Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) is dropping out of the 2020 race on Thursday, her campaign confirmed.
“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 — and the changes will have ripples for years to come,” Warren wrote in a Medium post announcing the decision. “. . . I may not be in the race for president in 2020, but this fight — our fight — is not over. And our place in this fight has not ended.”
The moves comes after a lackluster performance on Super Tuesday, which saw the Massachusetts Democrat fail to win a single state and a third-place finish in her home state.
It is unclear who Warren will endorse for the 2020 Democratic nominee and when she will weigh in. Both former vice president Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) confirmed they spoke to her on Wednesday, but Politico cited a campaign source who said she was considering the possibility of refusing to endorse either candidate.
The former law professor and Republican centered her campaign around a progressive pragmatism, emphasizing that she has “a plan” for a suite of domestic policy issues, which she outlined in extensive white papers released periodically throughout her run.
Warren enjoyed a brief stint as the field’s front runner in October after releasing a plan outlining how she would pay for Medicare for All, but her support evaporated as her fellow candidates attacked her over the proposal. In the October debate, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and former South Bend, Ind. mayor Pete Buttigieg both slammed Warren for refusing to admit that Medicare for All would raise taxes on the middle class after she had repeatedly dodged the issue.
Warren was also dogged by questions about her authenticity, and faced scathing criticism from Native Americans after she published a DNA test in an attempt to defend herself from President Trump’s mocking “Pocahontas” nickname. Warren later apologized for the test, which showed that she is somewhere between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American, and quietly wiped her announcement of it off of social media one year later.
Another question centered around her claims of pregnancy discrimination, after school board records challenged Warren’s claim that she had been fired in 1971 from her first job as a public school teacher for being pregnant, and a 2007 interview showed she had changed her message over time.
“All I know is I was 22 years old, I was six months pregnant, and the job that I had been promised for the next year was going to someone else. The principal said they were going to hire someone else for my job,” Warren countered to CBS News.
The school-board story was sat on by The New York Times, whose editorial board later endorsed Warren for president.