| 摘要 | Is Elizabeth Warren the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination? You can make a strong argument that she is. You can also make the arguments that she is at most, a default front-runner and a problematic general election nominee.
And you might reasonably conclude that both arguments taken together tell you some interesting things about the state of the Democratic Party — the world’s oldest political party — today.
Now I’m certainly not arguing with my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York, who wrote last week that Joe Biden is no longer the Democratic front-runner. Since then, Biden’s lead over Warren in the realclearpolitics.com average of recent polls has shrunk from three percentage points to just half a point. Back on June 21, he led her by 20 points.
Warren admirers attribute her sharp poll rise over the last three weeks to her energetic campaigning, ranging from smiling for countless selfies to insisting “I have a plan for that” on countless issues. But she’s also benefited from the problems of her opponents.
The Democrats’ case for impeachment inevitably highlights Biden’s son’s $50,000-a-month contract with a Ukrainian natural gas company when then Vice President Biden was in charge of Ukraine policy. Bernie Sanders, 78, had a heart attack on Oct. 1. Kamala Harris’ habit of sloppily taking stands she can’t sustain has lowered her numbers from 15% to 5%. Pete Buttegieg’s chipper articulateness has helped him raise millions, but his support peaked at 8% in May and June. Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker, the only other candidates ever above 5%, are hovering around 2% now.
That leaves Elizabeth Warren as, at most, the front-runner faute de mieux, or for want of a better alternative. In getting here, she seems to have taken some lessons from the president she obviously detests, Donald Trump.
One is not to back down on even the diciest stands. Her claim of Indian ancestry and her claim to have lost her teaching job because she was “visibly pregnant” don’t seem well founded, and her insistence that the police officer in the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Mo., committed “murder” is contradicted by the Obama Justice Department’s thorough investigation of that tragedy. But she sticks to her guns.
The other lesson is to take what many consider unpopular stands on issues. Like many Democrats, Warren seems to have concluded that if a rule-breaking candidate like Donald Trump can be elected president, then the old political rules don’t apply any more. So she has endorsed Medicare for All and backs eliminating private health insurance; she has said she’d ban fracking for oil and natural gas; she supports decriminalizing illegal border crossing, health care for illegal immigrants who get across, and paying reparations to the descendants of slaves. She has ignored warnings by, among others, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki that such proposals are hugely unpopular and could become great fodder for Trump campaign ads.
Warren obviously hopes that her calls for federal oversight of large corporations and her call for a 2% wealth tax on multimillionaires will resonate with non-affluent Trump voters. But those voters seem more concerned with elites’ political correctness than convinced that Warren’s proposal will send their way any money somehow mulcted from corporations. Oh, and the wealth tax is probably unconstitutional and, judging by European experience, mostly uncollectable.
Among Democratic primary voters, Warren has been scoring best with white college graduates — the core anti-Trump constituency — while lagging far behind among blacks and non-college whites. As Washington Post analyst David Byler has argued, her current constituency “looks like media + their neighbors,” and she “matches an upscale idea of who POTUS should be.” Even as she easily won re-election in Massachusetts last year, she ran far behind Hillary Clinton in “beer Democrat” constituencies.
This is not to say that Warren is a sure loser. Any Democratic nominee has a serious chance of beating Donald Trump. But it says something interesting about the Democratic Party that its current top three are in their 70’s and all from overwhelmingly Democratic states (although Biden’s Delaware was competitive before 2000).
Democratic activists seem to like it that way, as indicated in their fundraising. The party’s contributors, surely tilted toward white college grads, seem to prefer the unusual over the conventional. Sanders and Warren, with their leftist platforms, led June-September fundraising, with about $25 million. Pete Buttegieg outraised Joe Biden; Andrew Yang outraised Cory Booker and nearly outraised Kamala Harris; Marianne Williamson outraised Michael Bennet.
As for the faute de mieux front-runner, the latest IBD/TIPP poll shows Elizabeth Warren leading Donald Trump 48% to 46%, which is exactly the same popular vote lead as Hillary Clinton had four years ago. Maybe there’s an opening for some other candidate. |
