“Up, Up, Up With Elizabeth Warren.” This was the ultimate feel-good headline, and it appeared—where else?—in The New York Times. Well, now that she’s nipping at Joe Biden’s heels, her rise makes the remarkably favorable coverage she’s received seem prophetic. But what’s missing from this chorus is a rigorous analysis of her surge. If you look closely at data-driven sites like Five Thirty Eight, you’ll see that Warren’s gain has come mostly at Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris’s expense, which means that she’s consolidating the left wing of the Democratic party, not capturing its center. She’s made modest gains among black voters, but most polls show her running in single digits in states where their numbers count. Her following remains, for the most part, well-educated, well-off, and white. This is a matrix for a movement, but it’s not broad enough to defeat Trump. Woke is not the same as winning.
We lost the last presidential election partly because the black turnout was lower than when Barack Obama was on the ballot, and partly because nine percent of those who chose Obama in 2012 shifted to Trump. Those swing voters came mostly from the industrial midwest, which proved to be Hillary Clinton’s Waterloo. In order for Warren to do better, she’ll have to persuade these people, who are wary of what liberalism has become, to trust her program and identify with her. The former may be easier than the latter, since many blue-collar voters—especially Catholics—favor a strong government as long as it benefits them. But they are resentful of the class that has created the Warren phenomenon. It doesn’t help when she taps her hardscrabble roots, because she’s spent her life struggling to overcome them, and there’s a persistent feeling that she now belongs to no class at all. This vague sense of evasiveness becomes concrete when she dodges hard questions rather than tackling them. And so, the major question about Warren—is she electable?—applies to her image as well as her ideas.
This is not an argument for supporting Biden. Blacks and union members are his main credential, but he hasn’t lived up to their faith in him. He seems incapable of holding the center, and no moderate has the big-mo to replace him. There’s a void at the core of Democratic politics, and Warren is poised to fill it. But her campaign is grounded in a glaring paradox. Her message is populist, yet her base is prosperous. This contradiction is a big reason why most polls show her beating Trump by only two points, pretty much the same as Hillary’s margin. It wasn’t enough then, and it may not be now.
I’m sorry to be skeptical. I’d like to think this will be a transformative election, with Warren in the White House and a liberal majority in the Senate as well as the House. But we haven’t had that sort of Congress since 1964, when the result was landmark civil rights legislation and Medicare. The election of 2020 is likely to be less a revolution than a relief—if we’re lucky. A real transformation has to be truly popular, and right now, Warren’s movement is parochial. Its sense of the feasible is shaped by an environment that broadcasts its beliefs. Social media amplifies these assumptions exponentially, and the lust for clicks and ratings creates an echo chamber that can block the truth from sounding. Every blip in Warren’s numbers reverberates, and the result is an exultant mood that doesn’t reach very far beyond Rachel Maddow’s demographics.
If I’m proven wrong, I’ll gladly eat my locally sourced hemp hat. But I’ve worked in liberal media long enough to know where its interests lie. It relies on the economic power of the professional classes, and it plays to their biases. No one makes stuff up, but a pervasive semiotics—the tone of headlines, the choice of images, decisions about whose name comes first in a list of candidates—is always at work. It can seem that everything you read and watch affirms what your tribe believes. You wake up on the morning after the election in a state of shock because you never saw the outcome that was looming. This is the danger we face again.
Let me give you an example of the media’s myopia, and how it works in Warren’s favor. In a recent article, Mark Leibovich, the Times Magazine’s chief national affairs correspondent, tried to explain Biden’s appeal to his supporters. He referred to them as victims of a “feedback loop,” in which hearing over and over again that a candidate can win becomes a reason to believe it. “They will reach for a stitched-up old teddy bear,” Leibovich wrote. What he’s suggesting is that Biden’s base consists of people unable to think for themselves. But what about Warren’s supporters? Aren’t they, too, the victims of a feedback loop? Certainly not. They hold college degrees and enjoy the privileges of being white, even if they don’t take pride in it. Such people aren’t susceptible to a rash of superlatives in their daily media diet. They think for themselves.
If you consider this idea from a black or working class perspective, it’s deeply offensive. It suggests that the well off and well educated are more rational than the masses. There’s the problem, encapsulated in a tone of blithe expertise: Warren’s base is enlightened; Biden’s base has to be brought into the light. If I were asked to vote for someone whose program says empathy, but whose supporters radiate contempt for my ability to reason, I would toss the invitation. I live in a high-end neighborhood today (thanks to rent control), but I grew up in a housing project, and I’m expert at detecting an underlying attitude of sanctimony. It exists when it comes to class as well as race, and it’s one reason why we ended up with Trump.
Right now, I’m leaning toward Sanders. I can’t imagine him quipping, as Warren did recently, that men who oppose same-sex marriage will have trouble finding women to love them. As a married gay man, I understand the howls of joy from her following, but calling your opponents primitive is not the same as calling them out for being wrong. Insult is something Sanders reserves for the corrupt and greedy, and to me that’s the right kind of militance. I know that some of the arguments I’ve made against Warren also apply to him, but I think he has a better shot at capturing working-class voters in the midwest, and he leads her among black voter, an electorate whose judgement I usually trust. Unlike any politician I have known, Sanders doesn’t evade or pretend, and I deeply admire that.
But I won’t vote for sentimental reasons, so I may change my mind. I’m suspicious of any network or publication with a staff of people who all agree, and I think you should be, too. Keep your mind on the data, not the buzz among your peers. The biggest cliche in politics is: “vote like your future depends on it,” but this time it’s true. If we lose in 2020, it won’t just be power that slips from our grasp. It will be democracy.
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Endnote: This piece was written before the latest Democratic debate, but that exchange affirmed my impression of Warren. You may share the Guardian’s assessment that she “displayed extraordinary restraint in the face of some excruciating mansplaining.” I would call it evasiveness. Either you like that quality in Warren or you don’t. I don’t.