Elizabeth Warren repeatedly has said that she is not running for president.
Warren makes that statement, with the most earnest of faces, because she still has a November 2018 reelection to win, and her opponents are hitting her over the presidential plans. Republican candidate Geoff Diehl has made “Where’s Warren?” one of his main campaign themes.
It is going to be tough to defeat Warren in her Senate match, but she’s not taking any chances considering her favorability has dropped.
So Warren repeatedly says that she “is” not running:
In May 2017, we noted the verbal dodges, Elizabeth Warren again says “I am not running for President,” but no one believes her:
How many times do we have to go through this?Elizabeth Warren still is the face of #TheResistance and the Democratic Party. She could raise a gazillion dollars if she ran for president.She would have beaten Hillary so badly Warren’s supporters would have gotten tired of winning.Yet she keeps saying she is not running for President.That’s technically true. She is running for Senate in 2018, and while there is little likelihood she would lose, she is taking no chances. She doesn’t want a surprise if voters, whose support has softened, think she’s looking too far ahead.In an interview with Bloomberg, Warren says “I am not running for President.” And then goes on to detail all the reasons why she should be running for President, the first among them Donald Trump.
In June 2017, we covered Warren’s word games again, Elizabeth Warren says not running for president, but “hold on, hold on, hold on”:
Put this one in your political time capsule. On her MSNBC show this morning, Joy Reid played a clip of her recently asking Elizabeth Warren if she was “going to run” for president in 2020. Her response is interesting, to say the least.What makes it significant is that Warren did not resort to the classic dodge of saying “I am not running,” a meaningless non-answer for anyone who has not yet thrown his hat into the ring. The question was whether she was “going” to run, and Warren’s “no” would, as a matter of logic, indicate that she has ruled out a run.And yet . . . Warren immediately went on to add: “hold on, hold on, hold on. So, I want to be really clear about this. I am running for Senate in 2018. Go Massachusetts! I announced early. I did not want anybody to doubt whether or not I’m in this fight. But I really want to be very clear to everybody in this room: politics cannot be just what happens every four years.”That additional verbiage wouldn’t seem to negate her “no,” but does anyone doubt that if Warren does decide to run, she’d say something like “what I meant was that I was focused on my Senate race, and wouldn’t consider a presidential run until the Senate race was over?”
We repeatedly have noted that Warren’s non-denial denials about running for president were inconsistent with her actions, which certainly seem to be laying the groundwork for a presidential run:
The New York Times notes that Warren is the most aggressive among likely Democrat candidates in taking steps to set up a presidential run:
During a campaign-style tour of the West late last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren did not announce she was running for president. But in private events and public speeches, her message about 2020 was as clear as it was rousing.In Salt Lake City, Ms. Warren urged Democrats to turn out in force for the midterm elections to build momentum for the next presidential race, and in Denver, she told a meeting of state legislators and trial lawyers that she wanted to be a tribune for lower-income Americans, according to people who attended the events. And in a speech to the Nevada Democratic Party in Reno, Ms. Warren said Democrats must do more than “drive Donald Trump and his enablers out of power.”“I want a party strong enough to take on the hard job of cleaning up the mess they’ll leave behind once they are gone,” Ms. Warren declared, all but volunteering for the task.Before the trip and since, Ms. Warren and her emissaries have been reaching out to key Democratic officeholders in Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina — three states early in the presidential primary calendar — making introductions and offering help in the midterm campaign. Altogether, her moves are among the most assertive steps taken by any Democrat to prepare for 2020….But for now, it is Ms. Warren making the most concerted strides. She is holding regular buffet dinners in her Senate office with policy experts, recently hosting Kathleen Stephens, the former ambassador to South Korea.While in Nevada, Ms. Warren made a pilgrimage to the home of Harry Reid, her former Senate colleague who remains the state’s most powerful Democrat. And she has emailed with Tom Vilsack, the former Iowa governor and agriculture secretary, about an article he wrote about how Democrats can recover in rural America.Ms. Warren also telephoned [James Smith, the Democratic nominee for governor in the early primary state of South Carolina] after his primary win in South Carolina, offering help to the Biden ally.
Trump says having Warren as the Democrat nominee would be “a dream come true”.
Maybe we’ll get that match up. It would by Yuge.
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