In the week since Elizabeth Warren suspended her campaign I've seen numerous columnists insisting that the reason she lost is sexism or even misogyny. This is silly. The party that nominated Hillary Clinton in 2016 didn't turn anti-woman in four years. So what did go wrong with Warren's campaign? Lots of things.
She missed her window. Teddy Kennedy told Barack Obama not to wait to run for president because you don't get a second chance on your popularity. Warren's popularity peaked by the 2016 election. When she announced that she wasn't running, her supporters turned to Bernie Sanders. Their positions are nearly identical (free medical coverage, college and preschool financed by a wealth tax) but by 2020, Sanders is seen as the progressive leader and Warren a pale shadow.
Fauxcahontas. Early in her career Warren claimed to be Native American. She insisted that wasn't why she was hired as a law instructor at Harvard but her degree was from a 2nd tier law school and she was the only person from that law school to ever teach at Harvard. She also claimed to be Indian on at least one other job application. The blond, blue-eyed Warren is not part-Indian and her earlier claims continued to haunt her candidacy to the end. What she should have done was confess and apologize when it first came out. At the time she was running for the Senate and favored to win. If she had simply released a statement saying, "When I was much younger I felt that I needed an edge to advance my career so I used unverified family stories to claim Native American heritage. I'm sorry and I apologize for doing that." Such a statement might have hurt her a bit at the time but it would be ancient history now. Instead she tried proving her Indian heritage through a DNA test that proved she was as little as 1/1024th NA. She also released a recording of herself and her brothers, all indignant that anyone would question their family story. It all flopped and she spent years trying to mollify tribes.
Problems with her honesty. Other details have popped up about Warren's biography. Most notably, her story about being fired form a teaching job for being pregnant is contradicted by a video where she says that her teaching while pregnant "just wasn't working" for her and she decided to take some time off to raise her baby.
Conflicting narratives. A candidate has to choose what parts of her biography to emphasize her candidacy. Talking about growing up in Oklahoma and being a school teacher takes away from her image as a policy wonk Harvard law professor. She needed to choose the parts of her biography that reinforced her having a plan for everything.
Bad planes.. Her battle cry was, "I've got a plan for that" but when she presented her healthcare plan, critics poked so many holes in it that Warren withdrew it.
Playing the woman/victim card. The story about being fired for being pregnant is irrelevant. If it happened, it happened decades ago. It would not be allowed today so what is the point of telling it? She even told it at her last debate. No one is going to choose their candidate because she was discriminated against decades ago. It's also annoying to listen to a rich, privileged, white woman complaining about how hard life is. This was a problem with Hillary Clinton's campaign, also.In contrast, the main time that Barack Obama talked about race and discrimination was when he threw his grandmother under the bus.
Warren has terrible political instincts. There's just no way around it - Elizabeth Warren has terrible political instincts. In addition to the examples I listed above there are ones like her podcast which she started with, "I'm gonna get me a beer." I can't imagine a more forced and artificial start to a podcast.
She's just plain unlikable. She has an annoying voice and she always sounds like she cares so much about her causes that she's about to break down in tears. Does anyone really want to listen to this for the next 4-8 years?
