After a half year of circulating petitions, staging rallies, opening offices in states with early presidential contests and gathering 365,000 signatures, Run Warren Run is acknowledging what’s been clear to others for a while: Elizabeth Warren isn’t running for president.

And now, it’s closing up shop.


Run Warren Run, the effort jointly operated by the liberal groups Democracy for America and MoveOn, will shut down Monday after delivering its final petition to Warren’s Senate office. Warren, the bank antagonist and liberal hero who has said from the start that she has no plans to run for president in a field that now includes Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, hasn’t budged.

The organization’s recognition that the Massachusetts senator truly won’t run is a significant shift in the Democratic presidential contest, in which Warren has been a shadow candidate even as she has repeatedly insisted she would not pursue the White House. But the prime driver of pro-Warren enthusiasm is acknowledging that its time and resources would be better spent influencing the national discussion in another way entirely, while Sanders builds grass-roots momentum and O’Malley ratchets up his campaign by targeting liberals.

The group — which has been getting less and less attention as actual candidates enter the race and jockey for Warren supporters — will shift its focus to supporting the senator’s legislative work that effectively pressures the front-runner Clinton from the left, starting with opposition to fast-track trade deals.

“We still think there’s plenty of time for Sen. Warren to change her mind,” said DFA Executive Director Charles Chamberlain. “But now that we’ve shown that she has the support she would need to mount a winning campaign, we’re excited to take the grass-roots juggernaut we’ve built with our members and stand shoulder to shoulder with Warren in the battles ahead.”

The move comes as Sanders has surged in early state polling, suggesting that many of Warren’s supporters are warming to the independent from Vermont. Staff movement has followed: Run Warren Run’s top New Hampshire staffer Kurt Ehrenberg recently joined the Sanders camp to lead its efforts in the Granite State.

And a person close to the Sanders campaign says the candidate will make special efforts to target former Warren backers before long.

O’Malley’s team has also suggested it would reach out to Warren supporters, but when the Bay Stater is removed from polls it is more often Sanders who benefits. Sanders has recently been drawing overflow crowds in Iowa and New Hampshire as he looks to position himself as the progressive standard-bearer in the race.

Nonetheless, the effective exit of a major pro-Warren player promises to change the dynamic among liberals aiming to push Clinton left on a specific series of policies, with the underlying threat that the dominating front-runner could face a real challenge: in a POLITICO Magazine op-ed published Tuesday Chamberlain and MoveOn’s Ilya Sheyman write that Warren’s message was visible in Clinton’s campaign announcement, and that O’Malley and Sanders have also reflected Warren’s ideals thus far.

The inter-Democratic Party fight over the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement that has pitted Warren against President Barack Obama is a prime example of where the senator still stands to influence the presidential race. A leading opponent of the deal, Warren has pressured Clinton to take a stance on the agreement that she helped negotiate as secretary of state.

But Clinton has yet to stand firmly for or against the TPP deal, thereby allowing Warren and other detractors like Sanders and O’Malley to gain the attention of liberals by criticizing the front-runner. While smaller groups like Ready for Warren are still pushing the former Harvard Law School professor to run, DFA and MoveOn will now shift to more emphatically advocating against the agreement.

The two liberal groups launched Run Warren Run in December with a pledge to spend $1.25 million, and the effort was quickly joined by a handful of labor leaders and progressive activists. The groups set up offices in the early voting states of both Iowa and New Hampshire, and are framing their pivot away from a Warren candidacy as a victory given “the presidential race’s focus on income inequality and populist progressives’ increasing power.”

Still, “there’s no sugar-coating it,” write Sheyman and Chamberlain. “We didn’t achieve our central goal.”