Just a week after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said she would accept help from a Super PAC – after it became clear she was losing the 2020 Democratic nomination – the dark-money group set up to assist her candidacy is placing a $9 million ad buy ahead of Super Tuesday.
Persist PAC, a reference to that time three years ago when Warren kept reading a rebuke of then-Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions even though Sen. Mitch McConnell told her to stop by using a little-used senate rule and the minor back-and-forth made Warren a hero to feminists on par with Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman, plans to spend the money boosting Warren before the mass of primaries on March 3.
Politico reported that the “mysterious” super PAC “is making a late attempt to save her candidacy.”
“Combined with the $3.25 million Persist PAC already spent in Super Tuesday states along with $2 million in Nevada and South Carolina, the shadowy group has committed over $14 million to try to buoy Warren’s candidacy,” the outlet reported. “All together, Warren — who has made the corrupting influence of dark money central to her candidacy — now has the biggest super PAC advertising in the Super Tuesday states.”
That’s a big swing from Warren’s previous stance on super PACs and dark money. As The Daily Wire previously reported, Warren said she was giving up her rejection of big-dollar donors because she couldn’t get her fellow Democrats to go along with her – a metaphor for her leadership skills if there ever was one.
“So, here’s where I stand. If all the candidates want to get rid of super PACs, count me in. I’ll lead the charge,” Warren said. “But that’s how it has to be. It can’t be the case that a bunch of people keep them and only one or two don’t.”
“So, look, the first day I got in this race over a year ago, I said I hope every presidential candidate who comes in will agree – no super PACs for any of us. I renewed that call dozens of times,” Warren added. “And I couldn’t get a single Democrat to go along with it.”
That was Warren’s justification for now accepting super PAC money – and not just accepting it, but accepting a lot of it on her behalf.
“Finally, we reached the point a few weeks ago where all of the men who were still in this race and on the debate stage all had either super PACs or they were multibillionaires and could just rummage around their sock drawers and find enough money to be able to fund a campaign,” she said.
Warren was in third place when she opened the door for the Persist PAC to start helping her flailing campaign. She’s now in fourth place after a poor showing in Nevada. She currently has eight delegates to her name, all of which she won during the messy Iowa caucus. She doesn’t appear to have any advantages heading in to Super Tuesday, but with this amount of dark money getting injected into her campaign before then, we’ll have to wait and see 1) whether it works for her and 2) whether she completely rethinks her stance on dark money going forward.