Elizabeth Warren Is the Bernie Lost Cause Myth of 2020

By Jacob Weindling | August 7, 2025 | 11:45am

Screenshot via CNN

Elections 2020 Democratic Primary

Elizabeth Warren Is the Bernie Lost Cause Myth of 2020

This take has spawned from a bit of an insular moment on Bluesky, but the vast dogpile it created proved that the wounds of the 2020 Democratic primary are still fresh and distorting objective reality. There is something of a lost cause myth that has taken root amongst my fellow Bernie Sanders supporters, where Elizabeth Warren was supposedly the main thing preventing Bernie from winning the White House in 2020. While she does deserve some blame for her poor political performance that did harm the left’s ability to take power (her Medicare for All debacle pretty much ended her campaign before it began), she has become far too central to the story of how Bernie Sanders lost to Joe Biden, creating a lost cause myth for the left.

There is this wrongheaded belief that all of Warren’s voters would have automatically moved to Sanders had she dropped out and endorsed him, while her eventual embrace of Medicare for All and the support that decision lost her proves otherwise. Look at this Wikipedia chart of opinion polling from 2019 to 2020. Biden is the blue line up top, Bernie the green line under it, and Warren is the rising red line across 2019. When her support declined in 2020, Bernie’s rose, but so did Michael Bloomberg’s. Pete Buttigieg’s too. Tulsi Gabbard even saw a bump. Bernie would have received some of her voters, but far from all of them.

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There is a natural assumption that the trend which opened 2020, Biden’s blue line falling while Bernie’s green line rose, would endure. But I don’t think it’s so simple and even without the Democratic establishment’s help, Biden easily could have snapped back to that roughly 30 percent baseline he sat at for a year. The average American voter is nowhere near as ideological as those of us who argue about politics are, and a lot of people liked Warren because of her wealth tax that only affected the top 0.1 percent of the population, drawing in Michael Bloomberg’s gilded voters. This also misunderstands the kinds of voters that Bernie attracted, thinking that they are only progressives who like Elizabeth Warren too, when there are many exit polls like this from 2016 demonstrating how 39 percent of West Virginia primary Sanders voters said they would vote for Trump over Bernie in the fall. Sanders may have taken more voters away from Joe Biden in 2020 than he did from Elizabeth Warren, given that Pew found that a little over a third of Warren voters preferred Bernie as their second choice in January of 2020, while one fifth of Biden’s much larger coalition preferred Bernie as their second choice.

Elizabeth Warren could have dropped out of the race and endorsed Bernie, her closest ideological ally, and while sexism is impossible to avoid in nearly any American political subject, the sheer fact that Bernie was polling in the 30s and Warren was polling in the teens gave credence to this strategic alignment. As Brad Lander demonstrated next to Zohran Mamdani in New York City, there’s no shame in being the second-in-command who helped get the ball over the goal line, and it’s fair to wonder why Warren didn’t do something similar after it became clear she was a third-place candidate in a two-person race.

But for whatever reason, Warren continued to run a hopeless campaign even though she consistently shed support throughout 2020. She had a structural problem in that her support was spread out amongst the entire Democratic Party, so she couldn’t benefit from factional consolidations once the gloves came off the same way that Bernie and the establishment behind Biden could. She shed voters in every fight.

But this doesn’t mean that she cost Bernie the election. Scroll back up to that poll just before Barack Obama, James Clyburn and the South Carolina primary at the end of February changed everything for Biden. He and Bernie post-Nevada were sitting at around one-third support, while what I have typically termed as “neither” added up to all the candidates beneath them for the last third of Democrats. Warren didn’t cost Bernie the race, Bernie’s campaign couldn’t mobilize more than a plurality going into voting, and one Nevada election does not make a trend. After the first three primaries in 2020, it was pretty clearly a stalemate between three pluralities of similar size. Bernie narrowly won de facto home games in Iowa and New Hampshire, and the Nevada victory showed how his campaign had momentum, not that its victory with 46.8 percent of the vote proved Bernie to be some unstoppable juggernaut if Elizabeth Warren and her 9.7 percent vote share in Nevada would just get out of the way.

The story of the 2020 Democratic primary is that the left was the only organized force entering it, and after the first primary, support was split 26-18 across two candidates. It’s clear that the Democratic establishment hoped that someone other than Joe Biden would emerge from the field to battle its left flank, and after narrow losses by Pete Buttigieg proving to be their best hope, the Dems pulled the plug on someone who had out-performed Joe Biden in two of three states to that point, and consolidated Biden’s support from the shrinking “neither” group who all bowed out per Obama’s wishes to make this a two-man race.

While this was a backroom deal where elites hand-picked someone to gain power, it was nothing new. This is the dirty game of politics, and us lefties can complain about it all we want, but as a famed man once said, “the game is the game.” The Bernie Sanders campaign didn’t play it as well as the Biden campaign did, and the rage on the left should be directed at a feckless Democratic establishment willing to prop up a man they would tear down a few years later, all in order to mount a tepid opposition to the only organic popular movement in the party–not the woman who came in a distant third place with 1.68 percent of the delegates.

Bernie’s 2020 campaign wasn’t a popular movement that proved it could command a majority of the party, demonstrated by when Bernie Sanders agreed with a question at a debate asking if the “candidate with the most delegates, even if they’re short of a clinching majority, [should] be the unquestioned Dem nominee.” Every other candidate on stage said no, basically giving you an insight into everyone’s internal polling. Bernie knew he didn’t have a majority, which is why he said he should win with a plurality, and that’s likely why Warren stayed in the race, knowing that she didn’t need to rely on siphoning Bernie voters off him the way a lot of more ideological folks think she did.

Elizabeth Warren is a clunky politician (at best) but a good legislator who created one of the most effective agencies of the century, as demonstrated by Trump dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as soon as he came into office. The amount of hate she gets from the left is vastly disproportionate to the actual harm her lukewarm 2020 campaign did, and it certainly doesn’t do much to blunt the attacks of Bernie bros being sexist. Warren is part of this coalition, and I firmly believe that Mamdani and Lander didn’t just prove that better things are possible to the aimless Democratic Party, but also to the tenuous left-liberal alliance clearly still damaged by stupid bullshit from 2020 that shouldn’t matter anymore.