Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is dropping out of the presidential race, leaving two white men to duke it out for the Democratic nomination and then take on the white man sitting in the Oval Office.

It’s a disappointing turn of events for Democrats who are proud of recent historic firsts — electing America’s first black president and then electing a woman as a major party’s nominee in 2016. The 2020 Democratic field started out diverse but winnowed over time until Warren was the only candidate standing who wasn’t a white man.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to persist her way to the convention — and even though Super Tuesday did not go as she had hoped, how long she stays in could have some important implications for how the 2020 Democratic primary plays out.

Moderates appear to be rallying around former Vice President Joe Biden. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed him in an attempt to consolidate the anti-Sen. Bernie Sanders coalition. That’s potentially a problem for the left.

The biggest problem facing US democracy did not come up at the Democratic debate in Charleston this week. It hasn’t really been discussed in the election at all. But it lurks behind all the more specific issues, an unwelcome presence no one quite wants to acknowledge.

It is simply this: The US is in a period of declining social and political trust. Americans increasingly think the system is rigged and that their fellow citizens don’t necessarily share their basic values and presumptions. This makes them strongly disinclined to invest their hopes in political promises of common good.

Elizabeth Warren’s team in recent weeks explored ways to raise money from Silicon Valley donors without violating her ironclad fundraising pledge to not “sell access to my time,” Recode has learned.

The Democratic presidential campaign considered an inbound request to have a campaign representative — such as an endorser, a staff member, or a high-level volunteer leader — attend a now-canceled high-dollar event in the Bay Area, according to several people familiar with the discussions. Those talks coincided with a previously unreported event in San Francisco that raised about $12,000 for her campaign, hosted by local physicians and activists.

As the fiery Democratic debate in Nevada raged on Wednesday night, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) began fundraising at a blistering pace.

Warren, in particular, lit up the stage in Las Vegas. As Vox’s Emily Stewart noted, the appearance of multibillionaire and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg brought back the Warren who started the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and promised to leave a legacy that meant “plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor” in the agency’s creation.

There’s no way around it: New Hampshire was a tough loss for Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The state is often referred to as her backyard, and she once notably led the polls there. Her fourth-place finish on Tuesday wasn’t just behind the other top candidates; it was far behind them. Plus, the recent loss followed a solid but not stellar finish in Iowa.

That said, it’s worth noting that New Hampshire marks just the start of the primary — and far from the end for her campaign. Because of her strong organizing and expansive presence in Nevada, Warren is poised for a decent showing in the state and could well be among a handful of leading candidates in delegate-rich California on Super Tuesday.

What happened to Elizabeth Warren?

The big politics story of the spring and summer of 2019 was Warren’s relentless rise in the polls. Throughout May, June, July, and August, her numbers got better and better. By mid-October, she had nearly caught Joe Biden.

Six staffers, all of them women of color, have left Elizabeth Warren’s Nevada campaign in recent months, saying that higher-ups treated them like tokens and ignored their concerns.

“I felt like a problem — like I was there to literally bring color into the space but not the knowledge and voice that comes with it,” one former field organizer, who asked to remain anonymous, told Politico on Thursday. “We all were routinely silenced and not given a meaningful chance on the campaign.”

Last week, President Donald Trump loosened restrictions on the use of landmines by the US military in conflict areas, reversing an Obama-era policy. Top 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, though, are vowing to reverse the reversal.

In four statements to Vox and a tweet, former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), billionaire Tom Steyer, ,Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg all say they will scrap Trump’s policy and revert to the Obama administration one, which prohibited the procurement of landmines and their use outside of the Korean Peninsula. Obama’s team chose to continue their deployment in the Koreas to thwart a potential invasion from Pyongyang.

Foreign policy dominated the opening section of Tuesday night’s presidential debate, and it allowed the six candidates onstage in Iowa to put some serious daylight between them on issues of war and trade.

Among other things, they debated how many troops to keep in the Middle East and whether they support the US-Mexico-Canada trade deal (USMCA) President Donald Trump negotiated.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is not shying away from the parade of ultra-rich guys fretting about her in the press — instead, she appears to be egging them on. From a tax calculator meant for billionaires to a new campaign ad, a twist on a popular meme, and campaign coffee mug reading “BILLIONAIRE TEARS,” the Massachusetts Democrat is leaning into her billionaire battle.

It’s a way to fire up supporters and a signal of her campaign’s calculation that billionaires complaining about her helps and doesn’t hurt. At the current moment, the word billionaire is accompanied with almost a villainous connotation among much of the American public, especially on the left, and Warren appears to be trying to capitalize on it. And taking on billionaires is also a way to remind voters of her past as a longtime critic of the financial industry, Wall Street, and the big banks.

On Wednesday, New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin interviewed Bill Gates and took the opportunity to ask the world’s second-richest man for his take on Sen. Elizabeth Warren and her wealth tax proposal.

“I’ve paid over $10 billion in taxes. I’ve paid more than anyone in taxes. If I had to have paid $20 billion, it’s fine. But when you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over,” Gates said.

Leon Cooperman is worth more than $3 billion. He spent 25 years at Goldman Sachs before starting his own hedge fund, which in 2017 reached a $4.9 million settlement with federal regulators over insider trading charges while admitting no wrongdoing. And this week, he cried about Elizabeth Warren on CNBC. “I care,” Cooperman said.

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with crying on television or anywhere else, and Cooperman’s emotions appeared genuine. What’s more, he’s far from the only billionaire fretting about Warren’s candidacy in public. Talking to billionaires about their thoughts on her is all the rage at the moment.

The angry conservative reaction to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s tax proposals is quite revealing. They expose a particular intellectual tendency, one that goes beyond merely opposing higher taxes into a more fundamental defense of the American model of political economy. It’s a sense that the basic contours of America’s system, despite yawning inequality and the undeniably outsized influence of the rich over politics, is fundamentally just — and that the attempts to reform it are illegitimate efforts to impose tyrannical forms of majority rule.

One of the most interesting expressions of this view came from Michael Strain, the director of economic policy studies at the center-right American Enterprise Institute. Strain has a reputation as a thoughtful policy type; he recently wrote a Bloomberg column arguing that Warren’s proposal to tax fortunes above $50 million likely would not raise as much revenue as her campaign says it would. (Sen. Bernie Sanders has also proposed a wealth tax.)

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders agree on the broad contours of what the American health care system should look like — universal enrollment in a government program that provides care with no premiums, deductibles, or co-payments financed largely by taxes on the rich, and cuts in payment rates to pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other health industry players.

But they do disagree in part on how to finance the rest of it.

On Friday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren released her Medicare-for-all financing plan. After being attacked at the last Democratic debate for refusing to admit Medicare-for-all would require middle-class tax hikes, Warren wants to show that you can pay for the plan without them.

And you can. Maybe.

The fourth Democratic debate on Tuesday night reopened a familiar fault line between presidential candidates: Medicare-for-all.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), having established herself as one of the two leading contenders, came under repeated attack over her support for Medicare-for-all and the question of how to pay for it.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren now holds a slight lead in national polls of the 2020 Democratic primary, according to the polling aggregation site RealClearPolitics — the first time that she, not former Vice President Joe Biden, has led the race.

Warren’s new lead in national polls comes on the back of a Quinnipiac poll, released on Tuesday, which shows her leading the Democratic field: 29 percent of registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters said they would vote for her if the primary were held today. Former Vice President Joe Biden, now in second place, received 26 percent of the vote in the same poll. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), typically considered the other frontrunner in the race, had 16 percent.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is expanding the first major piece of legislation she’d try to pass through Congress if elected president: a vast anti-corruption package to crack down on the entrenched culture of lobbying in Washington, DC.

Warren’s plan, first released in September, is an update of a bill she released back in August 2018, well before she announced her campaign for president. She’s been clear it would be the first major legislative priority of a Warren administration — and she’s been gradually updating it ever since. Warren believes the flow of money in politics has stalled progress on a number of other issues, including gun violence, climate change, and the rising cost of health care. Stamping money out of politics goes to the root of these issues, she says.

The journalism industry’s landscape looks bleak — and Democratic presidential candidates are talking about it.

President Donald Trump is calling the media the “enemy of the people.” Major media companies are consolidating, like the recently announced Gannett and GateHouse media merger, mass layoffs are on the horizon, and local newspapers are shuttering at a concerning speed. All the while, newsroom budgets are dwindling and the digital media industry faces financial pressures that have shaped newsroom priorities away from reporting.

Less than a week after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has released one of the most sweeping gun policy proposals of the Democratic presidential candidates. And she’s set a big objective for the plan: to get US gun deaths down by 80 percent.

It’s an ambitious, if not downright impossible, goal — one that would attempt to shift US levels of gun violence down to that of America’s developed peers. But Warren’s plan goes further than the typical Democratic proposals, which are mostly focused on universal background checks and an assault weapons ban, to start moving America in that direction.

BOSTON — Elizabeth Warren has long struggled to capture independent voters in her home state of Massachusetts.

This dynamic betrays a fear among Democrats who are already thinking ahead to a high-stakes general election matchup with President Donald Trump. Some worry Warren’s low approval numbers among Massachusetts independents — particularly men — foreshadow a potential lack of appeal to independent voters she would need in crucial states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin should she become the Democratic nominee. Those states were all sources of a painful Electoral College loss in 2016.

Elizabeth Warren released a plan Monday that challenges the way American presidents have thought about trade policy since the Cold War — rejecting the premise that deals should be about business interests in favor of a progressive agenda.

President Trump’s pitch to white working-class voters has involved plenty of culture war politics, but also a striking break with the free trade policies adhered to by most Republicans over the past generation. That’s left Democrats divided and puts the question of trade policy at the center of the Democratic primary. Some want to continue in the tradition of Presidents Clinton and Obama, who signed big trade deals with American partners. But most congressional Democrats opposed NAFTA in the 1990s and the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2015-’16.

Elizabeth Warren has a plan for the private equity industry — and they’re probably not going to like it. For workers at the now-defunct Toys R Us, Payless, and Shopko, had her plan already been enacted, it could have made a difference.

This week, the Massachusetts Democrat unveiled the latest plank of her “economic patriotism” proposal to push American companies to operate in a fairer way and focus more on the interests of workers and consumers, this time with a focus on Wall Street. In a Medium post, she laid out various ideas for ways to end Wall Street’s “stranglehold” on the economy. “To raise wages, help small businesses, and spur economic growth, we need to shut down the Wall Street giveaways and rein in the financial industry so it stops sucking money out of the rest of the economy,” she wrote.

While Elizabeth Warren famously has plans for everything, the Democratic senator and presidential candidate hasn’t unveiled a full immigration proposal yet. But she has endorsed the most radical immigration idea already out there in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary (ahead of her appearance in the first debate on Wednesday night): making it no longer a federal crime to cross the border and migrate to the US without papers.

In an interview with HuffPost’s Roque Planas on Tuesday, Warren said she supported repealing the provision of US law that makes “illegal entry” into the US a federal crime, which has been on the books since 1929 but has only been routinely enforced in the 21st century.