss…..
Banjy Sarlin: “To many Warren supporters, there was a sexist double standard at play in the campaign and the press, one that demanded more and more details from her and only broad talk of revolution from Sanders.”
“But there were other factors that made her more vulnerable to attacks too. Her voters skewed college-educated and suburban and were less likely to be uninsured and more likely to be nervous about electability concerns. The issue also distracted from the simple winning pitch she rode early in the race: A wealth tax on billionaires to fund education and child care benefits for the upper middle class and lower incomes. Instead, she found herself explaining a health plan whose benefits and tradeoffs were more complicated.”
Christine Rosen: “Elizabeth Warren didn’t have a gender problem; she had a trust and authenticity problem. Her multiple fabulations about her personal history, including a false claim that she was fired because she was pregnant and the infamous and repeated efforts to pass herself off as Native American, undermine her narrative of being a truth-telling, incorruptible champion of the people. As well, she opportunistically embraced intersectionality politics (such as her claim that a trans person would vet whomever she might choose as her Secretary of Education and her attempts to paint Bernie Sanders as a raging sexist) in a way that was likely off-putting for more moderate Democratic voters.”
“It feels a little bit like a death knell in terms of having the prospect of women in our elections,” MSNBC’s Rachael Maddow said Thursday in an interview with Warren.
Warren was also someone a lot of Democratic primary voters liked, but just not enough: A February Washington Post-ABC News poll found 20 percent of voters named her as their second choice, the most of any other candidate, consistently.
That means that even though the votes weren’t there for her, there are more Democratic voters who might be genuinely bummed that she’s out. They would have liked for her to succeed, but for whatever reason put their support with someone else.
Warren also hasn’t shied away from talking about yet-to-be-resolved issues still swirling in this primary. Like:
- On whether the Democratic Party is too siloed: “You know, I was told at the beginning of this whole undertaking that there are two lanes, a progressive lane that Bernie Sanders is the incumbent for, and a moderate lane that Joe Biden is the incumbent for,” she said as she announced her departure. “And there’s no room for anyone else in this. I thought that wasn’t right. But evidently, I was wrong.”
- On Sanders’s supporters, known for being more aggressive and hostile, especially online: “I think that’s a real problem with this online bullying and sort of organized nastiness,” she told Maddow on Thursday. ”… I’m talking about some really ugly stuff that went on.” She even compared Sanders with President Trump indirectly, saying Democrats can’t “follow that same kind of politics of division that Donald Trump follows.”
- On money in politics, exemplified by former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, whom she basically single-handedly took down in a Nevada debate: “In my view he was absolutely the riskiest candidate for Democrats on the stage,” she told Maddow.
- And still more on gender and the dilemma of talking about it openly: “Gender in this race, you know, that is the trap question for every woman,” she told reporters Thursday. “If you say, ‘Yeah, there was sexism in this race,’ everyone says, ‘Whiner!’ And if you say, ‘No, there was no sexism,’ about a bazillion women think, ‘What planet do you live on?’ I promise you this: I’ll have a lot more to say on that subject later on.”
Warren has built her career on being the unapologetic, persistent, squeaky wheel when she sees a problem that needs fixing….
image…wsj.com