Elizabeth Warren Drops Out of Presidential Race

Elizabeth Warren, the liberal Massachusetts senator whose policy-oriented pitch to remake Washington and boost the middle class caught fire in the fall of 2019, is ending her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination after a weak showing across a series of states over the past month, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Ms. Warren’s exit followed voting on Super Tuesday, when Democrats in more than a dozen states, territories and living abroad cast their ballots. She was facing unlikely prospects of overtaking or slowing the progress of the leaders, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.

The Massachusetts lawmaker was the last remaining woman out of the candidates who had been in the top tier in polls.

Her White House bid was the culmination of decades of work critiquing the financial sector’s practices toward ordinary consumers. On the campaign trail she honed a reputation as a plain-spoken wonk with plans to address a range of social and economic concerns by fighting corruption and curtailing corporate influence on government, with many of her ideas funded by proposals to tax the wealthy. She took off in some state and national polls in the fall, sparking jitters in corporate boardrooms and on Wall Street.

Ms. Warren competed with Mr. Sanders for support from the Democratic Party’s liberal wing, and her stronger performance with women and college-educated voters for a time indicated a potential to appeal to more moderate Democrats. She made big investments in staff, hiring faster in Iowa than other campaigns and building up in other states that vote early in the nominating process.

Signs of trouble appeared in the fall, when she was pressed to explain how she would pay for Medicare for All, which would eliminate private health insurance and instead cover all Americans with a government-run plan. She said she would finance it with taxes on the wealthy and corporations instead of on the middle class and would transition to the system after three years in office, separating her plan from that of Mr. Sanders, who had popularized the idea. A series of prominent liberal lawmakers later endorsed the Vermont senator over Ms. Warren.
 

Her momentum in polling and fundraising started to crumble. She placed third in the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses, a disappointing outcome after having led in polls there a few months earlier, and finished in fourth place or worse in the other states that voted in February. Like many other candidates, she couldn’t match Mr. Biden’s support among black voters, a key Democratic Party constituency in states that vote in March and later.

During her run, Ms. Warren said she was freed from the traditional fundraising structure of political campaigns that required scheduled call times and private huddles with deep-pocketed donors. In February, however, a super PAC was started by outside allies to support her bid, even though she had repudiated them earlier in the campaign. And a late burst of grass-roots fundraising was outshined by even better fundraising by Mr. Sanders.

As she emerged as the leading female Democratic contender in the 2020 race, Ms. Warren also faced electability questions that her supporters said were rooted in sexism. She said Mr. Sanders had told her in a 2018 meeting that a woman couldn’t beat Mr. Trump. Mr. Sanders has denied saying that. She earned an endorsement from Emily’s List, a group that backs women candidates, after Sen. Amy Klobuchar dropped out.

Ms. Warren’s team tried to make a late appeal to voters’ sense that their choices were limited, arguing that Mr. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, and Mr. Biden, around whom moderates had coalesced after his South Carolina victory, represented a false choice for Democrats.

“From the start of this campaign, despite so many great candidates with so many different perspectives, voters who were worried about beating Donald Trump have been told there are only two lanes, only two choices,” Ms. Warren said in California. “And now we find ourselves barreling toward another primary along the same lanes as 2016: one for an insider, one for an outsider.

“Democratic voters should have more choice than that. America needs more choice than that,” she said.

Ms. Warren, a 70-year-old former Harvard Law School professor and bankruptcy expert, kicked off her career in Washington by leading a congressional panel tasked with oversight of the government’s 2008 bank bailout. She later set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency whose creation under the Obama administration she had championed, and then defeated a Republican incumbent for Senate in Massachusetts when she wasn’t chosen to lead it.

Despite being one of the most prominent liberal Democrats in the country, Ms. Warren’s 2020 campaign got off to a rocky start.

The first major Democrat to announce a presidential exploratory committee, she was initially plagued by lackluster fundraising. Ms. Warren’s previous claims to Native American ancestry drew controversy from critics—prominently including Mr. Trump, who mocked her repeatedly as “Pocahontas.” That dispute, including her decision to respond by releasing a DNA test in late 2018, hoping to settle the matter, shadowed her entry into the race. She would later apologize both for identifying as Native American and for issuing the test results.
 

Looking to move past that sluggish start, she also doubled down on her reputation as a policy expert. A series of rollouts, including a vow in the spring of 2019 to cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt, helped Ms. Warren carve out a lane as the candidate with “a plan for that”—which became the mantra of her candidacy.

By the late summer, Ms. Warren used her signature skill—reducing complex concepts to digestible messages—to rejuvenate her 2020 candidacy, moving her from the middle of the Democratic pack in early 2019 and to the lead in some state and national polls. And she regained her footing as a prolific grass-roots fundraiser.

Her aides said shunning traditional fundraising practices allowed her to travel more and linger after events for photos with supporters. One of the longest “selfie” lines at a Warren event lasted about four hours after a 20,000-person rally in New York City (although a campaign staffer took pictures of the senator with attendees, rather than supporters snapping their own selfies).

It was during that September 2019 rally in Washington Square Park that Ms. Warren cited fighting corruption as the underpinning of her presidential campaign.

“Climate change. Gun safety. Health care. On the face of it, these three are totally different issues,” Ms. Warren said. “But despite our being the strongest and wealthiest country in the history of the world, our democracy is paralyzed. Why? Because giant corporations have bought off our government.”

Ms. Warren will return to the Senate after exiting the presidential race. She was re-elected in 2018, and her term expires in early 2025.

Write to Joshua Jamerson at joshua.jamerson@wsj.com