The Elizabeth Warren moment isn’t over quite yet, according to Karl Rove.
With little over a month to go before the Iowa caucuses, Sen. Warren (D-MA) has suffered a drop in the polls amid scrutiny of her exorbitantly costly, health care plan. But the Democrat could make a surprising comeback, Rove said, citing her strong ground game in the Hawkeye State, Fox reported.
“She’s got resources,” Rove declared.
Faltering poll numbers
After a much-discussed polling bump buoyed talk of a frontrunner challenge, Warren is no longer being seen as Joe Biden’s closest rival for the nomination. Many have pointed to her incomplete “Medicare-for-All” policy as the culprit.
Unlike Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Warren has been dodgy about how she will pay for the likely trillion-dollar plan to put every American on government healthcare. It’s just one big reason why Warren is viewed with suspicion by die-hard Sanders supporters, many of whom consider her to be a capitalist pretending to be a revolutionary.
“It turns out she had plenty of plans but she didn’t have a plan to defend her plans, and on ‘Medicare-for-all’ she got creamed,” Rove said.
But I don’t want to count her out just yet… because she has had the biggest and best well-organized ground game in Iowa… and…it may win you two or three points. And, if that’s the case…it could be she comes in a surprise — maybe not the winner, but could come in as a second- or third-place surprise in Iowa.
Warren’s poll numbers have dropped since peaking in October, when she was thought to be Biden’s top challenger and subsequently became the focus of attacks from her rivals. But the primary has gotten more combative as the field has narrowed in on Joe Biden, Sanders, Warren, and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
No clear frontrunner
The stakes were clear at the last primary debate when Warren invoked an esoteric insult, accusing Buttigieg of schmoozing with wealthy donors in California’s “wine caves.”
Warren has faced questions about her own apparent comfort with private industry, despite her socialist bona fides; the candidate recently released a list of corporate clients she has served over her years as a lawyer, which included time spent guiding Dow Chemical through bankruptcy amid lawsuits from women who developed health problems from breast implants.
Buttigieg is said to be on the rise as an alternative to Biden in the moderate lane, as the former vice president has continued to stoke voter doubts with a series of awkward gaffes. Of the top four, Buttigieg appears to be leading in Iowa, but at the national level Biden, maintains a comfortable advantage in the polls.
With no particular candidate inspiring widespread enthusiasm, some have begun to speculate about a brokered convention, in which more than one vote is taken to select the final nominee — a scenario that has not been seen since 1952, when Adlai Stevenson won the Democratic nomination on the third ballot. Whether the nomination goes to Warren or someone else, the current state of the primary shouldn’t have Donald Trump losing any sleep.
“It would be exciting to see it go past the first ballot because it would be so unusual,” remarked Kathy Sullivan of the Democratic National Committee.
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