Elizabeth Warren Drops Out of the 2020 Presidential Race: Reports
Sen. Elizabeth Warren is announcing Thursday that she is dropping out of the 2020 presidential race, according to multiple news reports, leaving the race to for the Democratic Party’s nomination between Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden.
Warren will reportedly notify her staff and supporters later Thursday, following a disappointing “Super Tuesday” showing that was emphasized with a third-place finish in her home state of Massachusetts.
Warren, 70, was long-thought to be one of the leading candidates in the Democratic Party’s race, consistently polling near the top of the field and producing some of the 2020 race’s most memorable moments so far, including her appearing to duck Sanders’ handshake following a heated January debate and her viral takedown of Bloomberg in the Nevada debate a month later.
But her viral momentum never transferred to the voting booths, earning just eight delegates in the first four state primary contests and failing to notch anything higher than a third-place finish in any of the first four states.
Warren failed to win a single state on Super Tuesday, picking up just 28 delegates compared to Biden’s 380 and Sanders’ 328.
On Thursday, Warren was still polling in fourth place behind Sanders, Biden, and billionaire Mike Bloomberg, according to national polling aggregates from RealClear Politics.
Bloomberg dropped out of the race a day prior, endorsing Biden on Wednesday morning.
Scott Varley/MediaNews Group/Torrance Daily Breeze via Getty Sen. Elizabeth Warren
Sen. Elizabeth Warren campaigning in New Hampshire in September 2019.
Warren stood out as the leading woman candidate in the Democratic race, championing a plan to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and making a promise to cancel student loan debt on her first day in office.
She popularized the use of “selfie lines” to connect with voters throughout the country and made striking impacts on young women who came to meet her on the campaign trail, including young girls she routinely gave pinky promises and introduced herself, saying, “My name is Elizabeth, and I’m running for president because that’s what girls do.”
The Massachusetts senator was named one of PEOPLE’s “Women Changing the World” in 2019, alongside fellow Democratic candidates Sens. Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar, who previously dropped out of the 2020 race.
“It’s pretty exciting that at every debate there have been multiple women on stage,” Warren told PEOPLE last year. “That when I go to the Iowa Wing Ding or to a small town in New Hampshire, the chances are that I could run into another woman running for president. That’s pretty amazing.”
“But it’s also about making change,” she continued. “It’s about the past, but it’s about the future. It’s about issues that have received lip service forever, but never any really passionate push behind it.”
Courtesy Warren campaign Sen. Elizabeth Warren giving one of her signature “pinky promises” to a young child in South Carolina.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is technically the only woman left in the 2020 presidential race, though she hasn’t polled well enough nationally to appear in the latest debates and hasn’t received any delegates so far in the primary.
Warren’s campaign re-sparked the conversation about women running for national office in January, when CNN reported her campaign aides claimed Sanders once told Warren in a private conversation that a woman couldn’t be elected president.
Sanders denied the accusation, but Warren backed up the CNN report and the two politicians’ relationship became a focal point for weeks as Democratic candidates turned their focus from defeating President Donald Trump to beating out each other for their party’s nomination.
The senator followed up by finishing third in the Iowa Caucus, about 10,000 votes behind Sanders and former Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, who both claimed victory in the state. It was Warren’s best primary showing, but the last tangible results that her campaign could continue.
Warren made headlines again about two weeks later when she took on Bloomberg and held him up against criticism surrounding the history of sexual harassment lawsuits against him and his eponymous business news company.
The Massachusetts senator’s determined inquiries into Bloomberg’s treatment of women during the Nevada debate went viral and created the most memorable debate performance in the 2020 election thus far, but it came too late. Early voting in the state had already began prior to the nationally televised debate and Warren failed again to translate her momentum in the media into an immediate boost in support, finishing in fourth place with less than 10 percent of the state’s votes.
It’s not clear who Warren will endorse to win the Democratic nomination, though Sanders told reporters the two had spoken on the phone together earlier Wednesday.
“Elizabeth Warren is a very, very excellent senator,” Sanders said. “She has not made any decisions as of this point. It’s important for all of us to respect the time and the space that she needs to make her decision.”
