Warren drops out of presidential race
Elizabeth Warren has pulled out of the presidential race after a lacklustre showing on Super Tuesday, the Massachusetts senator announced today.
Warren was considered a favourite of the liberal left and a frontrunner among Democratic candidates. However, a strong showing from rivals Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday — a day of cross-state primary elections and caucuses across the US — left Warren’s support lagging far behind.
In a stiffly-worded email to staffers yesterday, Warren’s campaign manager Roger Knau conceded that her Super Tuesday performance “fell well short of viability goals and projections”.
The campaign had hoped to secure a position in the top two across the majority of states that voted on Tuesday, but failed to hit the mark in any of them, including Warren’s own state of Massachusetts.
Warren informed campaign employees of her decision to pull out of the presidential race this morning, and is expected to hold a press conference later today.
Her exit snuffs out any hope of a female candidate to take on incumbent President Donald Trump, despite early promise from a historically diverse field of women and people of colour.
The Democratic offering for the November 2020 election is now seen as a two-horse race between Biden and Sanders, after fellow Democrat heavyweights Pete Buttigieg, Mike Bloomberg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out earlier this week.
Warren had been hailed as a champion of social issues such as student debt relief, universal child care and affordable housing, and surged to the fore last summer after announcing plans for wide-scale structural change in the US.
The former Harvard professor entered the race with a pledge to weed out corruption within Washington and grand plans for a wealth tax on the richest Americans in a popular policy dubbed the “Ultra-Millionaire Tax”.
In her presidential manifesto, she also outlined her support for antitrust action, and received international support for her vow to break up big tech companies such as Facebook and Google.
Focus will now shift to which Democrat candidate Warren chooses to endorse. Her support would be seen as welcome news for Sanders, who is looking to hoover up stray voters after trailing slightly behind Biden on Super Tuesday.
Biden currently stands in poll position, with drop-outs Klobuchar and Buttigieg yesterday announcing their official endorsement of the former vice president.