Although Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) remains adamant that she can beat President Donald Trump in a general election, her supporters are starting to worry.
Ellyn Rothstein, a voter who was interviewed at a town hall in Brooklyn by the Wall Street Journal, believes that Warren’s declining performance in the polls is indicative of the candidate’s inability to connect with non-liberal voters.
“I started to realize,” Rothstein, a retired teacher, told the WSJ, “I know a lot of people in the middle of the country who are frightened by her.”
According to the WSJ, “interviews with more than a dozen attendees of the Brooklyn town hall who either plan to back Ms. Warren or are leaning toward doing so suggest Ms. Warren’s liberal base is, at this stage in the race, viewing her campaign cautiously.”
Warren, however, believes that her policies are actually appealing to large swaths of voters outside left-wing bubbles. “Independents and Republicans like it,” Warren said at the Brooklyn town hall, reports the news agency.
However, recent polling shows this not to be the case. An Economist/YouGov poll released Wednesday shows that only 8% of Republicans view Warren favorably, and 81% view her unfavorably. Among independents, 27% view Warren favorably, while 44% view her unfavorably.
According to a Morning Consult poll released on Tuesday, supporters of other top-tier Democratic presidential candidates don’t even flock to Warren as a second-choice candidate, with the exception of those who support the self-avowed democratic socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT).
Furthermore, the appeal of Medicare For All, one of Warren’s signature policy proposals, only enjoys support from 14% of Republicans, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. The news agency also reports that Warren, who is polling third nationally at 18%, has experienced “a 5-point drop from her level of support in October and 7 point fall from her peak in September.”
As support for Warren continues to decline, the candidate seems to have gotten the hint — the New York Times reported earlier this month that Warren has stopped bringing up Medicare For All in campaign stump speeches.
But Ms. Warren herself is barely speaking of the proposal. After months of attacks from other candidates, and questions and some blowback from both liberals and moderates, the most ambitious and expensive of Ms. Warren’s many plans — and the one most likely to transform the lives of voters — is just a passing mention in her standard stump speech, rarely explored in depth unless a questioner brings it up.
“I expected her to talk more about the health care for all stuff, definitely,” said Max Goldman, 53, who attended Ms. Warren’s rally in Clarinda. Referring to her campaign, he added, “I think they know it’s controversial.”
As the Daily Wire previously reported, Warren doesn’t have a feasible plan to pay for Medicare For All.
She might as well have said she’d pay for the plan with leprechaun gold…
Warren’s plan would cost $52 trillion over 10 years, but remember, there is no sunset for the single-payer program. It would cost more than $5 trillion a year. For comparison, the federal government spent an already alarming $4.11 trillion in fiscal year 2018, up from $3.99 trillion in fiscal year 2017.
On Tuesday, Warren appeared on The View and claimed otherwise: “I figured out how to do every plan I’ve done without increasing taxes on the middle class.”