With a defeat in her home state, the humiliation of Elizabeth Warren is complete. So what now?

She predicted the future correctly — and it backfired

Poor, talented Elizabeth Warren. Mere months ago, we thought she was a shoo-in for president. Remember the four-hour selfie lines; the early endorsements from Julian Castro, Scarlett Johansson, John Legend and Chrissie Teigen; the impressive, uncompromising debate performances? We thought she might throw Bernie a bone and make him her VP when he floundered in the polls. We thought “I have a plan for that” was 2020’s answer to “Yes we can”.

But then her much-vaunted ability to predict the future backfired. On Tuesday night, she came away without first or even second place — those honors were reserved for Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders respectively. Donald Trump tweeted a mocking racial slur about her in response.

It was, to put it bluntly, a humiliation. And it shouldn’t have ever happened.

When Warren saw where the race was heading, she dealt with it in the most infuriating way. She stopped talking about the revolutionary universal healthcare system known as Medicare for All at the same time as she began distancing herself from Bernie, the man who “wrote that damn bill”. Once, Sanders supporters cheered as loudly for her as they did for their own candidate.

Then she started saying she’d expand Obamacare in her first year in office — which was basically Joe Biden’s pitch — and did a Buttigieg-esque waffle about how people with private insurance “enjoy having a choice”.

It looked like she was creeping away from her principles before she even hit the Oval Office. The people who had thought she was going to deliver a revolution began to melt away. They started talking, again, about how she used to be a Republican; how she once falsely claimed Native American ancestry.

Trump poisoned the well, and Democrats began to drink from it. Warren’s past mistakes were no longer old faux pas — they were evidence of her flakiness, her unreliability. How could anyone trust her to stand for anything any more? She’d refused to shake her old friend Bernie Sanders’ hand in front of the nation. She’d co-opted his ideas for popularity points and now she wanted to cast him aside.

Almost all of this is monumentally unfair. Warren is a talented politician with a long history of standing up for the little guy. She stuck it to Wall Street when it wasn’t cool, and she did it from within. She was more energetic, more on-the-ball and more articulate than her fellow septuagenarians Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. She had more to say about women’s rights and a more coherent policy on gun control. She was also free from the baggage of either a former VP or a former independent who spent most of his career shouting from the sidelines at every passing Democrat. Indeed, Warren had the whiff of electability about her, and no doubt Trump’s team were glad to see his “Pocahontas” jibes take effect.

Warren could have been a unifying candidate, one who successfully bridged that wide chasm between Biden and Bernie. But she overthought it. She clearly predicted, correctly, that everyone bar Sanders would coalesce around a single moderate candidate. Too late and too awkwardly, she tried to make herself into that candidate.

What happened to the righteous, relatable anger channeled by a woman who had specialized in bankruptcy law and had her Republican foundations shattered when she realized the system was rigged against the people? It became subdued as time went on, as healthcare and punishing the bankers — lines which echoed Sanders — stopped appearing so often in her speeches.

That anger did return, briefly, when Bloomberg made an appearance on the Democratic stage in Nevada. “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians’,” she said at the time. “And I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.” It was Warren at her best. But a lot of primary votes had already been cast early, and she didn’t benefit from her performance in the way she would have in a more just system.

Where does Warren go now? Does she make a joint-ticket agreement with Joe Biden, thus sealing the deal on her centrist conversion? Does she throw it all in with Bernie, back the revolution and risk being cast out in the cold by the DNC for the rest of her career? Does she retire back to Massachusetts and regroup, re-strategize, at the age of 70? Time is not on her side — although it’s still two presidential cycles until she’s the same age as Bernie is now.

Tonight, she may, for the first time, be left without a plan. Not long ago, she said she would stick it out to the Democratic convention in Milwaukee, come hell or high water; but failing to even win her home state is surely a humiliation too far.

Perhaps she can still pull some strings in a cabinet position which befits her energy and experience, under either a President Biden or Sanders. Perhaps a miracle will happen and she’ll make it to the White House anyway. Perhaps she’ll run away with the nomination in 2024 and finally oust Trump in a landslide victory, long after both Uncle Joe and Bernie are shown to be inadequate bulwarks against the rising tide of Keep America Great.

She would have made a better president than either of the two frontrunners. She deserved better than this. But Elizabeth Warren changed what she was selling too late for people to buy it — and in the end, she was left with not very much at all. Not even Massachusetts.