Elizabeth Warren and the Myth of the Unity Candidate
Elizabeth Warren won’t save the Democratic Party from its bitter divisions. No candidate will.
Back in 2016, there was nothing I was more certain of following Donald Trump’s shocking electoral victory than the need for Democrats to heal the divide the primary had left between moderates and progressives in the party. I knew the divisions were more complex than center versus left, and that this framing wasn’t entirely fair to women and people of color prioritizing racial and gender justice issues. But facing a barrage of attacks on vulnerable communities by the new Trump administration, I felt that a show of unity in opposition to Trump was the most important thing Democrats could accomplish while they were out of power.
And I assumed the best way to communicate unity was to nominate candidates — first for DNC chair in 2017 and then for president in 2020 — who could appeal to both mainstream Democrats who had backed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 and the progressive flank of the party that had rallied around Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary.
Perhaps the outcome of the DNC chair race was the first indication that there was never going to be any such thing as a unity candidate. The race between then-Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison and Obama administration alum Tom Perez mirrored the many divides in the party, with Ellison as the Sanders-backed progressive populist and Perez as the darling of the center-left establishment. Despite broad enthusiasm for his candidacy, Ellison ultimately lost the race to Perez. But Perez did offer an olive branch to the Sanders wing of the party — he immediately appointed Ellison as Deputy Chair of the DNC. But the damage had been done. Sanders supporters felt denied again.
Fast forward to 2020, and the Democratic primary has come down to Bernie Sanders versus pick-your-moderate. But Sanders wasn’t the favorite in the beginning — not by a long shot. The candidate with the most promise to reignite the enthusiasm of the first Obama presidential campaign, California Sen. Kamala Harris, flamed out after failing to build off a dominant performance in the first Democratic primary debate last June.
The next best thing looked to be Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose national primary poll numbers began climbing in the summer of 2019; by early October, she was close to tied with former Vice President Joe Biden as the front-runner.
For Democrats seeking a candidate that could unite the many factions of the party, Warren had it all — she was a woman, but she was white; she had a bold vision for society, but was practical in her plans for getting there; she understood the value of institutional gatekeepers, but held a reputation for going up against the party’s old guard.
But Warren’s crowning as the Democrat’s unity candidate looks as though it will cost her the nomination in the end. After climbing in the polls from August through early October of last year, she began a downturn in late October and has failed to regain her front-runner status since. She came in third place in the reported Iowa caucus results, and is on track to finish fourth in the New Hampshire primary.
Warren did herself no favors on healthcare. She never took a firm stance on Medicare For All, choosing instead to straddle the fence between the left’s immediate demands for single-payer and the moderates’ desire to tread lightly on the subject by offering improvements to the Affordable Care Act.
Warren also failed to confront the electability question in a way that was consistent and compelling for most of her campaign. It simply wasn’t enough for Warren to point to her record or her policy proposals and declare herself to be just as progressive as Bernie Sanders. Voters needed a reason to choose her over him. She refrained from gender-based appeals — a potential source of separation from Sanders — until the seventh primary debate, when she had already began cratering in the polls. By then, her attempt to rally Democratic women by confronting electability fears raised by voters — and allegedly, by Bernie Sanders himself — felt like a desperate ploy to smear her rival for the progressive vote.
But above all else, Warren’s failing presidential bid confirms that the so-called unity candidate touted by pundits and spectators like me was largely a fiction, a talisman to allay our anxieties over the deeper meaning of the Democrats’ loss to Donald Trump in 2016. In losing to Trump, the center-left had lost its claim to what political parties are for.
Trump proved, as Sanders had endeavored, that political parties are no longer at the center of most people’s political identity formation or political activism. Instead of party elites dictating to voters what it means to be Democrat or Republican, Trump showed that parties could be molded to fit whatever candidate, movement, or policy agenda voters could be convinced — by demagogues or by disinformation — were a reflection of their true values. Back in 2017, I dubbed this the conduit view of political parties in contrast to the establishment’s conception of the two parties as being more like clubs for the loyal. And it bears some truth — Democratic insiders appear more worried by the potential loss of institutional power if Sanders, an independent and democratic socialist, becomes the party nominee for president than if Trump is reelected to the White House.
Sanders’ ability to set the terms of the debate on issues like healthcare and college affordability throughout the 2016 primary foreshadowed his campaign deciding for the rest of the field in 2020 what qualities were going to matter in the Democratic nominee. It wasn’t going to be diversity, but consistency. Winning outright over consensus-building.
In other words, the moment Sanders jumped into the presidential race is the moment “unity” ceased to be a compelling basis for Warren’s candidacy. Progressives were always going to choose Sanders over her. And after losing out to establishment candidates in the 2016 Democratic primary and in the 2017 DNC chair race, it remains their prerogative to do so.
Right now Bernie Sanders is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president, but there is still a chance moderates could coalesce around Joe Biden as he is expected to perform better in primary in the sunbelt states. But no matter what Democrats tell themselves, the eventual nominee will represent victory for one side of the great divide over the other, not the coming together of a party.
