After a series of disappointing finishes in primary contests, including very poor performances in Super Tuesday states, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) will drop out of the presidential race on Thursday.
“Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts plans to drop out of the presidential race on Thursday and will inform her staff of her plans later this morning, according to a person close to her, ending a run defined by an avalanche of policy plans that aimed to pull the Democratic Party to the left and appealed to enough voters to make her briefly a front-runner last fall, but that proved unable to translate excitement from elite progressives into backing from the party’s more working-class and diverse base,” the Times reported Thursday morning.
Warren’s decision follows a rather grim statement on her campaign’s “next steps” from campaign manager Roger Lau Wednesday following the progressive senator’s disappointing Super Tuesday outcomes.
“Last night, we fell well short of our viability goals and projections, and we are disappointed in the results,” wrote Lau in a Medium post promoted by Warren Wednesday. “We’re still waiting for more results to come in to get a better sense of the final delegate math. And we also all know the race has been extremely volatile in recent weeks and days with frontrunners changing at a pretty rapid pace. But we are obviously disappointed, and Elizabeth is talking with our team to assess the path forward.”
“All of us have worked for Elizabeth long enough to know that she isn’t a lifetime politician and doesn’t think like one,” Lau continued. “She’s going to take time right now to think through the right way to continue this fight. There’s a lot at stake for this country and the millions of people who are falling further and further behind.”
“This decision is in her hands, and it’s important that she has the time and space to consider what comes next,” he concluded. “Elizabeth believes in her ideas and in the big, structural change that is badly needed to root out corruption in Washington and will decide what she thinks is the best way to advance them. We’ll have more soon.”
In its postmortem on Warren’s campaign, the Times describes the collapse of her candidacy as being the result of “death by a thousand cuts” rather than a “dramatic implosion.”
As The Daily Wire has chronicled, Warren once topped the crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates, peaking on October 7, where she briefly held a narrow lead over the long-time frontrunner former Vice President Joe Biden, according to Real Clear Politics‘ average of the national polls. But since late October, her performance in national polls has steadily declined, bottoming out in recent weeks at less than 15%.
“Last October, according to most national polls, Ms. Warren was the national pacesetter in the Democratic field,” the Times notes. “By December, she had fallen to the edge of the top tier, wounded by a presidential debate in November where her opponents relentlessly attacked her. She invested heavily in the early states, with a ground game that was the envy of her rivals. But it did not pay off: In the first four early voting states, Ms. Warren slid from third place in Iowa to fourth in New Hampshire and Nevada to fifth in South Carolina. By Super Tuesday, her campaign was effectively over — with the final blow of a third-place finish in the primary of her home state, Massachusetts.”
Warren’s decision makes her the fifth Democratic candidate to pull out of the race in less than week. After coming up far short of expectations in South Carolina on Saturday, Tom Steyer announced that he was out Saturday night. He was followed by former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Sunday and Sen. Amy Klobuchar on Monday. Billionaire Mike Bloomberg dropped out Wednesday after failing to gain as much traction in the Super Tuesday contests. Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Bloomberg have since thrown their support to resurgent frontrunner Biden.
This story has been expanded to include more information.