Elizabeth Warren is on a mission to save America. "Progressives have got one shot, and we need to spend it with a leader who will get something done," Warren emphasized Tuesday night, laying out the stakes of the 2020 election at the outset of the Democratic debate in South Carolina.
Warren was setting the scene before the Palmetto State weighs in on the contest Saturday along with another 15 states and territories voting on Super Tuesday, March 3. By the time all is said and done, more than a third of the delegates will have been decided in the race for the nomination. Democratic front-runner Sen. Bernie Sanders will either emerge with a sizable lead that makes him virtually unstoppable, or he will have the company of one or two other candidates, and it could be a fight to the finish. But anyone who tells you they know how this will all play out is wrong. And Warren has spent the past two debates building a convincing narrative for why she's the best Democratic candidate to both take down Trump and govern the nation.
The crux of those arguments came within the first few minutes of each of the last two—and arguably most consequential—debates. In the first, Warren greeted Michael Bloomberg's entrance onto the stage with a jaw-dropping takedown, likening him to a Trumpesque "billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians." Democrats could not win, she warned, "if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist policies."
Up to that point, Bloomberg had been steadily rising in the polls, buoyed by the inflated promise of an unopened gift that, whatever its contents, would be accompanied by gobs of cash. Now his numbers have either "stalled out or begun to reverse themselves," writes FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver. "Bloomberg is in quite a lot of trouble," Silver adds of the former New York mayor’s present standing in the race.
Warren engineered Bloomberg's fall from grace almost single-handedly—proof positive that she has exactly what it takes to level a New York billionaire. Others piled on in the last debate, but Warren led the charge, knocking Bloomberg back on his heels with immediacy and leaving him visibly unsteady for the rest of the event. She wasn't any more sparing of Bloomberg in this week's debate, charging bluntly that “the core of the Democratic Party will never trust him." When Warren was later pressed on MSNBC over why she continued to pummel Bloomberg for a second debate in a row, she responded, "I think Bloomberg is the riskiest candidate standing on that stage." In other words, regardless of whether Warren wins the nomination, she's taking one for the team on this one.
But Warren's other target onstage was Sanders, her longtime ally on liberal causes and the candidate who lured away a good portion of the support that boosted her into front-runner contention last fall. Sanders was winning, she noted, because he espoused progressive ideals, and "progressive ideas are popular ideas." Warren said she agreed with Sanders on the issues but added, "I think I would make a better president." When they both wanted to take on Wall Street following the market crash in 2007, she explained, she was the one who dug in, fought big banks, built coalitions, and “won” by creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Warren made the same charge on Medicare for All, asserting that Sanders' plan doesn't explain the path to passing the bill, building alliances, and paying for it.
"Getting a progressive agenda enacted is going to be really hard, and it's going to take someone who digs into the details to make it happen," she said in her early remarks from the stage. Warren spent the rest of the night touting policy details about her 2-cent wealth tax, the $800 billion she would invest in education, the $50 billion she would invest in historically black colleges and universities, and more. She also dug into the wonky importance of nuking the filibuster, explaining that the 60-vote threshold to advancing bills in the Senate is "giving a veto” to the gun industry, the oil industry, and opponents of immigration.
"Many people on this stage do not support rolling back the filibuster," she said. "Until we’re ready to do that, we won’t have change.” She's absolutely right, and for some reason Sanders is weirdly wed to keeping this destructive vestige of institutionalism intact.
But as dogged as Warren was in pointing out Sanders’ greatest weakness and demonstrating her unique ability to dive into the weeds and deliver, the debate overall was perhaps most memorable for being a cauldron of finger-pointing and unintelligible cross-talk. That undeniable fact makes it hard to know how it will play in the minds of voters. What is true is that, while Sanders is heading into the next round of voting looking strong, he's never faced this much blowback on a debate stage this cycle, which makes it equally difficult to know where voters will land with it. In Super Tuesday states, Sanders is also showing some softness in polling vis-a-vis his national polling, according to both FiveThirtyEight's Silver and Nate Cohn of The New York Times' Upshot.
"One thing that looms, for me," writes Cohn, "is that the state polling has not been great for Sanders" since New Hampshire. Though he's hovering at about 30% nationally, his numbers in the Super Tuesday states have tracked closer to mid-20s. Silver notes, "It's a relatively thin line between [Bernie having] a very good Super Tuesday and a pretty good Super Tuesday, and another thin line between a pretty good Super Tuesday and a pretty bad Super Tuesday."
However this all plays out for Sanders, Warren's effort and skill over the past couple of debates has paid off for her in terms of millions in donations to her campaign, along with some fresh adulation from the press. Writers for both The Washington Post and NBC News gave her top billing for last night's goat rodeo. Warren also earned an endorsement Tuesday from her hometown paper, The Boston Globe, which had originally urged her to sit 2020 out.
The Globe reinforced both of Warren's thesis statements from the last two debates. “Fearless and brilliant on her feet, Warren has the greatest potential among the candidates to lay bare Trump’s weaknesses on a debate stage,” the editorial board wrote of her ability to take on Trump. As for governing, it added, “Warren is uniquely poised to accomplish serious reform without sacrificing what’s working in our economy and innovation ecosystem. She would get under the hood to fix the engine — not drive off a cliff, but also not just kick the tires”
Nonetheless, there's no mistaking the fact that this is a do-or-die moment for everyone not named Bernie. In basketball parlance, they're down by 5, there's 30 seconds on the clock, and the other team has the ball. But whatever the outcome, Warren's not throwing away her shot, and she's promising Democratic voters—and progressives in particular—that if they give her their vote she won't throw away America's shot either.
Here’s Warren’s opening salvo on Tuesday night.
And a post-debate appearance on CBS.
Also, a Chris Matthews special (worth noting that Warren’s assertion here was backed up by reporting in The Washington Post.)