With Elizabeth Warren’s decision to drop out of the 2020 presidential race, the progressive pundits have flung themselves into fits of mourning.
Warren was, we are being told, a magnificent candidate, with her penchant for perfect plans and her brilliance rendering her the obvious choice. The fact that people obviously did not see her this way has the commentariat calling out the stupidity of Democratic primary voters, with Megan Garber in The Atlantic announcing that “America Punished Elizabeth Warren for Her Competence” and Jessica Valentia sniffling that “It Will Be Hard to Get Over What Happened to Elizabeth Warren,” among dozens of other hard-to-make-up headlines.
It must first be pointed out that America didn’t punish Elizabeth Warren for anything: It was the Democrats who decided to go with one of two geriatric white men over her. That is the sort of thing that Democrats claim to care quite a lot about, so perhaps a bit of soul-searching about the obvious chasm between the professed values of the Democratic elites and the preferences of their voters might be in order. One obvious factor that nobody likes to discuss is the fact that African American voters are actually far, far more socially conservative than white Democratic voters — they lean heavily left economically, but are not, as a demographic, big fans of the LGBT agenda. (That is one of the key but unspoken reasons Pete Buttigieg could not get any traction in the black community.)
