The Massachusetts senator is in fourth place, even losing her home state – but she seems to have her hopes on a contested convention

Five months ago Elizabeth Warren was the Democratic frontrunner. Heading into Super Tuesday, she was in desperate need of winning just a single state, after trailing miserably since Iowa kicked off voting at the start of February.

Instead, Warren watched as all 14 Super Tuesday states went to rivals Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders – including, crushingly, her home state of Massachusetts, where she seems set to finish third.

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With the former vice-president and democratic socialist senator now accelerating off into the distance, Warren is in a distant fourth place measured by delegates in the overall Democratic primary – behind even the former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg. Now Warren’s supporters are waiting to see what she will do next. Even before Tuesday, she was being urged to drop out of the race, as #WarrenEndorseBernie trended on Twitter, and erstwhile Warren backers shared videos explaining why they were rescinding their support.

On Wednesday the progressive congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who has endorsed Sanders, appeared to urge Warren to withdraw.

Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) Imagine if the progressives consolidated last night like the moderates consolidated, who would have won?



That’s what we should be analyzing. I feel confident a united progressive movement would have allowed for us to #BuildTogether and win MN and other states we narrowly lost. https://t.co/lAj2mhI3GR

One of Warren’s campaign slogans, however, is “Persist” – a play on the term the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, used to admonish her during the nomination hearing of Jeff Sessions.

At a rally in Detroit on Tuesday night, Warren encouraged people to vote with their heart. “You don’t get what you don’t fight for. I am in this fight,” she said. Michigan’s primary is next week, and Warren has already scheduled a return trip to that state for Friday.

Warren seems to have pinned her hopes on a contested Democratic convention in July.

If no one is able to win a majority of delegates, then the nominee will be decided by party grandees at the Milwaukee gathering. If Warren stays in the race, quietly picking up delegates over the next couple of months, then perhaps at the convention she can twist arms and persuade people to back her at the convention.

That winding path to victory probably isn’t what Warren was envisaging when she announced her campaign for president on 9 February 2019 in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People listen as Elizabeth Warren spoke during a primary election night rally at Eastern Market in Detroit. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

Speaking at the site of the historic women- and immigrant-led Bread and Roses labor strike, launched more than a hundred years earlier, Warren made it clear she would run a progressive campaign, telling the crowd told the crowd she would “break up monopolies” and “take on Wall Street banks” as president.

They weren’t just empty campaign slogans. Warren immediately published plans on how she would tackle corporate greed, along with her ideas on healthcare and the climate.

Warren had so many ideas, in fact, that it became a key part of her identity.

“I have a plan for that” became Warren’s catchphrase on the campaign stump, and a rallying cry for her supporters. Her campaign overflowed with plans – in time, she would have 80 specific proposals on her official website – and by October she had built convincing leads in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to vote, and was ahead of Biden nationally.

But while Warren had a plan for almost everything she would do as president, she was unprepared for the obstacles that popped up on her way there.

As she rose to the top of the polls, Warren was criticized for dodging questions about how she would fund Medicare for All. After weeks of hedging, Warren eventually admitted she would raise taxes on the middle class, but by then she had taken a blow to her popularity.

Warren also lacked a plan for the rise of Pete Buttigieg, who gobbled up her supporters, and she suffered from the reluctance of Sanders’ adherents to consider a rival progressive candidate. She never came up with an answer to either, and trundled to third place in Iowa, fourth in New Hampshire and Nevada and fifth in South Carolina.



It isn’t over for Warren. There are 32 states still to vote. But after months of decline, it is hard to see how even the woman with a plan for most things can concoct a successful strategy to win the Democratic nomination.