Joe Biden is no Elizabeth Warren.

That’s the message being sent by former leaders and foot soldiers of the draft Warren movement after the vice president met privately with the Massachusetts senator on Saturday in preparation for a possible presidential run.


Unlike Warren or Bernie Sanders, the Vermont progressive who’s assumed the support of many Warren backers, Biden is a pillar of the Democratic establishment, vice president in an administration that many progressives consider too centrist.

That puts him in roughly the same position as Hillary Clinton: liberal on many issues, but a traditional party loyalist at the end of the day.

“He enters the race in the same place she is,” said Charles Chamberlain, president of Democracy for America, which helped operate the pro-Warren grass-roots group Run Warren Run.

That’s a considerable problem because Biden, to be successful, would need to appeal to a large majority of progressives who are disenchanted with Clinton, while convincing them that he’s a better vehicle for their beliefs than Sanders, who’s been drawing huge crowds and gaining on Clinton all summer.

Winning the support of Warren, who remains neutral in the race, would be key. Aside from Clinton and Biden, she’s probably the best-known Democrat and retains a strong hold over millions of progressive voters.

Still, it’s not like the Warren acolytes have been sitting around waiting for a new leader. The vast majority have already signed up with Sanders, from the more casual to the top professional political leaders: Kurt Ehrenberg, the Run Warren Run point person in New Hampshire, and Blair Lawton, the point person in Iowa, are both now working for Sanders.

The Vermonter, for one, brushed off the news of the Biden-Warren conversation in New Hampshire on Monday, saying, “I’ve had many, many meetings with Elizabeth Warren.”

John Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign, said, “Am I nervous? No.”

“We’ll prosecute our case and, if the vice president gets in, I’m sure there will be a good debate among the Democratic candidates,” he said.

Meanwhile, most of the pro-Warren political machinery and organization in the early states have already moved over to Sanders with them, leaving Biden with little to claim.

“Warren’s endorsement would have an impact. Would it be a strong enough impact to make a candidate get more support among the members?” Chamberlain said, referring to his group. “The answer is yes. Is it enough to win the majority? I don’t know.”

At the end of the day, Chamberlain added, “I think it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll see a lot of switching from people who support Bernie Sanders to support Joe Biden.”

John Deeth, an influential progressive blogger in Iowa, put it more bluntly: “The ship has probably sailed,” he said. Biden, Deeth predicted, is unlikely to get support at this point from either Warren’s ideological allies or the anti-Clinton crowd.

Even if Warren endorsed Biden, Run Warren Run is not becoming Run Biden Run, and Draft Warren’s not linking up with Draft Biden.

“There is no transitive property of draft efforts,” said Ilya Sheyman, head of MoveOn.org, which was also behind Run Warren Run.

Most of the economic inequality issues that progressives are talking about — student debt relief, stricter rules on banking, a more progressive tax code — were discussed in very different terms when Biden was last running for president, and when he was in the Senate. Biden, Warren backers say, would have to prove to progressives that he understands why they’ve chafed at the Democratic establishment and feel that the Obama administration has been too friendly to Wall Street.

“He’s going to have to put out substance that matches the rhetoric,” Sheyman said.

Winning the support of Warren, who remains neutral in the race, would be key. | AP Photo

John Colombo, the Franklin County Iowa Democratic Party chair who signed a letter in May urging Warren to run, and who remains without a candidate in the primary, said he’d like to see Biden enter the fray. That doesn’t mean, though, that he or any of the other pro-Warren people will get behind him — even if she endorsed him.

“A lot of the infrastructure that was in the Run Warren Run campaign is going to the Sanders campaign, I don’t think they’d abandon that. But I could see Hillary supporters switching over,” Colombo said. “I don’t think endorsements do the trick here in Iowa. People just don’t care.”

There’s also the chance that a Warren endorsement could backfire — for Biden, and for herself.

“Frankly, I think you’d have a ton of very angry Bernie Sanders supporters in the state, and you’d have a lot of rather confused and upset Clinton supporters, too,” said David Watters, a New Hampshire state senator from Dover who signed a letter in March, urging Warren to run, but who is now with Clinton. “If Warren wanted to have her hand in the presidential race, she should have run herself.”

Other former Warren backers were skeptical of the whole idea that she’d try to throw her weight around with an endorsement.

“I don’t think she wants to go there. I don’t think that’s even feasible,” said Julie Stewart, the former Dallas County Iowa Democratic Party Chair who signed the May letter, urging Warren to throw her hat in the ring, and who is now backing former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

Beyond the hopes and wishes of the Biden circle about how he could run and how Warren might fit in, the numbers don’t seem to support the play, said Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray.

“The Warren voters almost to a person went to Bernie Sanders once it was clear she wasn’t running, and we saw that in the polls,” Murray said. “When we asked last month about the likelihood of voting for Joe Biden, we found that two-thirds of those people who said they’d be likely to back him were coming from Clinton’s camp and the remainder were basically evenly split between Sanders and undecided.”

In other words, the conclusion is clear: “It doesn’t seem like he would naturally draw from the Warren voter at this point.”