Warren ends campaign, declines to endorse for now
‘We don’t have to decide this minute,' she says about backing Biden or Sanders
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SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN ended her presidential campaign Thursday, after devastating losses at the ballot box on Super Tuesday, but declined to endorse either of the remaining candidates.
Warren, speaking to reporters outside her Cambridge home, said she wants to “take a little time to think a little more” before endorsing another candidate. Asked what she will tell her supporters about who to support, she said, “Let’s take a deep breath and spend a little time with that. We don’t have to decide this minute.”
Warren dropped out of the race two days after losing her home state of Massachusetts and failing to finish higher than third place in any of the first 18 states to vote for the Democratic nomination for president. A former Harvard Law School professor who has represented Massachusetts in the Senate since 2013, Warren acknowledged that she misread the politics of the race.
“I was told at the beginning of this whole undertaking that there are two lanes: a progressive lane that Bernie Sanders is the incumbent for and a moderate lane that Joe Biden is the incumbent for, and there’s no room for anyone else in this,” Warren said. “I thought that wasn’t right, but evidently I was wrong.”
Warren tended to appeal to progressive voters and was expected to face enormous pressure to drop out and clear the progressive aisle for Sanders, the Vermont senator who calls himself a democratic socialist. Sanders won three of the first four nominating states, then four more states on Super Tuesday.
Warren indicated that she may endorse a candidate in the future, after taking some time to consider it.
Warren signals her thanks to supporters outside her Cambridge home as she announced the end of her run for president. (Photo by Shira Schoenberg)
Warren said she will continue to fight for the causes she has championed to help working families, but gave no indication of what that will look like. “My job is to keep fighting and to fight as smartly and effectively as I can,” she said.
A lingering question of the campaign is what role sexism played in Warren’s defeat. Warren noted the conundrum she faces even in answering that question. “If you say, yeah, there was sexism in this race, everyone says, ‘whiner,’ and if you say no there was no sexism, about a bazillion women think, what planet do you live on?” Warren said. “I promise you this: I’ll have a lot more to say on that subject later on.”
Facing a scrum of reporters, Warren at times struck a personal tone. She seemed near tears when asked for her message to young girls who hoped for a female president. “One of the hardest parts of this is all those people and all those little girls who are going to have to wait four more years,” Warren said.
Asked how she felt voting for herself Tuesday, Warren said she recalled her late parents. “I stood at the voting booth, looked down and saw my name on the ballot and I thought wow kiddo, you’re not in Oklahoma anymore. It really was a moment of thinking about how my mother and dad, if they were still here, would feel about this,” Warren said. “For that moment standing in the booth, I missed my mom and my daddy.”
Warren’s decision to drop out also frees up other top Massachusetts politicians to back other candidates. Warren had secured endorsements from 176 Massachusetts politicians, including prominent officials like Attorney General Maura Healey, House Speaker Robert DeLeo, Senate President Karen Spilka, Sen. Ed Markey, and a multiple members of the state’s congressional delegation in the US House.
