Elizabeth Warren’s anemic performance on Super Tuesday — including a blowout loss in Massachusetts — has left the presidential hopeful assessing whether she will stay in the race.
Warren’s campaign suffered what could amount to be a fatal blow on Tuesday, when she failed to finish higher than third place in a single state — including her own, where she lost to former Vice President Joe Biden in a surprise upset and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders finished second.
The Massachusetts senator was meeting with advisers at home Wednesday to assess her path forward.
In the afternoon, Warren campaign manager Roger Lau released a memo saying, “This decision is in her hands, and it’s important that she has the time and space to consider what comes next.”
“Last night, we fell well short of our viability goals and projections, and we are disappointed in the results,” Lau wrote. “We’re still waiting for more results to come in to get a better sense of the final delegate math. And we also all know the race has been extremely volatile in recent weeks and days with frontrunners changing at a pretty rapid pace.”
But, he added, “We are obviously disappointed, and Elizabeth is talking with our team to assess the path forward.”
The post was sent out via the Team Warren Twitter account. Warren retweeted it, in what was her first tweet of the day.
Warren was nowhere to be found Wednesday, even as media spent the day camped outside her house in Cambridge. The lights were off at her nearby campaign headquarters, a sign on the door still giving directions to a results watch party at Tony C’s in Somerville the night before.
Warren spent Tuesday night in Detroit — Michigan votes next week — forsaking her home state and others in the Super Tuesday sweep in an effort to cast her campaign’s focus forward.
She sought to dismiss the notion of electability that has dominated the 2020 primary cycling, urging voters to “vote from your heart” and said, “You don’t get what you don’t fight for. I am in this fight.”
Warren shot into the top tier of the Democratic field last year on the strength of her myriad policy proposals. Her slew of plans spawned her campaign catchphrase — “I have a plan for that!” — kept her competitors on their toes for weeks on end and made her the darling of party activists.
But she stumbled in the rollout of her “Medicare for All” plan, walking back her full support for the single-payer system by saying she would first offer a public option — a move that opened her up to sustained criticism and set off a weekslong slump in fundraising and polling heading into 2020.
Warren finished third in Iowa, a state where she had built a significant ground game. And a perfect storm followed in New Hampshire: The chaotic Iowa caucuses left her unable to build any momentum in the Granite State and a standout debate performance by Amy Klobuchar gave the Minnesota senator an edge — leaving Warren to finish fifth in her own backyard.
Warren fared little better in the next contests, finishing fourth and fifth in Nevada and South Carolina respectively, boxed in on all sides as Sanders consolidated the liberal wing and Buttigieg performed well among white, college-educated voters.
And despite a campaign strategy memo from February that said Warren was “poised to finish in the top two in over half of Super Tuesday states (eight of 14), in the top three in all of them, and is on pace to pick up at-large statewide delegates in all but one,” the Massachusetts senator was on track to finish third or fourth across the map, and below the viability threshold in several states.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.