May 8, 2021

"She can paint a compelling portrait of what the inside of the Democratic Party activist bubble looked like, but shows no awareness that there is anything outside of the bubble..."

"... or even that she was inside of one. Warren does deal extensively with campaign questions about her electability. But she treats these as largely, and even axiomatically, sexist.... But sexism alone has a hard time explaining why Warren took the lead in national polls of primary voters before collapsing in the fall of 2019. Surely, the reason many of the voters who were prepared to nominate her changed their mind is not that they learned her gender.... At the outset of her campaign, Warren staked her ground closer to the ideological center of the party.... [But] the competition with Sanders pulled her farther and farther left.... In February 2020, at a moment Biden’s campaign was bottoming out... the balance of power within the Democratic primary was held by voters with 'somewhat liberal' views. Warren’s campaign, though, has spent a year sprinting away from those voters, as if the party was actually torn between social democracy and democratic socialism.... [She should have learned] to treat the cadres of activists on Twitter and in academia as just one small yet vocal constituency within the party, not the party itself.... [T]he same misread of the electorate tripped up most of the field, with the famously Not Online Joe Biden being an exception."

From "Elizabeth Warren’s Book Shows She Has No Idea Why Her Campaign Failed" by Jonathan Chait (NY Magazine).

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