When Joe Biden entered the 2020 presidential race, he was seen as the “compromise nominee,” the so-called centrist that could win the primary and beat Trump in the general election. He was thrust out there as a moderate-by-comparison candidate in a field of otherwise hardcore radicals. That was the whole point of his candidacy. But it turns out the Democrat Party establishment is warming up to one of his opponents instead: Fauxcahontas herself, Elizabeth Warren.
There was a time not so long ago when leading Democrats warned that Elizabeth Warren’s “fantasy-based blue-state populism” risked leading the party to ruin.
But in a revealing tell of how far her campaign has come since its early February launch, some unlikely voices in the center of the party are growing more comfortable with the idea of Warren as the nominee.
It’s a sign of how the ideological lanes of the 2020 primary have blurred and overlapped and of the steady progress Warren is making as a candidate. But it’s also a statement on Bernie Sanders, Warren’s top rival for progressive votes. Sanders continues to face significant resistance from within the party — and nowhere more so than among the moderates and establishment players who blanch at his talk of democratic socialism.
Warren, on the other hand, is gaining traction among those who once rejected her muscular vision of liberalism. She’s drawn notice for her wide-ranging “I have a plan for that” policy playbook, which has just enough growth-and-opportunity, center-left measures to earn her a serious look from former detractors. The Massachusetts senator may be out of sync with party centrists, but she’s drawn at least one sharp line with Sanders that is resonating with prominent moderate voices as she surges into the top tier in national and early state polls.
In other words, because she’s not Bernie Sanders, the party establishment thinks that makes her ultra-progressive platform look electable to independent voters, I guess? It’s true that Joe Biden has been flip-flopping in favor of more radical positions in order to maintain his frontrunner status, but it’s hard to imagine how that makes Elizabeth Warren suddenly appear palatable.
Biden’s not being shoved to the side just yet though. According to the report, even though establishment and “moderate” Democrats have been warming up to Warren, but still prefer Biden at this time, in the end, it doesn’t really matter because whoever the nominee is will be running on the most radical platform possible because that’s what it takes to win the nomination. Warren is no moderate, and if they believe her to be the “compromise nominee” then that just tells you how far to the left the Democrat Party has gone in recent years.
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Matt Margolis is the author of the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. His new book, Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy, will be published on July 30, 2019. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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