Elizabeth Warren’s campaign brass realized they had bungled her budget at the worst possible time.
Several weeks before the Iowa and New Hampshire elections, they discovered their fundraising projections for the fourth quarter of 2019 were far too rosy. The army of organizers they hired when fundraising and polling were at their peak — it ultimately ballooned to over 1,000 people — had become a straitjacket. Donations nosedived after an Oct. 15 debate, when Warren was bombarded by her rivals.
Strapped for cash, the campaign didn’t have enough money to run the TV and digital ads they had originally planned for early contests as they tried to stay afloat in Iowa. Even then, they were forced to obtain a $3 million line of credit at the end of January.
The crunch was exacerbated by the disaster of the Iowa caucuses, which dominated headlines and deprived Warren and the other top three campaigns of bragging rights and a potential fundraising boost.
That was just one of several mistakes campaign officials are grappling with now as they contemplate how Warren’s once-surging campaign ended without placing above third in any of the first 18 contests. The campaign’s collapse has led to finger-pointing and self-doubt among Warren staffers and outside allies, who believe that even with the headwinds of sexism and electability she faced, the nomination was within reach.
“They chose ... Bailey over ‘blood and teeth,’” said one staffer, referring to Warren’s golden retriever that the campaign made into an omnipresent prop to soften her image. “Unforgivable.”
“Blood and teeth” refers to a famous Warren quote from the legislative fight over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which transformed Warren from a respected Harvard academic into a national progressive star. “My first choice is a strong consumer agency,” Warren said then. “My second choice is no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.”
This account is based on interviews with more than two dozen people with intimate knowledge of Warren’s operation. They include some of her most senior aides, as well as junior staffers who implemented strategy and outside allies who worked closely with the campaign.
Famously disciplined about not discussing internal campaign dynamics or strategy with reporters, they let loose after Warren’s withdrawal and described a series of botched strategic decisions and if-I-could-do-it-over-agains.
Besides the misallocation of resources, many felt they had turned a candidate known for her tough-minded, blunt-spoken approach to politics into a more conventional politician. The portrayal of Warren primarily as a candidate of competence — “Warren has a plan for that” became a signature rallying cry — was not true to the candidate’s strongest selling points.
Many also regret Warren playing too nice with her rivals until the very end, when it was too late.
Joe Rospars, Warren’s chief strategist, said he and the campaign were trying to showcase the full Warren, not dull her edges.
“People watching closely got as complete a view of Elizabeth Warren as anyone who’s ever run for president, and she is more beloved because of it,” he said in a statement. “She is a tireless fighter with an uncommon humility and humanity, and it’s precisely that rare combination that would have made her a uniquely great president.”
Nearly all the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to share their insights candidly, cited the double standard Warren faced on the campaign trail. When she went on the offensive, the backlash was usually more severe than it was for her male rivals, they said. And her bar for overcoming gaffes and misstatements, they believe, was much higher.
Some have gloomily asserted that no woman could have solved the electability riddle in 2020, with a Democratic electorate obsessed with defeating Donald Trump and traumatized by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss.
But most of the advisers and allies said that sexism doesn’t capture the entire story; some argued it’s a distraction to paper over missteps. Warren was the Democratic frontrunner for weeks in the fall, they noted, and victory slipped through their grasp.
Several people pointed to Rospars’ overarching effort to make Warren less objectionable to voters. They argued there was excessive concern within the campaign that her hard-charging reputation would be too polarizing to the center of the party, and that only so many Bernie Sanders voters could be persuaded to switch to her.
‘We couldn’t talk to nonwhite folks’
Many advisers acknowledged they were too wary of how female anger is perceived differently from male anger, and said Warren should have drawn contrasts with her rivals sooner and more often.
Four veterans of Warren’s first run for Senate in 2012 said the 2020 campaign was sometimes unrecognizable.
“People really knew her as a fighter for the middle class. And people would shout at us [at campaign events], ‘The middle class is getting hammered!’ So we knew they knew who she was,” said Abby Clark, the deputy field director on the 2012 race who also volunteered for Warren in New Hampshire and Massachusetts this year. “The language was accessible and people got it. The meaning of ‘big structural change’ is mystifying to the average person. It’s what you get when you don’t hire a pollster or do focus groups.”
Warren’s campaign, intent on running a unique operation that disrupted the typical campaign model, declined to employ a pollster and decided to produce ads in-house rather than through outside consultants (although Rospars himself was paid through his firm Blue State Digital, technically making him a consultant).
The campaign’s focus on Iowa and New Hampshire, whose electorates are predominantly white, also meant that the campaign was not as robust in states with more diverse populations. Despite her very deliberate incorporation of race and the effects of racism into her policy proposals and speeches, Warren never earned significant support among minority voters, a fatal shortcoming that also did in several of her rivals.
“It just seemed we couldn’t talk to nonwhite folks,” one Warren staffer said.
Even after POLITICO reported the departure of several women of color from the Nevada team in the final stretch of the caucus, inside the campaign many advisers in the state complained the media sensationalized the story, rather than trying to address the culture that led to the women’s departures, according to two staffers on the ground in Nevada.
The ‘Medicare for All’ morass
With her torrent of detailed policies, Warren established herself as the “plans” candidate by the spring. But there was one curious and glaring exception: health care.
Before the first Democratic debate in June, senior leaders on the campaign debated whether to come up with their own plan or to stick with her “I’m with Bernie on Medicare for All” position.
They now concede they made the wrong call.
Nearly every staffer interviewed for this story said the campaign should have put out a health care plan months earlier than Warren did, given that primary voters consistently cite the issue as their biggest concern.
At the very latest, she should have released a plan before the October debate, they said, when Warren was hammered for not having one. And instead of issuing the plan in two phases weeks apart, they said she should have done it all at once.
When Warren did finally come out with her health care plan, her attempt to thread the needle struck some as trying to have it both ways. Yes, she was for Medicare for All. But first, she said Congress should pass a public option, and then follow up by implementing full single-payer health care by the end of her first term.
Aides said it was a byproduct of the larger — ultimately losing — strategy of Warren pitching herself as a bridge candidate.
'Bernie but better'
Warren herself appeared to regret not picking a lane — or at least not being able to create her own lane between the two that existed.
“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 and there is no room for anyone else in this,” she told reporters outside her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home Thursday after ending her campaign. “I thought it was possible that that wasn’t the case, that there was more room, and more room to run another kind of campaign. But evidently that wasn’t the case.”
Rather than directly challenging Sanders for the progressive mantle — a “Bernie but better” approach, as one ally called it — Warren tried to assuage both sides. In doing so, many supporters felt she became too ordinary: an establishment-seeming politician with a radical agenda.
The senator who became a hero of the left for her willingness to take on even members of her own party — including Barack Obama — adopted a “I’m not here to attack other Democrats” mantra for almost the entire campaign. It was only at the final two debates that Warren stopped holding back, with precision strikes on billionaire Mike Bloomberg that mortally wounded his campaign.
“The first time they really let her be her complete self was in the first debate with Bloomberg,” said one close ally of the campaign. “If she had been that Warren — fierce, direct, naming names — then yes, there would have been other issues including sexism to navigate. But it also would have been more true to her. Fundraising and overall enthusiasm would’ve benefited. That’s the Warren people love.”
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