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Campaigns that express a fear of letting the candidate act like the candidate rarely succeed.
Journalists at liberal publications are highly attuned to policy, by and large college-educated, and disproportionately white, categories that interact with affinity toward Elizabeth Warren. She has cultivated progressive media intensely since running for the Senate. So it’s not surprising to see a burst of elegies to her campaign, which closed last week. They’ve taken a variety of forms, from pinpointing the timeline of collapse, to wondering why she didn’t garner more support, to exclaiming that, actually, she won the war of ideas.
Somehow, there’s still more to say, as much about why Warren lost as about how the race revealed blind spots among the Democratic consultant class, the media, and the progressive movement.
To begin at the beginning, Joe Rospars should never be allowed near another progressive campaign. His role as the Warren campaign’s chief strategist ultimately falls on the candidate, who for years identified with the phrase “personnel is policy.” Warren’s most important personnel choice was a disaster, and he cost her the primary.
This in no way discounts the role of sexism in American politics, which clearly mattered. Of course, that was a known issue the day Warren entered the race. If she or her team truly believed that gender was an insurmountable obstacle, they effectively stole over $100 million from mostly small-dollar donors to put toward something doomed to failure. I don’t believe they did, and I don’t believe a Warren nomination was impossible.
Leadership from the likes of Rospars made it impossible.
As Matt Stoller recently explained, Rospars came out of the Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign; he and three colleagues took the source code that the campaign used to rack up Internet donations and used it to found consulting firm Blue State Digital. Snagging a high-ranking job when Dean became chair of the Democratic National Committee, Rospars hired Blue State Digital—where he was still a partner—for a lucrative tech software contract. He then hooked on with the Obama campaign, which licensed the same software. (Rospars was paid through Blue State Digital for the Warren campaign.)
Rospars was responsible for positioning Warren to the electorate. If you asked me to identify Elizabeth Warren’s talents as a politician, I would simply say that she’s a fighter. Witness her performance in hearings that would so damage the reputations of (mostly) male financial titans that they would quickly resign in disgrace. She fought the Obama administration whenever it strayed from putting the public interest over the interests of financiers. The fights displayed her first principles: a populist champion of the little guy, battling a rigged system.
Under Rospars, Warren decided to highlight how she had a very nice golden retriever. “They chose ... Bailey over ‘blood and teeth,’” said one anonymous staffer to Politico, referring to an old quote where Warren said she would rather have no Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor” than a weak agency. Several staffers complained that Rospars tried to soften Warren’s edges, make her less polarizing, and generally erase the thing that made her a political rock star in the first place. Campaigns that express a fear of letting the candidate act like the candidate rarely succeed.
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Even though it was too late, eviscerating Michael Bloomberg in the Las Vegas debate in February gave her a boost. The populist pugilist, the fighter for the middle class, put her into contention.
In place of this, Rospars highlighted Warren’s plans, white papers that are relatively common in presidential campaigns. The focus on policy was admirable, and did have an initial impact. But it eventually started to blur together; by the end, new plans were being fashioned out of bits and pieces of old plans so the campaign could say they had a new plan.
The one plan that didn’t exist, at least initially, happened to involve the primary policy issue for Democratic voters. I’ve written previously about how health care was not an area where you could lay in the weeds, which Warren tried to do by parroting “I’m with Bernie” at every opportunity. The rushed Medicare for All financing plan—and then the retreat to a public option with Medicare for All added later—cut the heart out of the wonky, competent image Warren had been putting forward. There were other problems, but in a sense the campaign ended there.
Meanwhile, the moments in 2019 when Warren rose are instructive. The first poll spike came when she called early for Donald Trump’s impeachment. She released a proposal for student-debt cancellation before Sanders (although Sanders’s plan ultimately cancelled more debt). She vowed to break up Facebook and started making billionaires cry on national TV. Even though it was too late, eviscerating Michael Bloomberg in the Las Vegas debate in February gave her a boost. The populist pugilist, the fighter for the middle class, put her into contention. Then Rospars put gauze over the lens of one of the more hard-charging figures in politics, and it got him nothing.
Finally, something partially out of Warren’s control and partially within it signified her failure. For the last decade, Democrats have argued over the role of finance in American life. But on the biggest stage, for an entire presidential campaign, Wall Street vanished. There has not been a single question about Wall Street in a primary debate, it has barely appeared in any candidate’s platform (it got only a glancing mention in Warren’s!), and it’s just disappeared as a voter, candidate, or media concern.
Even in 2016, financial reform plans were a major point of contention between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Given the potential for financial crisis from the collapse in oil prices and the proliferation of low-grade energy-related debt, this is tragic. And this absence absolutely hurt Warren (and to a lesser extent Sanders) and boosted Joe Biden.
Broadcast media figures don’t understand finance and will gladly ignore it when given a chance. But good candidates have a knack for bringing the conversation around to whatever they want to talk about. Warren, unbelievably, never did this on Wall Street issues. She even released a plan right before a debate in January that served as an indictment of Biden’s record on bankruptcy reform, a big flashing signal that she would imminently raise the issue before a national audience. Then it never happened.
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It’s a chief strategist’s job to move the campaign onto terrain where their candidate holds the sharpest advantage. Rospars’ inability to make a campaign with Elizabeth Warren in it about Wall Street for a single day reveals his catastrophic leadership.
But it’s worth holding progressives to account for this as well. The organized groups involved in this primary took no opportunity to highlight finance’s role in the economy, in inequality, in climate policy. They don’t really seem to care about it; they’re uncomfortable highlighting it and discount it as a concern. You cannot ignore such an overwhelming and malignant force in politics. Ceding ground on Wall Street equates to ceding ground on power.
What matters in American politics has too often been pushed aside in this primary, in favor of voters playing pundit and assessing electability. Voters must own their choices, but so too must opinion leaders and validators and campaign officials and candidates, who made their own bad choices. Progressives have not built a winning coalition within the Democratic Party. The tragedy of the Warren campaign, and maybe the Sanders one soon, is the failure to find a better course.
