Eighteen progressive groups are begging Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to put aside the differences and make up after a contentious week on the trail that culminated in an agressive confrontation during (and after) Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate.
If Warren and Sanders can’t declare a truce, they say, it’ll cost progressives in the presidential election and, perhaps, across the board, as the “united” progressive front fractures into warring factions.
The problems began late last week, after Warren’s campaign discovered a Sanders call script, provided to volunteers making campaign and “get out the vote” calls to identified Iowa Democrats, that referred to Warren as a “candidate of the elite,” and suggested that Warren couldn’t pull from the working class and “red state” demographics the Democratic presidential nominee will need to defeat President Donald Trump in 2020.
Warren fired back, accusing Sanders of deplying his volunteers to “trash” her in Iowa. Sanders tried to apologize but it was too late: a coincidentally timed allegation hit CNN, and in it, a source claimed that, in a 2018 meeting, Sanders told Warren that a woman could never be president.
Sanders confirmed that the pair had met, but denied saying that a woman couldn’t be president. Warren seemed to confirm the CNN story, saying only that Sanders said a woman couldn’t win a contest against Trump, not that a woman couldn’t be president altogether. Sanders and his supporters called Warren’s subsequent statement an unfair attack, and blamed her for looking to boost her flagging poll numbers by manufacturing outrage among potential progressive voters who might be favoring Sanders.
The two duked it out again during Tuesday night’s debate and, it now appears, afterwards. Following the closing statements, as candiates were shaking hands and leaving the debate stage, Warren confronted Sanders, accusing him of “lying” about her on “national television.” Sanders, taken aback, cautioned Warren to continue the discussion in private.
Their respective supporters, taking cues from the candidates, pushed contrasting hashtags on Twitter and shouted insults across social media. Left-leaning media argued that Warren was stoking unwarranted dischord. Warren’s supporters — many of them female — accused Sanders of being a career misogynist.
The feud, which once looked speculative, has now, progressive groups say, boiled over, and its threatening to sideline Democratic socialists and far-left voters altogether, according to CNN, and they want Sanders and Warren to knock it off before someone really gets hurt.
“Eighteen days out from the Iowa caucuses, 18 influential organizations with ties to both candidates — and strong stakes in the wider movement — are launching a campaign to unite the Democratic left and push voters to act strategically on caucus night by not leaving their sites ‘without casting their final vote for one of the top two progressives in the race,'” the outlet reports.
“As part of a new ‘Progressives Unite 2020 Pledge,'” CNN adds, “the groups are vowing to direct their fire on President Donald Trump and against ‘candidates supported by the corporate wing’ of the Democratic Party. They are also asking progressive voters to ‘come together in state caucuses, primaries and conventions from the first vote in Iowa to the last vote at the DNC Convention in Wisconsin.'”
“When progressives fight each other, the establishment wins,” the group’s chair said in a statement to media. “We saw it in 2004 when progressives took each other out and John Kerry slipped through to win Iowa and then went on to lose in November to a very unpopular Republican incumbent.”
That may be easier said that done. Sanders supporters seem increasingly convinced that Bernie is being deliberately sidelined by the Democratic party — yet again — and that progressives are being written out of the 2020 election in favor of “electability.”
They may not be wrong. Then-prospective nominee Hillary Clinton wielded plenty of influence within the Democratic National Committee in 2016, accumulating superdelegates so as to block Sanders from the nomination before the first ballot was cast in New Hampshire. This time around, insiders say former Vice President Joe Biden is the party’s best shot, and the polls seem to back them up.