The New York Times first reported that Elizabeth Warren is suspending her campaign and exiting the presidential primary race:
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts plans to drop out of the presidential race on Thursday and will inform her staff of her plans later this morning, according to a person close to her, ending a run defined by an avalanche of policy plans that aimed to pull the Democratic Party to the left and appealed to enough voters to make her briefly a front-runner last fall, but that proved unable to translate excitement from elite progressives into backing from the party’s more working-class and diverse base.
Ms. Warren’s political demise was a death by a thousand cuts, not a dramatic implosion but a steady decline. Last October, according to most national polls, Ms. Warren was the national pacesetter in the Democratic field. By December, she had fallen to the edge of the top tier, wounded by a presidential debate in November where her opponents relentlessly attacked her.
She invested heavily in the early states, with a ground game that was the envy of her rivals. But it did not pay off: In the first four early voting states, Ms. Warren slid from third place in Iowa to fourth in New Hampshire and Nevada to fifth in South Carolina. By Super Tuesday, her campaign was effectively over — with the final blow of a third-place finish in the primary of her home state, Massachusetts.
Her potential endorsement is highly sought after in the race and both Mr. Sanders and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. have spoken with Ms. Warren since Super Tuesday, when the end of her campaign appeared imminent.
The news clarifies that a Democratic field that began with a record number of female candidates has now become a contest between Mr. Biden, 77, and Mr. Sanders, 78.
CNN confirms the report, Elizabeth Warren is ending her presidential campaign:
Elizabeth Warren is dropping out of the presidential race, a source familiar with her plans tells CNN, following another round of disappointing finishes in primary contests across the country on Super Tuesday.
The Massachusetts senator, who centered her bid on a promise to wipe out corruption in Washington, is announcing her decision on a staff call Thursday morning.
NBC News also confirms the report, Elizabeth Warren ends presidential run:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren is suspending her presidential campaign, a source familiar with the decision tells NBC News, a bitter blow for a senator who was long seen by prominent Democrats as headed for the White House.
It is unclear whether Warren will endorse another Democratic candidate for president.
Expect a public statement later today. Will update with Warren’s statement.
UPDATE: Here is the video of Elizabeth Warren’s statement and brief press conference.
A nice summary by Kerry Eleveld at Daily Kos, Elizabeth Warren rallies campaign staffers: ‘This fight—our fight—is not over’:
Like all great fighters with a mission, a purpose, and a vision, Elizabeth Warren doesn’t have time to despair. The hours are precious, the need is ever-deepening, and wallowing in sadness is a luxury great leaders never afford themselves.
“You know, I used to hate goodbyes,” Warren told her staff on a call Thursday on which she informed them she was suspending her campaign. “But then I realized that there is no goodbye for much of what we do. When I left one place, I took everything I’d learned before and all the good ideas that were tucked into my brain and all the good friends that were tucked in my heart, and I brought it all forward with me—and it became part of what I did next.”
Still, that on-brand ethic doesn’t mean that Warren wasn’t emotional when she briefly addressed reporters outside her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and said she wasn’t yet ready to endorse another candidate. Warren said that the “hardest” thing was “all those little girls who are going to have to wait four more years” to see a female president. She reflected on seeing her name on the presidential primary ballot when she went to vote and thinking, “Wow, kiddo, you’re not in Oklahoma anymore,” and that it made her miss her “Momma and Daddy.” And instead of being disappointed by her third-place finish in Massachusetts, she said she was deeply grateful for the chance Bay State voters had taken on sending someone with no political experience to Washington.
Emotional, yes, but not dispirited. In terms of who to support, Warren told her supporters, “Let’s take a deep breath and spend a little time on this.”
On the role gender played in the race, she called it a “trap question.” If you say it played a role, everyone calls you a “whiner,” she said. If you say it didn’t, “about a bazillion women think, what planet do you live on?” But more than likely, Warren’s got a plan for that too, telling the crowd, “I promise you this: I will have a lot more to say about that later on.” (Where do I click to preorder?)
Warren ended by touching on all the issues that matter so deeply to her, whether she’s running for president or not: people who can’t finish a degree or take jobs because they can’t find quality affordable child care; people mired in student loan debt; people who are one bad diagnosis away from being financially underwater.
“I had to think a lot about where is the best place for me to go to keep fighting those fights, because those problems don’t disappear when I stand here in front of you,” she said. “Those problems go on, and my job is to keep fighting and to fight as smartly and effectively as I can.”
Surely if there’s one thing Warren supporters can trust, it’s that she will find a way to leverage her expanded platform into meaningful change for the better, come hell or high water, or maybe lots of blood and teeth on the floor.
As Warren told her campaign staff, “I refuse to let disappointment blind me, or you, to what we’ve accomplished. … It’s not the scale of the difference we wanted to make but it matters and these changes will have ripples for years to come.”
Warren changed the conversation through a combination of big ideas backed by a blizzard of detail-laden plans that are now shelf-ready for action. But she also inspired a new generation of fighters by telling Americans that they shouldn’t put up with a country where some 90% of the population has been systemically blocked from reaching for the American dream. Far from being intractable, those are solvable problems if people are willing to fight for a better way forward.
As Warren told her campaign staff at the end of the call, when she voted Tuesday at the elementary school, she was approached by a mom with two small children who have a nightly ritual. “After the kids have brushed teeth and read books and gotten that last sip of water and done all the other bedtime routines, they do one last thing before the two little ones go to sleep,” Warren recounted. “Mama leans over them and whispers, ‘Dream big.’ And the children together reply, ‘Fight hard.'”
Then paraphrasing Senator Teddy Kennedy’s 1980 Democratic National Convention speech:
The work continues, she said; the fight goes on, and “big dreams,” Warren added, “never die.”
I too think of “all those little girls who are going to have to wait four more years” to see a female president. A female did win, but she was denied by a vestige of slavery that still stains our Constitution (the Electoral College). In no other election anywhere in the world is the candidate who wins the most votes not the winner. This must end.
I hope that I will live long enough to see a woman elected president so I can see my girls experience that, finally, they too are included when we tell our children that anyone can grow up to be president of the United States someday.
I fell in love with Elizabeth the first time I saw her, a brand new senator, grilling some Wall St. big shots who had been called on the carpet by Congress to explain how, in their greed, they had managed to wreck the economy. It was not too long after the crash of 2008 and the memory of the pain was still fresh. She wore her hair parted in the middle then, little makeup, fresh-faced as a farm girl and the camera caught her…rosebud mouth and big blue eyes open wide with shock and outrage like she’d just come upon the farmhand doing something unspeakable behind the barn. I laughed out loud and thought …yes! at last! a politician with the courage to say exactly what she meant to the most powerful men in the country; a fighter for the likes of me. She has never let us down…and as long as she has breath, I doubt she ever will. She would have made mincemeat out of Trump in any debate, witness her takedown of Bloomberg, and been one helluva President!
Tragic. She was where my money went. Wall Street and the banks hated her because she called out their lies and knew their schemes better than they did. Now we have 70 year old white men only to choose from. But she can stay in the Senate and hopefully be tougher with a majority. And when Mitch whines she can tell him to stuff it.
They are closer to 80 than 70.
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that along with some good old American misogyny, Warren is out mostly because the banks, major media companies, and multinational corporations are afraid of her.
I cheered her beat down of Wells Fargo CEO and noted crime lord John Stumpf.
And I’m going to love her forever for the beat down she gave Mike Bloomberg.
A Warren/Trump debate would have been priceless.
Someday, America, let’s catch up to the last century and elect a woman POTUS. I think pretty much every other developed country in the world did starting decades ago.
Comments are closed.