U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren ended her presidential campaign on Thursday.
“I refuse to let disappointment blind me — or you — to what we’ve accomplished,” Warren told her campaign staff on a call Thursday. “We didn’t reach our goal, but what we have done together — what you have done — has made a lasting difference. It’s not the scale of the difference we wanted to make, but it matters.”
Warren is the latest Democratic White House hopeful to end her campaign after former Vice President Joe Biden's resounding South Carolina and Super Tuesday victories. On Wednesday, former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg ended his campaign.
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Bloomberg was preceded by former Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and billionaire Tom Steyer. All endorsed Biden, who won 10 of 14 states on Super Tuesday.
On Wednesday night, the Washington Post reported representatives from both the Warren and Bernie Sanders’ campaign were meeting to discuss ways of uniting their progressive campaigns, with the expectation Warren would soon leave the race.
Warren failed to win a single primary during her presidential bid and placed an embarrassing third in Super Tuesday’s Massachusetts primary, her own state.
Biden and Sanders, lifelong politicians with starkly different visions for America’s future, are locked in a delegate fight that could take weeks to resolve.
Warren hasn’t announced if she will endorse Sanders or Biden.
Warren’s exit extinguished hopes that Democrats would get another try at putting a woman up against President Donald Trump, who immediately tweeted his response to Warren’s exit on social media.
Her exit from the race following Klobuchar’s departure leaves the Democratic field with just one female candidate: Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who has collected only one delegate toward the nomination. It’s an unexpected twist for a party that had used the votes and energy of women to retake control of the House, primarily with female candidates, just two years ago.
Biden tweeted his respect for Warren after her announcement.
Warren’s campaign began with enormous promise that she could carry that momentum into the presidential race. Last summer, she drew tens of thousands of supporters to Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, a scene that was repeated in places like Washington state and Minnesota.
Warren, 70, began her White House bid polling near the back of an impossibly crowded field, used wonky policy prowess to rocket to front-runner status by the fall, then saw her support evaporate almost as quickly.
Her candidacy appeared seriously damaged almost before it started after she released a DNA test in response to goading by President Donald Trump to prove she had Native American ancestry. Instead of quieting critics who had questioned her claims, however, the test offended many tribal leaders who rejected undergoing the genetic test as culturally insensitive, and it didn’t stop Trump and other Republicans from gleefully deriding her as “Pocahontas.”
Warren also lost her finance director over her refusal to attend large fundraisers, long considered the financial life blood of national campaigns.
Warren’s poll numbers began to slip after a series of debates when she repeatedly refused to answer direct questions about if she’d have to raise taxes on the middle class to pay for Medicare for All.
Sanders, meanwhile, wasted little time capitalizing on the contrast by boasting that he would ship a full Medicare for All program for congressional approval during his first week in the White House. After long avoiding direct conflict, Warren and Sanders clashed in January after she said Sanders had suggested during a private meeting in 2018 that a woman couldn’t win the White House. Sanders denied that, and Warren refused to shake his outstretched hand after a debate in Iowa.
The Sanders campaign announced Wednesday it would begin airing three new campaign ads in Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and Washington, states that hold primaries March 10 and March 17.
