(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Last fall, Elizabeth Warren got an email from Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, inviting her to speak at the group’s annual meeting in Davos in late January. He was taken with Warren’s sweeping moral critique of winner-take-all capitalism and looking to jolt the heads of state and global financial titans at his glittering conference in the Swiss Alps. Would she come to Davos and address them?
The Massachusetts senator, who was then preparing to run for president, understood immediately the attention such a showdown would bring and thought she needed an idea big enough for the moment. A few weeks later, she settled on one: an annual “wealth tax” of 2% on fortunes over $50 million, slightly higher on billionaires. Working with Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the eminent University of California at Berkeley economists, Warren’s staff calculated that her tax would hit the richest 75,000 people in the U.S. while raising $2.75 trillion in a 10-year period.
It was a characteristically big, bold idea that would revolutionize how government taxes the rich, shifting the basis from income to the much broader category of wealth. These “ultramillionaires,” as she calls them, would no longer pay only on what they earn, which clever accountants can minimize, but on the entirety of what they have. This massive infusion of revenue would fund even the most zealous package of liberal programs with billions to spare.
But the proposal’s principal attraction, in the moment, would be the sheer spectacle of Warren’s unveiling it at a gathering of Davos plutocrats—one imagines horrified gasps and a Champagne flute shattering on the floor. At a time when U.S. politics and electoral fundraising are increasingly driven by viral media moments, here was one guaranteed to make everyone sit up and notice. Schwab thought so, too.
“He was going to give us all of the CEOs in a room,” Warren told me recently, with a twinkle, over homemade mango lemonade at her Washington condominium. Schwab even dropped by her Senate office to lobby her personally.
But after a long period of consideration, she decided not to go. Her presidential campaign was set to launch on New Year’s Eve with a swing through rural Iowa, and her staff fretted about the optics of leaving the trail to go join a gathering of bankers, even to challenge them. As it turned out, though, Schwab’s conference still focused on capitalist inequity and still featured a dramatic confrontation over taxing the wealthy that instantly went viral. It just didn’t involve Warren. Instead, Rutger Bregman, a young Dutch historian, scolded the Davos crowd for studiously ignoring the one measure guaranteed to mitigate wealth inequality—the very thing Warren had identified. “Taxes, taxes, taxes,” Bregman declared. “All the rest is bullshit.” Within hours, he was hailed as “the folk hero of Davos,” and a clip of his remarks drew millions of views.
The missed opportunity seemed to symbolize a candidacy that looked destined to fail. In her first weeks on the campaign trail, Warren didn’t generate nearly the excitement or fundraising other candidates did. The activist progressives who once hung on her every word appeared to be shopping for someone else. And she was dogged by her decision to take a DNA test to determine her American Indian ancestry, which offended potential supporters and drew a fresh wave of “Pocahontas” taunts from President Trump. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders led the polls and the news coverage, while Warren languished in single digits. “I hit her too hard, too early,” Trump crowed to Fox News in March. “Now it looks like she’s finished.”
He spoke too soon. Since then, Warren has not only put herself into the top tier of Democratic hopefuls but forced the others to follow her lead. Although she missed her star turn at Davos, Warren made the wealth tax the centerpiece of her campaign. It’s part of a fusillade of proposals that are more aggressive, far-reaching—and expensive—than any previous Democratic front-runner would have dared venture: break up big tech companies like Google and Facebook; abolish private health insurance and give everyone Medicare; start a $2 trillion industrial policy built on “economic patriotism” to boost exports; crack down on private equity’s “Wall Street looting”; overhaul corporate governance by putting workers on boards; eliminate the filibuster; cancel student loan debt; and establish free public college and universal child care. Together, Warren’s platform amounts to a giant leap in Democratic ambition—some would say radicalism—that dwarfs the steady but safe achievements of the Clinton and Obama eras.
If Warren is a revolutionary, she sure doesn’t look the part. When I arrived at her sleek, sunny Washington condo on a scorching July afternoon, she was wearing a striped Vineyard Vines button-down and tinkering with her lemonade recipe. “How ya doin’?” she greeted me. Her husband, Bruce Mann, a Harvard Law School professor, was tapping on a laptop and excused himself so we could get down to business.
When the conversation turned to politics and her campaign, Warren snapped into a whole different gear: evangelist for a Democratic revolution. Her wealth tax and all that’s followed is her attempt to apply shock paddles to a party that she believes has lost its way. “You could wake somebody up in the middle of the night and ask them what a Republican stands for, and you’d get pretty consistent answers,” Warren said. “Ask what Democrats stand for, and it’s always a more difficult explanation. That makes it harder to pull people into the fight, because they’re less sure it’s their fight.”
One way to understand her urgency is as the result of a radicalizing moment: Trump’s victory. Four years ago there was talk of a Warren presidential campaign, but she decided not to run, wagering that the best shot to enact her agenda was by working through a powerful Democrat she believed could win—Hillary Clinton. People close to her say Trump’s surprise election left her shocked and filled with regret. “If you went back to 2014 and told Elizabeth that Donald Trump would be elected president as a right-wing populist,” a close adviser told me, “there’s no question she would have run for president.”
It’s one of very few topics that leaves Warren short of words. Sitting on her sofa, she rebuffed any attempt to get her to revisit her thinking and what she’d have done differently. “I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t.”
Friends say what’s driving her now is a desire to correct that mistake and a conviction that Trump’s election showed voters want change on a scale most Democrats don’t comprehend. She believes Democrats lost in 2016 because they were timid. Trump ditched Republican orthodoxies and brought along union members, blue-collar workers, and other traditionally Democratic voters in the bargain. Warren is making a big bet that taking Trump down requires beating him at his own game: go big and bold or risk losing again on warmed-over incrementalism. That’s why the sweep of her agenda aims for the New Deal or the Great Society. “We need to fight harder for what we believe in,” she told me.
If Trumpism is a hypertrophied version of conservatism, then Warrenism is, by design, liberalism jacked up on steroids. “It’s all a response to Trump,” says former Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, a Warren ally who’s neutral in the race. “It’s meant to be earthshaking.”
Until now, few Democrats would have embraced such an agenda for fear of being branded radical, tax-and-spend liberals. For many party regulars, that remains a live concern. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spends much of her energy trying to contain the progressive exuberance Warren and other Democrats to her left have eagerly unleashed. Right now, the central strategic divide in Democratic circles is between Pelosi’s desire not to spook voters and jeopardize her party’s chance to beat Trump and Warren’s conviction that they won’t show up unless Democrats aggressively reclaim their historic mantle. Wake someone up in the dark of night during a Warren administration, she seems to promise, and they’ll know damn well what the Democrats stand for.
Her push for enormous changes to the structure of the U.S. political economy is taking not only her party out of its comfort zone, but also Warren herself. For all her provocations, she has long been a believer in institutions who spent her career as an academic, government regulator, and senator carefully working within those systems. Her considerable success came because she taught herself to master the establishment, not blow it up.
That’s changed. Her decision to abandon the constraints and conventions of how a Democrat traditionally runs for president has revivified a campaign many observers, not just the president, had written off. Suddenly, she’s one of the hottest candidates in the field.
“What I’ve seen in the last six weeks for Warren in terms of grassroots energy is like a rocket ship taking off,” says an independent digital strategist closely tracking the Democratic campaigns. More than anyone else, Warren has set the terms of the race and forced other candidates to respond as a matter of strategic necessity. As the first primary debates in Miami showed, Democrats’ plans for a post-Trump future are far more sweeping than just about anybody expected them to be even a few months ago. Kamala Harris, a supposed moderate, has endorsed “Medicare for All,” and even Biden was compelled to produce a far more robust health-care plan than the one he helped pass as Obama’s vice president.
All of this raises a thorny question: Is Warren prophetically right or tragically wrong? For many Democrats, her decision to throw caution to the wind and run on a full-dress liberal agenda of vaulting ambition—dragging the whole party along with her—is both thrilling and scary. It offers the promise of an historic advance and a rebuke of Trump and all that he stands for, but couples it with the possibility that vowing to raise taxes and eliminate private health insurance might frighten voters into delivering the one thing Democrats fear most: four more years of Trump.
Midnight was approaching when Warren and a small entourage wandered into the Miller Time Pub & Grill in downtown Milwaukee in mid-July. She’d just finished a rally at a high school, then grinned and chitchatted her way through a line of hundreds of people waiting to have their picture taken with her. Warren does this after every event as part of an Olympian commitment to be warm and approachable, to fend off the charge of “chilly Harvard professor” before it can be uttered. When she arrived at the pub, it took her several minutes and several more selfies before she could slide into a booth, skip over the fancy craft beers, and ask the waitress, “Do you have Miller Lite on tap?”
Like her choice of beer, Warren’s stump speech is simple, straightforward—and very self-aware. It’s an allegory about how government rescued her family in hard times, then provided her opportunities to advance—opportunities it no longer offers. When she was a middle schooler in Oklahoma, Warren’s father had a heart attack and couldn’t work. Her parents feared losing their home. Her mother, who’d never worked outside the home, got hired at Sears. “That minimum wage job saved our house—and more important, it saved our family,” Warren told the Milwaukee crowd.
After marrying at 19 and quitting college to move to Texas, Warren finished her degree by attending “a commuter college that cost $50 a semester.” A few years later, as a young mother with another child on the way, she was able to graduate from a state law school without relying on student loans, and then was hired to teach at another one. These were the steppingstones in a career that eventually led to Harvard, the U.S. Senate, and the presidential campaign trail.
The purpose of this tale, besides softening her image and establishing her populist bona fides, is to make the case that while government once served the needs of poor and middle-class families like her own, by providing a solid minimum wage and affordable public schools, it now operates chiefly in the service of those who are already well off. “When corporations get so big that they can start to squeeze the government,” she said, “then democracy no longer works.” Her life’s story, juxtaposed against the much direr options a struggling family faces today, is the windup to her campaign’s declaration of purpose, which she practically shouted across the Milwaukee high school gymnasium: “We need big, structural change in this country!”
“Democrats are afraid of Elizabeth Warren. She has an absolute veto over certain public-policy issues”
Warren’s great talent as a politician is her ability to make her left-wing economic agenda sound like plain common sense that any ordinary person would agree with. Traveling with her through Iowa, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin this year, it was clear she was connecting; voters would nod along and say afterward they appreciated her diagnosis of what ails the U.S. economy and her detailed plans to fix it. T-shirts emblazoned with “Warren Has a Plan for That” were popular fashion items at her events.
Her speech also offers a clue about her professional and political success, because it’s the story of someone perceptive and capable enough to thrive in every environment she encountered by studying the rules and figuring out the game. One of her least recognized attributes may be her skill at getting noticed.
Warren’s academic career is celebrated both for its commuter-college-to-Harvard trajectory and for her pioneering work in the field of consumer bankruptcy law. But it’s also noteworthy that she managed to succeed in two realms at once—the academy and the broader popular culture.
When Warren began teaching law at the University of Texas in the early 1980s, most academic research focused on corporate bankruptcies. Seeking to explain the spike in personal bankruptcies, Warren and her partners, Jay Westbrook and Teresa Sullivan, spent years traveling to courthouses studying bankruptcy filings. Their conclusion, laid out in their influential 1989 book, As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America, was that most bankruptcies weren’t driven by lazy profligacy, as was commonly assumed, but by financial and medical catastrophes from which respectable middle-class families simply couldn’t recover.
Professors tend to be poor public salesmen of their own work. Warren is an exception. At the same time her academic star was rising, her ability to communicate her ideas to lay audiences won her media exposure and a public profile that vastly extended the range of her influence. In 2003 she teamed up with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, to write The Two-Income Trap, a book aimed at a general readership that caught the eye of Dr. Phil, who made Warren a repeat guest on his talk show as an empathetic financial expert and life coach.
Warren’s telegenic flair drew the notice of top Democrats, who began calling on her to provide congressional testimony. Her clash with Biden at a 2005 hearing over a bankruptcy bill, recently resurfaced on social media, was an early glimpse of her talent for creating a public spectacle around an issue that was important to her and getting the better of whichever eminence she was pitted against. Warren spent a decade fighting to stop the credit card industry, based in Biden’s home state of Delaware, from winning more onerous bankruptcy rules. She ultimately lost the fight. It was, she told me, “a big part of my early education about power in Washington.”
Through repeated visits to Capitol Hill, she learned how influence works—and how to work the system. Politicians love experts who confer credibility and help them look smart. Warren was eager to lend academic ballast to others’ ideas. When I profiled Senator Charles Schumer in 2008, he practically dragged me to meet her, because he believed The Two-Income Trap validated his economic program. Warren, he assured me, “knows how to get a point across.”
At the same time, she also became a relentless popularizer of her own ideas through channels few others were thinking about at the time. Josh Marshall, the founder of the influential liberal blog Talking Points Memo, was surprised when Warren offered to write about bankruptcy reform for the site in 2005. Warren had deduced that congressional staffers were more digitally inclined than their bosses and instrumental in shaping their views. Blogging was a way to reach them directly, along with the rising crowd of grassroots activists who’d become increasingly vocal during the Iraq War. “She could see that blogs like TPM were having a decisive effect on the evolution of Democratic politics at a time when that wasn’t yet clear to the older generation of party operatives and officeholders,” Marshall says.
Warren’s credibility with party leaders paid dividends when her proposal to create a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, laid out in a 2007 journal article, was incorporated into legislation Congress passed after the global financial crisis. It also earned her a spot on the Troubled Asset Relief Program oversight board policing the bank bailouts, a public perch she used to stage high-profile confrontations with Tim Geithner, Obama’s Treasury secretary, that made her a cult figure on the left—and earned her the enmity of Wall Street allies in the administration. Her facility at playing the inside game advanced her career even when she lost: When Obama declined to nominate her to lead the CFPB, she was recruited to run for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts and won—landing in the very heart of the establishment.
When she arrived in the Senate in 2013, Warren was something of an exotic creature: a celebrity whose fame predated her run for office. But one even more prominent woman had preceded her—Clinton—and Washington groupthink dictated that Warren should comport herself as Clinton had. Upon her election in 2000, Clinton somewhat ostentatiously declared that she would be “a workhorse, not a show horse,” shunning the limelight so as not to upstage her senior colleagues. She hunkered down and made common cause on dozens of minor bills with Republicans, many of whom had been vocal detractors, in an effort to burnish a bipartisan image that would help her future presidential campaign.
From the outset, Warren recoiled at the Clinton model of the quiet, well-mannered junior senator who was “seen but not heard” and deferred to her male elders. Dan Geldon, a top adviser, recounted to me last fall that before Warren agreed to run for office, she had to be persuaded that she could be effective operating in an altogether different style. “I need to be convinced that if I go to the Senate there’s a path to accomplish what I want” that’s different from what Clinton did, he recalled her saying. “How do I aggressively advocate for what I believe in?”
In her 2014 book, A Fighting Chance, Warren tells a story that’s meant to reveal the unsavory way Washington power players wield their influence to benefit one another, while ignoring the common good. She recounts how, just after the financial crisis, Larry Summers, the director of Obama’s National Economic Council, invited her to dinner at a fancy Washington restaurant under the guise of imparting insider wisdom. Late in the evening, Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice...I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People—powerful people—listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders. I had been warned. Warren presents the tale as a provincial’s education in the byways of Washington power, assuring the reader about her disapproval of that culture. But her own answer for how to accomplish something useful as a new senator was to be a workhorse and a show horse. “It’s always been about the inside and the outside,” she told me. “That’s how I’d come to understand power in Washington.”
At her first Banking Committee hearing, Warren seized the spotlight by demanding of a panel of bank regulators: “When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial?” Their awkward evasions produced a showdown that established what became Warren’s signature slashing style. Although her staff exulted over these moments, they had a purpose beyond raising her profile and her online fundraising hauls.
In the 12 years since Clinton’s arrival in the Senate, American politics had polarized to such a degree that the incentive structure for ambitious Republicans and Democrats had changed. The old way to influence national politics was by accumulating a lengthy record of bipartisan achievement and a reputation for probity. The new way—Warren’s way—was to have big, loud, messy fights that offered moral clarity and galvanized public sentiment through cable news and social media. Warren used this technique repeatedly to steer Democratic sentiment against corporate tax inversions and global trade deals, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to steer it toward expanding Social Security benefits, and to establish her primacy as the rising progressive in the Senate.
Her adeptness won her a large and vocal grassroots following, which gave her an independent base and remarkable power for a freshman senator. Several of her old-school colleagues resented her fame and privately disparaged her, but none dared do so publicly. “Democrats are afraid of Elizabeth Warren,” Barney Frank said in 2015. “She has an absolute veto over certain public-policy issues, because Democrats are not going to cross her. … No Democrat wants Elizabeth Warren being critical of him.”
At the same time, though, Warren took care not to violate the assiduously proscribed rules of the Senate. She was a good colleague, a willing campaigner for Democrats facing reelection, and careful not to publicly criticize party leaders. This won her influence inside the party and a position in leadership to match her growing stature on the outside.
As the 2016 presidential campaign began taking shape, it was no surprise that progressives looked to Warren as a potential challenger to Clinton, who was distrusted by many in the party. In 2014, Warren found herself the object of a draft campaign and a “Ready for Warren” super PAC. Although the organizers had no formal affiliation with her, she did little at first to tamp down the effort, which fueled speculation she might run.
Among those anxious for a decision was the Clinton campaign, which viewed her as a formidable foe and was relieved when she passed. “We within the Clinton world initially thought Bernie was the poor man’s Warren,” says Brian Fallon, a senior campaign official. “But when she didn’t run, he had such success that he became a major figure in his own right.”
Warren’s decision to sit out proved fateful for two reasons: Sanders, a gadfly to this point in his career, entered the race and caught fire. This created pressure from the left for Warren to endorse him. More broadly, it brought into tension her hard-won status as a progressive hero and her growing influence within the Democratic establishment. Endorsing Sanders, her ideological ally, would mean sacrificing her ability to influence Clinton, who was widely expected to win. So Warren withheld her endorsement until it was clear Clinton would be the nominee. In essence, Warren bet that she had a better chance of enacting her liberal agenda by working through Clinton than by banking on a Sanders revolution. Her decision shocked her hardcore supporters on the left, many of whom turned against her when Sanders lost.
“There was an enormous amount of ill will that was the result of her declining to endorse anyone and deciding not to take a position until after the convention,” says Charles Lenchner, a co-founder of Ready for Warren, who later endorsed Sanders. “Warren had a chance to help Bernie win when it was still possible—and she declined to do so.”
Those close to Warren say the backlash was palpable and unnerving. Sanders supporters flooded her Facebook posts with vitriol and charges that she’d sold out. “The feeling on the left was that she lacked courage,” says Cenk Uygur, co-host of The Young Turks, an influential online progressive news show, “that Bernie’s loss could be laid at her feet.”
Warren tersely defended her decision. “I thought it was the right thing to do,” she told me, without elaborating.
Her inside strategy paid off. Warren nearly ended up in a position of power that would have been inconceivable a few years earlier. When they got together, Clinton and Warren had a good rapport. And Warren was a determined campaigner for the nominee. According to campaign officials, Clinton seriously weighed Warren as her running mate. The Massachusetts senator underwent a full vetting and was smuggled into Whitehaven, Clinton’s Washington home, for an interview. It went well enough that some Clinton advisers were convinced Warren would be the best pick.
In a memo to Clinton written shortly after the August meeting and obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek, Philippe Reines, a longtime adviser, concluded of Warren: “If a crystal ball said she wouldn’t antagonize you for four years, it’s hard to argue she isn’t the most helpful for the next four months to get you elected.”
I asked Warren if she would have accepted the job if Clinton had offered it. She put down her mango lemonade.
“Yes.”
Ultimately, of course, Clinton chose a safe, ticket-balancing male running mate. Yet nearly everything about the campaign and plans for the transition already underway augured well for Warren and the liberal cause.
And then Clinton lost.
Warren doesn’t like to look back, at least not on the record in the presence of a reporter. But when I asked if her careful calculations had taught her anything about the limits of pushing an agenda through someone else, she was blunt. “Yes,” she said. “It’s never as good as doing it yourself.”
After Trump’s win, Warren took steps to establish herself as a 2020 candidate. Before Trump, she stuck mainly to matters of financial regulation. While most senators gallop toward TV cameras, she husbanded her political capital by declining to weigh in on most issues, knowing her words would carry more weight when she did speak. On Capitol Hill, she was notorious for speed-walking through the halls of the Senate while refusing even to acknowledge the reporters rushing alongside her and peppering her with questions. Besides Mitch McConnell, there was no more disciplined senator.
After the election, that stopped. She broadened her issue portfolio, discarded the chilly hallway demeanor, and reached out to journalists. The game had changed, there was a new system to master, and Warren perceived, rightly, that getting ahead in a presidential race would entail a different approach.
Today, in contrast with the other front-runners, she makes herself available to the press after nearly every campaign event. It’s an evolution she seems to enjoy, not least because her newfound status gives her influence over a broader range of issues than ever before. “As the megaphone grew,” she explained, “I was able to pull more of those pieces in.”
And while Warren disappointed Schwab by passing on Davos, the wealth tax he inspired has given her license, she believes, to continue pursuing what Franklin Roosevelt called “bold, persistent experimentation.” Historically, Democrats’ lofty aspirations often crashed on the rocky shoals of public financing. But no one can question how Warren will pay for her policies if—and it’s a big if—her fervent wish to shake trillions from the pockets of the rich comes true.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have universal child care?” she asked. “The question is always, ‘How are you gonna pay for that?’ We never sound credible as Democrats on that, and it shrinks up our ambitions. So our ambitions keep narrowing.” She adopted a pleading look. “ ‘Well, can we have just a little bit of child care? How about a tiny bit? Could we give a little help on student loans?’ ” She shook her head. “Let me make this pitch: Who’s gonna show up to reduce student loan debt by 2%? I’m serious! Who’s gonna show up on our side to fight for that?”
For now, Warren has rebounded from early struggles like the DNA flap. “She took the full punch,” says an adviser, “and survived.” That’s let her populist message shape the race.
Trump, preoccupied with stoking racial and cultural divisions, hasn’t seemed to notice, yet. But some in his circle have long worried he’s vulnerable to a message like Warren’s. “Trump’s populism in the campaign had two components,” Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, told me two years ago, when he was still in the White House. “There’s the immigration and religion stuff, which we’re delivering on big time. And there’s the economic populism, which I’m pushing on. But you’ve got to have both. If we don’t deliver on it, we’re leaving it there for Warren and Sanders to pick up.”
Warren’s outspoken criticism of Wall Street excess hasn’t waned. She still takes down targets such as Tim Sloan, the Wells Fargo & Co. chief executive officer, who resigned in March after months of her withering attacks. (“His hands are too dirty from overseeing years of scams and scandals,” she tweeted.) But she’s also spent considerable energy distinguishing herself from Sanders by declaring herself a capitalist—not a socialist—who simply wants the system to work for everyone.
That assurance has won the grudging respect of some former adversaries. “The country is hungry for serious policy proposals to address income inequality,” says Lee Sachs, counselor to Treasury Secretary Geithner during the financial crisis and a co-founder of Gallatin Point Capital, a private investment firm.
Whether or not Warren can beat Trump, her poll numbers and fundraising success have bolstered her viability with Democrats. She has also resurrected her popularity with the left. “Warren is back in the good graces of a lot of progressives,” says Uygur, the Young Turks host. “Are some people still bitter about 2016? Yes. Bernie has his die-hards. But Warren is converting a lot of people on the strength of her ideas. She’s making progressivism safe for the mainstream.”
It’s a cliché that every candidate senses an imminent burst of momentum, Warren included. “This is what I’m beginning to perceive,” she told me. “For many people, they may not know the details of my plans, but they’re sure glad to know that the plans are there—that somebody has worked through this who they can trust, and who has their interests at heart, and will be in that fight and win that fight.”
Yet if Warren wins the nomination, many Democrats, her allies included, worry some of her plans could hurt her when she comes under the full force of Republican opposition. While the wealth tax is broadly popular, other Warren-backed plans such as decriminalizing migrant border crossings and Medicare for All, are not. “Banning private insurance is a problem,” says Frank. This month, NPR found only 41% of voters support a Medicare plan that does away with most private insurance, while a Hill-HarrisX poll found more Americans favor criminal prosecution (41%) for illegal border crossings than civil fines (32%).
Here’s what else the polls show: What Democrats want most is simply to beat Trump—period. A June Gallup survey showed that, by a wide margin, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents prize electability over issue stances, race, and gender. In other words, voters are looking for a nominee willing to hit back at a president who leaves no doubt he’ll do whatever it takes to win.
Warren is happy to oblige. She was the first major candidate to call for Trump’s impeachment. “If he were anyone other than the president of the United States,” she said in May, “he would be in handcuffs and indicted.” A new CBS poll shows that 56% of Democrats in battleground states believe Warren would “fight for” them, more than any of her rivals.
The possibility that Democrats may choose ruthlessness in a nominee above all else could put Warren in a strange position, since it would mean primary voters will have picked the professor-turned-senator less for her intellectual skills than her pugilistic ones. That would turn the rationale for her candidacy on its head. All those minutely detailed plans to tax the rich and provide Medicare and cut college tuition—the foundation of Warren’s campaign—might not be why they vote for her at all. If she defeats Trump on those terms, the most radical Democratic agenda since Roosevelt could end up being ushered into the White House almost as an afterthought.
And how would Warren feel? “I’d be totally fine with that,” she says.
To contact the author of this story: Joshua Green in Washington at jgreen120@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jim Aley at jaley@bloomberg.net, Wes Kosova
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