The Media Really Want You to Know How Great Elizabeth Warren is Doing
Uh…what? Are we watching the same movie?
Witness the fall and rise of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. She had a disastrous end of 2018, as — in hoping to put questions about her claims to Native American heritage behind her — she released a video that she hoped would clear things up. It did the opposite.
She became a punch line for, among others, President Donald Trump. Observers — including us — who had rated Warren as one of the two or three people most likely to be the Democratic nominee dropped her out of the top five.
But Warren understood that where she was in February 2019 mattered far less than where she would be in February 2020. So she started to build and roll out a series of detailed policy proposals designed to put the Native American flap behind her (again) and carve out space as the race’s resident policy wonk.
Mission accomplished. Warren is back in the top four in this week’s CNN 2020 rankings, thanks to a series of strong polls and the growing sense that she is very much back in this contest.
All due respect to Chris Cillizza and Harry Enten, but what are they talking about?
CNN’s own polling and the latest Morning Consult numbers released on June 4th, show Sen. Warren at the same 7-10 percent she has been bouncing around all of this year. Tracking up from 7% to 10% when that still leaves you 28 points behind the leader Joe Biden isn’t exactly “strong polling.”
RCP average has her right in the middle of her range at 8.2%, and while she is third nationally, more telling is that she is 4th in Iowa, 5th in New Hampshire, 4th in Nevada, 5th in South Carolina, and 5th in the newly moved up and important California. That is a strange batch of data to conclude “growing sense that she is very much back in this contest.”
It isn’t just CNN either. A quick glance at the Google reveals there is at least a strain of groupthink when it comes to Elizabeth Warren over the last week:
That is a lot of coincidence. Either A) it’s really happening B) it’s a media conspiracy to push a narrative C) it’s a large group of folks who all talk to each other, read the same things, think in similar ways, all saying what everyone they know is saying.
The numbers don’t seem to support A) and while I’m sure there are those on the right convinced B) is the answer cause everything is a media conspiracy, or something, I lean towards the latter. Add to it a healthy dose of boredom in the “horse race” that really isn’t a horse race until the paring of the field in September. Writers and commentators have to write and commentate, after all.
She has rolled out a series of policy proposals, but missing in most of the adoring coverage of Elizabeth Warren’s supposedly great week was that this also happened:
This has the potential to be a problem: right in that clip you see Warren try to pivot to policy, rattling off her list of proposals, only to get tagged with the “Rachel Dolezal” tag and get put right back on the defensive. The friendly media coverage she continues to receive pounds the drum beat of “policy wonk” but most voters aren’t voting for policy details; they are voting for narratives and stories. Right now the prevailing story on Elizabeth Warren to a whole bunch of folks is the “1/1024th” botched DNA rollout. Being challenged on appropriating race and culture by a popular African-American radio host on video is all the more problematic when you look at Elizabeth Warren’s paltry 7% support among African-American democrats, compared to Joe Biden’s 47%. That isn’t a bad number; it’s a death knell when states such as South Carolina figure prominently in the early primaries.
No policy proposal outweighs the viral visual of her stumbling around “I’m not a person of color but I believed what my family told me.” The media narrative of “charismatic policy wonk” didn’t make a dent on the stoic face of Charlamagne tha God as he refused to settle for anything less than an answer to the simple question he was asking. Supporters protested that it is three minutes out of an hour long conversation, but this is the world we live in. Three minutes is all the attention span most folks give a candidate that isn’t leading. Three minutes is all you get in the debates, if that, so wonky better give way to sound bite. Three minutes should be more than enough time to give an answer on an issue that you’ve known about for years if you are a master communicator. Those three minutes are now on video.
To be fair to the senator the Warren family isn’t the first or last family to claim heritage that isn’t theirs, innocent mistake or otherwise. As our friend Vikram Bath pointed out when the “1/1024th” debate was roiling, plenty of people who otherwise are supportive were conflicted on what to make of it.
I’m genuinely torn here. I feel respect should be given to those who have truly suffered for their identities, which Warren has not. If they object, I would like to defer to their views. Unfortunately, it may be difficult to get a true census rather than a handful of tweets I was able to find.
On the other hand, her claim was likely made in good faith.
But that benefit of the doubt is going to need a better answer to the question than she has so far given, and certainly better than The Breakfast Club gave.
The answer to something fundamental about you, as a person, cannot be a wonky proposal about doing something for someone else.
All of which runs counter to the “she’s on fire” parade of stories. What they, and Warren 2020 supporters, should be saying is it’s early, and though he has a huge polling lead right now, Joe Biden flamed out the previous two times he ran and carries a high probability of doing/saying something really damaging because…well, he’s Joe Biden. Bernie is a high floor/low ceiling candidate and has been stuck with the support of the quarter of the party that has always supported him but not made much headway with anyone else, especially without Hillary Clinton to push people towards him. So sitting in third isn’t that bad, and theoretically is the position to build a coalition to clip a fallen Biden or a distasteful-to-the-Democratic-normies Bernie Sanders.
That is what they should do. That is the path for a Elizabeth Warren nomination. Wishcasting that going from 7% to 9% or 10% in polls, (something Pete Buttigieg did back before the Joe Biden announcement when the media was bored and wanted a story before slipping back) is changing the shape of the race isn’t going to help. There is a high probability that some of this same-speak narrative of a Warren “on fire” absent anything positive outside of media events/stories is also boredom, as nothing much is going to happen in this race between now and the twin debates at the end of June.
Campaigns are months of talking and narrative building, ending in hard data — the votes. At some point if she wants to be the nominee Elizabeth Warren, the widely proclaimed “policy wonk” in this race, is going to have to get some real world data points on her winning over the voters in her party in substantial numbers, not just being told how great a candidate she is on TV.
Warren is the preferred candidate of the liberal wonk sit because she speaks their language. The liberal wonk set is really not liking it that the real actual base of the Democratic Party loves Joe Biden, who seems to be a sort of bogeyman for them. They also believe that Biden would be a disaster as a President because he simply doesn’t understand the changes that occurred in politics with Republicans becoming a full white power authoritarian party.Report
Buttigieg is likewise at the bottom with no African American support (at 1% or less). He may be the dream candidate for morning talk show hosts, but that just means he’s trendy with the chatty white liberal elite.
Kamala Harris had a horrible week due to her helpless reaction to the PETA protester who grabbed her mic in California. It did not look remotely presidential.
It’s a very weak field, and even past failed candidates like Howard Dean would probably dominate them.Report
That is a lot of coincidence. Either A) it’s really happening B) it’s a media conspiracy to push a narrative C) it’s a large group of folks who all talk to each other, read the same things, think in similar ways, all saying what everyone they know is saying.
Is there any evidence of journalists colluding with each other to push narratives? If there isn’t any evidence of that sort of thing, it’s a lot easier to dismiss as a right-wing fantasy to explain away why the narratives they don’t like keep getting hold in the media ecosystem.Report
I know it’s prehistoric at this point but the Journolist thing comes to mind.Report
Did you ever read David Corn’s take on the Journolist?
This is my favorite part:
He then talks about how the ideas kicked around in the conversations that happened, sure, made it to a lot of different stories. But that’s not a conspiracy.
He goes on to mention that “Some Journolist refugees have started up Cabalist. (I’m not on it—yet.)”
For what it’s worth, I’m sure that the new Cabalist is also a community, rather than a conspiracy.
And any comparison that you might want to make to “journalists getting together to coordinate narratives” is… well, surely that’s coincidental.
As Corn points out: “when we publish an exposé revealing new information or an article with a strong viewpoint, we hope that others in the media pick up on the ideas and information. We do want to affect the national debate. Just about every journalist does.”Report
Maybe I’m naive but I’d like to think Andrew has it right. I see less coordinated conspiracy and more a class clique of similarly educated people of a particular part of our culture who just happen to have a really big megaphone.
I do think a better journalistic class would be more circumspect about it if for no other reason than that it would make them better at their jobs. Right now they seem happy to remain oblivious.Report
Hey, so long as the journalists aren’t coordinating stories, just talking about them together beforehand and coming up with the best takes on various situations that they happen to be advocating either for or against, that’s good enough for me.
It’s not like you can prevent that sort of thing.Report
Just as long as they aren’t’ hiring network officials to work in the WH we’ll be good.Report
Is this an oblique Jay Carney joke?Report
You can’t prevent it. But you can keep it in mind when assessing credibility.Report
I put my thoughts in the next paragraph but although there may be some, like Journolist years ago, the truth is like-minded people who all marinate in the same circles and same friends and same general beliefs will have something of a herd mentality. Same with folks immersed in conservative media, probably also true to some extent to us on OT when we agree on things. I dont think it’s a conspiracy as much as it is human natureReport
It just be a conspiracy, because, it’s crazy that people in the same profession would enjoy talking to each other.
https://ordinary-times.com/2013/02/15/ben-smith-doesnt-understand-how-google-works-either/#comment-482662Report
Meanwhile, every right-wing pundit in the world has decided, completely independently, that David French supports infanticide.Report
If we want to compare Journolism to every right-wing pundit in the world, we’re pretty much exactly where I was arguing we were in the first place.Report
I’m comparing with, not to. (I just looked that up; I can never remember which is which.)Report
A president needs a strong media presence. It’s a job requirement. Warren does ok in certain settings, but not in others. I think she is better as a Senator where she can focus more on oversight and crafting legislation. She knows what those people are up to, and knows, mostly, how to stop them.
This is a take slightly less focused on narrative than Andrew’s but it isn’t that different. And to be fair, I had similar feelings about Obama, and he proved me wrong. I thought he was too intellectual to connect at an emotional level with voters, but that turned out not to be true. Maybe Warren will figure it out, too.
For what it’s worth, I think “I trusted what my family told me” is a reasonable response. It’s transparent, and demonstrates a virtue – family connection – that we can all relate to.Report
Disclaimer: Warren is my preferred candidate of the moment. Win it with Warren! (This is why I am not hired to write campaign slogans).
Biden has run for President twice before and both times he self-destructed in quite spectacular manners. He is popular and I like him but history might not repeat but it rhymes. We saw he needed to reverse himself on the Hyde Amendment this week.
Basically, I think it is Biden’s to lose and there is still a fair chance he does it based on past and present performance. He seems to be learning but maybe not enough.Report
Nonsense.
You quote Chris Cillizza and Harry Enten as saying that “Warren is back in the top four in this week’s CNN 2020 rankings.”
This is a fact. And this far out from the election, fourth is “in the race.” The other sources you cite as evidence of groupthink are a New York Times op-ed (one of many, but the one that conveniently fit your narrative), Slate (hardly a msm source) and the Daily Show (ditto). Not much of a msm consensus in evidence here.
I get that you would prefer that Warren be judged as Pocahontas rather than a thoughtful candidate, but the fact that the others choose not to follow your narrative doesn’t confirm the “liberal media” silliness that posts like this one repeatedly claim.
I dislike what has become of election coverage, too. I hate that it starts a year too soon, that it’s all about strategy and the horse race, and that serious consideration of policy proposals from the right, left and center are all but absent. This doesn’t prove that msm is “liberal.” It proves that its lazy and stupid.Report
Yeah, I’m getting pretty tired of all the horse race stuff too. Every election season we decry it and then focus on little else.Report
I get that you would prefer that Warren be judged as Pocahontas rather than a thoughtful candidate, but the fact that the others choose not to follow your narrative doesn’t confirm the “liberal media” silliness that posts like this one repeatedly claim.
If you got that it was from your own imagination and not the piece, since no where is the term liberal media used, nor is the slander “pocahontas”.Report
More nonsense. No, the P name was never explicitly used, but the repeated claim that the ethnicity issue deserves to dominate Warren’s campaign (“The answer to something fundamental about you, as a person, cannot be a wonky proposal.”) is the same thing in politer terms.
Similarly, the post never explicitly uses the L word. But please tell me another plausible way to interpret the title “The Media Really Want You To Know,” as opposed to the claim actually supported by the evidence, “Two guys from CNN and a comedian want you to know.”Report
Those two thing are not, in fact, anything like each other. Your interpretation is yours to make, clearly you think very highly of Elizabeth Warren and are not open to criticism of her, measured or otherwise. Thank you for reading.Report
Now it’s my turn to ask — how on Earth do you get “Warren is not open to criticism” from anything I have written? Yes, I think the P issue is a red herring, but I haven’t said a word in support of her or her candidacy. (Pardon me. I called her “thoughtful,” a word that I would apply to nearly every presidential candidate in every recent election, with one glaring exception. You can probably guess who that is.) In any event, as I read your post it wasn’t really about Warren at all, but rather about the way she is covered. And I’ve explained why I don’t think you have made the case for your claims about that.Report
Andrew quoted the authors at length, who were describing a dynamic, not simply a single poll, in which Warren had “put the Native American flap behind her (again).” They wrote: “Mission accomplished.”
The Breakfast Club video is painful to watch. First, she falsely states that the DNA test did not demonstrate that she had Native American ancestry. Second, the host summarizes the discussion as Warren being like “a white woman pretending to be black,” which she appears to embrace by saying she learned it from her family.
She’s either very poor at interactive discussions, or the issue raises a number of confounding problems that nobody could navigate. She will probably receive no primary delegates attributable to African-American votes.Report
I googled CNN rankings, and it looks like they”re “power rankings” produced by Chris Cillizza and Harry Enten. I don’t frequent CNN’s site, but the term “power ranking” on sports sites denotes the author’s hot takes, not necessarily supported by statistics.Report
Wow! The main thing about that CNN poll is this first question to Democrats:
“I’m going to read a list of people who may be running in the Democratic primaries for president in 2020.
After I read all the names, please tell me which of those candidates you would be most likely to support for the
Democratic nomination for president in 2020, or if you would support someone else.”
The pollster proceeds to randomly read twenty-some names w/ titles. Imagine what that feels like.
I like answering polls. If that was the first question, I’d probably hangup.Report
Warren is basically this generation’s Al Gore. She has a talent for repeating progressive talking points back to them, which causes them to proclaim her a genius. It’s kind of the inverse of Trump, who repeats conservatives’ YouTube comments back to them. But for all of Warren’s supposed genius, every plan revolves around a massive expansion of government power, all paid for by the “rich” (not you, your’e not rich, other rich people). And it tends to fall apart when real experts examine it.Report
Fivethirtyeight’s podcast this week talked about how Warren keeps getting ‘humanized’ by the media and they seem to really want to show her as a regular gal in most of the coverage she gets. They also said the media keeps trying to drag Harris in that direction as well but she keeps pointing back to her accomplishments and not her personal story. Their overall point was that female candidates are typically forced to share more of their personal stories than males.
I think Warren is going to have a lot of canned lines ready for the debates and it’s going to get old fast. I don’t expect her to do very well in the primaries, but this race is so hard to handicap at the moment.
As an aside – they also suggested that if Trump just played golf and stayed off Twitter for the next year he would improve his chances for reelection because the people that are going to vote for him have already made up their minds and he can only hurt himself between now and November 2020.Report
Trump would help himself by not being a two-year-old, but we all know that’s not going to happen.Report
Here;’s a poll published today in the Des Monies Register that has Biden ahead at 24% followed by Bernie, Warren, and Mayor Pete in pretty much a three way tie between 14% and 16%. The Iowa caucuses are eight fishing months away. Does anybody think that’s too little time for Joe Biden to blow himself up and leave the race wide open?
TLDR: It’s still really early.Report
I expect this to be similar to a WWE Royal Rumble. The various candidates are going to agree to go after the Big Show (Biden) and try to clear him out so they have a fighting chance. If they start giving him the elder statesman kid glove treatment they are signaling they either aren’t actually willing to fight for the nomination or they think the optics of tearing him apart will look bad.
I wish I had better recollection of how Obama slowly moved to the top during the 2008 run-up. I can’t remember if he started emerging during the debates or if his ascendancy was more of a primary phenomenon.Report
I found this graph of poll averages: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/us/democratic_presidential_nomination-191.html
Basically, during the month of January, Obama went from well behind to even.Report
Two things about Obama v Clinton in 2008 that I think make it unique and not very applicable to other races. 1) historic nature of Obama, along with his political talent, is something that is not replicatable 2) we now have another data point on what a terrible candidate HRC is, which in hindsight makes it apparent folks were longing for another option and once Barack Obama showed he was viable the switch was massive and permanent. Specifically to the 08 race, when the African-American community became convince Obama could win (I believe this was SC but can’t look it up right at moment so forgive me if it’s off), they then turned out at something like 97% for him. You probably will never see movement like that again.Report
I was thinking SC was really when he became inevitable. The question is whether a Cory Booker or Harris could pull that support. Iowa may be Biden’s to lose, but that’s not a bellwether IMO. All they ever seem to pick is which candidate has the most support among center Left Democrats.Report