Elizabeth Warren currently sits in third place in the Democratic primary delegate math, but there’s no need to sugarcoat it: She desperately needs to show strength somewhere soon in order to keep making the case that she’s a viable candidate. Yet by all indications, she’s bleeding support, while Bernie Sanders surges, suggesting that her progressive supporters are in the process of abandoning her. As such, her odds of victory have shrunk. Still, the (long-predicted) collapse of Joe Biden’s support and the unexpected rise of Mike Bloomberg have created a new opportunity to regain lost ground. It’s the longest of long shots, for sure, but it’s a viable one.
We begin with the concept of “lanes” in the primary campaign. Sanders and Warren occupied the left lane, while Biden dominated the center-left lane. Now, these aren’t necessarily ideological lanes. Most of Biden’s support came from solidly liberal black voters, but we still had a multi-candidate battle to claim that center-left lane, led by small liberal college-town Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Iowa survivor Amy Klobuchar.
Sanders has taken near-complete ownership of the left lane. At this point, that is undisputed. But it’s the utter chaos in the center-left lane that gives Warren that glimmer of hope.
The effective result of Iowa and New Hampshire was to expose the inability of any candidate to truly dominate the field. Sanders and Buttigieg won those two states with barely a quarter of the vote each.
Yet that was enough to essentially blow Biden out of the water, because if 22%-25% of the vote wasn’t impressive, you can imagine how pathetic Biden’s distant finishes ended up looking. And with the nominal front-runner in a free fall, that center lane is suddenly up for grabs.
Had we stuck with our 2019 field, we’d have a battle for that spot between Buttigieg and Klobuchar, although it wouldn't really be much of a battle—Buttigieg is a darling of Wall Street and had raised $75 million through December. Klobuchar? $29 million. Buttigieg has a significant field presence in places such as Nevada. Klobuchar does not. Buttigieg has done fairly well in the national polling, hovering among the top four all cycle long. Klobuchar has not.
Now maybe Klobuchar could’ve made a play for some of Warren’s supporters and picked up new ones along the way, but that hasn’t happened yet. Her national polling numbers remain in the mid-single digits. Could she have kept surprising? Maybe, but we’ll never know. Because Mike Bloomberg decided to Big Foot his way into the race.
Bloomberg’s team made a calculation last year that Biden was weak and wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny or actual votes, and that the rest of that center-left lane was weak and also wouldn’t hold up. Buttigieg never even reached 11,000 votes in either of his mayoral campaigns in his safely and solidly liberal campus town (read: It’s not “the heartland”). It’s a joke that he considered himself worthy of running for president, and an even bigger joke that he got this far, given the stakes we face in November. And Klobuchar has never had to run a competitive race in blue Minnesota and hasn’t really caught on with national voters.
Now, lo and behold, that center-left lane has opened up completely, and Democrats desperate to beat Donald Trump have decided that our best chance to do so is by fielding our own rapey plutocrat Republican. (If you want primers on the horror that is Bloomberg, start with this and this. It’s worse than you can imagine, I promise you.)
Bloomberg’s rise has hastened Biden’s fall, while also blunting Buttigieg’s own gains. And his years of doling out cash to campaigns, organizations, and cities is paying off, as he is suddenly on the receiving end of a flood of endorsements. Meanwhile, with spending approaching half a billion dollars, he’s gotten himself up to around 14% in the national primary polling. Sanders, the most prolific grassroots fundraiser in the field, is at about 20-25%. It is an unprecedented deluge, allowing him to bypass the traditional “grassroots” part of a political campaign. It’s a cynical repudiation of everything Democrats stand for, but Bloomberg doesn’t care. His party is whatever party is most convenient in the moment for his aspirations.
So back to the lanes: You have Sanders dominating the left lane, and Bloomberg in the process of planting himself in the center-left lane—not because he himself is center-left, but because it’s a lane for people who are seeking “the most electable,” and Bloomberg has an unlimited amount of electability units. About 60 billion of them, actually.
Is there a constituency of Democrats who are uncomfortable with Sanders’ socialism (out of either practical or ideological reasons) but are also uncomfortable with voting for a rapey Republican plutocrat? That’s a new lane. One that sits in between Sander’s left-left and Bloomberg’s conservatism. And that’s where Elizabeth Warren wants to position herself—a solid liberal, but a market-economy based one, and the only actual Democrat among the three of them.
Of course, Bloomberg may fail to claim the entirety of that center-left lane. Also, Klobuchar and Buttigieg will be fighting to create and occupy that new middle-ground lane, it’s not Warren’s for the taking. And that’s why showing some strength in the next several contests is so critical, even if it’s a handful of second-place finishes in February and on Super Tuesday. If she can remain top-three in the delegate count, then it becomes an easier case to make.
I can’t reiterate enough how difficult this is, how narrow a path this is, but it’s her only one. She’s lost the left to Sanders. She has to carve out something new, and Bloomberg is giving her the chance to do so.