Senator Elizabeth Warren. (photo: AP)
26 August 19
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Biden is ostensibly the candidate of the Democratic establishment. But
it was Elizabeth Warren—who’s built her career on trying to challenge
the status quo—who spent the weekend wowing party insiders.
At this point in Warren’s campaign, it’s not a
surprise anymore when she spends hours working a “selfie line” after a
major event, as she did following two massive rallies she’s held in the
past week. But it was a surprise when more than 150 of the Democratic
Party’s biggest donors similarly lined up on Thursday night after her
speech at a dinner here—and it struck even some of the Democrats waiting
to take photos with her.
“These are people who should not like her,” said one
attendee, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to avoid showing
favoritism. “And they love her.”
The next day, at the summer meeting of the Democratic
National Committee, party members were on their feet cheering when she
took the stage for a brief address.
When he spoke there, Senator Cory
Booker of New Jersey seemed to land more applause lines overall. A few
other candidates were also received warmly, including Senator Bernie
Sanders of Vermont, who gave a notably conciliatory speech about the
proud legacy of the Democratic Party that perhaps no one could have
imagined him delivering after his burn-down-the-DNC campaign in 2016.
But it was the Massachusetts senator who got a
standing ovation before she’d even said a word, and another as soon as
she’d finished speaking. From the start, Warren’s campaign was built on
the theory that she’s an outsider whom insiders can live with, and an
insider who has credibility with outsiders—in 2016 terms, someone who
can attract both Sanders and Hillary Clinton voters. Primary voting is
months away. The DNC’s 2020 convention is almost a year from now. But on
Friday afternoon, in the huge, bland hotel ballroom where the DNC
meeting was held, Warren’s theory seemed to be working out.
She “stretches across a broad spectrum of Democrats,”
said Don Fowler, a DNC chair in the 1990s, a longtime Clinton-family
loyalist, and someone who’s been to more DNC meetings over more election
cycles than most people in Democratic politics today. Explaining what
he thinks her appeal is to establishment Democrats, Fowler told me that
for all of Warren’s talk of “big, structural change”—by fundamentally
reworking the economy—“she does not include in her presentation the
implication of being against things, except the current president.”
Warren’s insider-outsider routine is one reason
Democratic operatives and analysts told me—and one another, in private
conversations—that they’ve begun to see her as the odds-on favorite to
win her party’s nomination. However, a few of the Democrats I spoke with
noted that her positioning could become a trap: With Sanders and Warren
expected to battle even more intensely in the coming months, the
change-hungry part of the Democratic base might begin to ask why
establishment insiders seem so comfortable with her.
Jay Jacobs, the chair of the New York Democratic
Party, told me a few hours after Warren’s Friday speech that although
his politics aren’t as far left as Warren’s, “there wasn’t a thing she
said today that I could not have written.” Jacobs, who was made chair by
the Biden-backing Governor Andrew Cuomo, added, “The times do call for
bolder action.”
“I hope Sanders supporters see Warren’s broadening
support as a good thing and won’t now cynically try to paint her as
beholden to insiders, because she’s not,” said a DNC member who isn’t
currently committed to any candidates and who spoke on the condition of
anonymity. “We will see.”
Most of the Democrats I talked to didn’t seem
especially upset that Biden did not attend the summer meeting. But they
did have their suspicions about why he skipped it: Multiple state-party
chairs and other attendees told me—speaking only on the condition of
anonymity—that they assumed he was wary of receiving a less-than-wild
reception compared with other candidates.
Asked for comment on those assumptions, the Biden
spokesman Andrew Bates wouldn’t say whether they were correct or not,
but he noted that the former vice president often attends DNC events.
“This weekend he was in New Hampshire, where he had great events
speaking directly to voters about the stakes of this election,” Bates
said.
Just like every other group of voters, DNC members
have their own interests, and Warren tried to appeal to the things that
make them tick. In her speech on Thursday, she reminded the audience
that in March 2018, she wrote $5,000 checks to each state party from her
campaign account, part of an overall $11 million she raised for
Democratic Party efforts. During the midterms, she also endorsed and
campaigned for candidates across the country. Her work on behalf of
other Democrats is likely helpful with the
what-have-you-done-for-me-lately types who live for these major meetings
of Democrats.
And even if most DNC members are staying studiously
neutral in the primaries, several of them told me they like what they’ve
seen in the massive ground operation Warren is assembling in the
early-voting states. To those who spend their professional lives
thinking about campaign mechanics, this is alluring.
“To her advantage, it appears as though she did not let the growing pains of the early stage
of her campaign sidetrack her from creating an infrastructure,” said
Trav Robertson, the Democratic Party chair in South Carolina, one of the
early states where campaign action is already under way. “Her
campaign’s been fascinating to watch,” he told me. “It’s a study of
‘Steady and slow wins the race.’”
Warren has made her detailed policy plans a core part
of her brand on the campaign trail, and that approach seems to interest
establishment Democrats too. After all, they’re the type of voters most
likely to actually read those proposals.
Sanders “is providing more of economic aspirations;
she’s providing more of a road map,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the
president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, the
executive vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers
International Union, and a member of the DNC executive committee. “Even
in this room, she comes across as practical, smart,” he said, standing
in the hotel ballroom. “I think there is a sense of respect for her and
the way she’s conducting her campaign.”
Do the opinions of party insiders even matter anymore? The answer is a resounding “maybe.” DNC members are among the superdelegates
whose power in the presidential-nominating process was stripped last
year. But all the people at the summer meeting are active and
influential in local politics, and they have the potential to softly
sway opinions in ways that could ripple out of their communities.
The DNC members won’t come together like this again
for almost a year. The next meeting, announced on Saturday afternoon, is
set for July 17, 2020, in Milwaukee—the day after the Democratic
nominee delivers his or her acceptance speech at the next convention.
Democrats have a history of summer flings with lefty insurgents ahead of
presidential primaries—think Howard Dean in 2003 and Sanders in 2015.
At least for now, though, Democrats seem to be having fun watching
Warren.
“Most of all, she’s smart as shit,” Fowler told me as
he tried to put his finger on why he and others like her. “You don’t
want a dumb-ass president.”
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