M4A, Narrative Building, and Poll Watching.

It is a rule so common it sounds like a cliche but it is absolute fact: never base a conclusion on just one poll. That’s THE fundamental principle of poll watching. Nevertheless, for over a month we’ve been subjected to pundits commenting on fresh polls as if they some how definitively prove the point they want you to get from it. That Elizabeth Warren’s campaign is in deep trouble. It’s not untrue that I’d like the recent numbers to look better. And while some BS is pretty obvious (like the insanity that any candidate would move 14 points, either way, in a given poll from one month to the next and the complete silence from PollPundits in calling that poll what it is — a ridiculous outlier) but there’s a difference between a reversal of fortune and impending doom.

That said, let’s break down what’s apparently going on in this race, over the course of this year. I think there might be a meta-narrative at work here.

It must be admitted that May-July, Sen. Warren got a lot of shiny, helpful press. It wasn’t slanted per se, they were typically deep dive profiles with a lot of content, but they were positive aspect of her story (back in December/January they had been almost universally negative dwelling on the DNA thing so perhaps there was some both-sidesing going on). At the time, while Warren had already established her bona fides as a challenger to the status quo of money corrupting politics.BUT her only announced position on health care was “I support Bernie’s bill”

Here’s my hypothesis: The Democratic Party AND the mainstream (supposedly “liberal”) media have MASSIVE streams of $$$ at stake in for-profit health care. There’s every bit as much lobbying/contribution cash flowing into the DNC as into the GOP and the whole centrist portion of the party is addicted to it to the exclusion, if necessary, of good policy. As for the media — just watch cable news for a day and count the number of insurance/pharma ads you see.

Now, these folks had and have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that Bernie’s appeal is limited. He can’t win the nomination, if he does he can’t beat Trump, and even if he somehow managed all that there’s no way his “I’ll just will it to pass in my first year” is farcically unrealistic and so there wasn’t any real reason for them to go in hard on Bernie…and they haven’t. And as long as Warren was “Bernie’s bill” they were not that worried that she could pass it either.

So, fast forward to early October. For six months she’s been steadily climbing while everyone else remained static (other than the Kamala bubble which faded), quadrupling her support and actually leading Biden in some polls. At this point Pete’s team decides to go in hard on her, as do some other centrists like Klobachar. As an aside, I still think this was strategically silly — he ought to have been trying to take down the guy in his lane and set himself up as the centrist alternate in a one-on-one race with Warren but he did what he did so… here we are.

He basically dared her to be more specific than anyone else on stage had been, or had been asked to be (including Bernie) in the sort of attack that political custom allows men to make against women but not the other way around, and that stalled her momentum a bit because it challenged the notion of the “plan for everything narrative”.

BUT

What they didn’t expect was — she pulled it off. She not only showed how it could be paid for without middle class tax increases but she went further and showed HOW IT COULD BE IMPLEMENTED SUCCESSFULLY. A key component of this plan was first-hundred-day actions that she COULD get done (unlike Bernie’s go-for-broke plan) and THAT was an existential threat to the gravy train. Moreover it wasn’t just that she made up some mythology about doing these things but she submitted it for review by economists who didn’t even favor single-payer universal care plans as proposed and they agreed — it checks out. At most they would quibble with this assumption or that one (say, how much cost savings could be realized by single payer) but the whole two-part plan was eminently credible. THAT got their attention.

That, could not be just hand-waved away. That had to be addressed. Suddenly you had the media parading centrist “experts” (think Rahm Emanuel, James Carville, Donny Deutsch and so forth) from the Democrats insisting that if a Democrat tried to run against Trump on M4A they would surely lose which was a risk we couldn’t take. They dragged down the favorability of single payer health care with industry supplied (false narrative) talking points and along with it, the credibility of Senator Warren.

Ah, but you’ll say, Bernie seems to be doing fine despite his support of M4A — and that’s largely true. Here’s the difference.

Bernie has his core. Loyal, committed, ride or die. NOTHING any centrist can say is going to make a Bernie supporter turn back. Different polls will find that cohort amounts to 12 or 13%, or 23% or whatever, but it is what is is, it’s immune to party or media narrative. Which, by the way, is why they seldom name him as a threat, they think that he can’t build on that enough new followers to get the nomination

Warren by contrast spend six months proving she COULD build a coalition which expands beyond her “true believers” and draws in more voters — but the flip side of that is that a “soft” supporter CAN be peeled away in a manner that doesn’t really happen to Bernie (particularly at this stage). All you have to do is find an effective pressure point, and right now there’s no more effective scare-tactic on the left than “what if Trump is re-elected?” (rightly so)

The PollPundits, some of which have spent all year creating storylines about how Trump could still win, will tell you “Warren started taking damage when she unwisely released details of her Medicare For All plan.” Nevermind that virtually EVERY voice on the debate stage and the in the media (there ARE notable exceptions) sang with one voice “We demand details!” — now that there are details the same crowd agrees that “this is what you get when you publish too many details.” That conclusion is not totally off track, it just doesn’t flow to the logical conclusion — they WANTED the details to set her up for counter-factual criticism. The narrative she’s facing now didn’t organically spring from the earth without many truckloads of fertilizer.

Now, can I prove all this with anything other than circumstantial observations? No. I’m not saying that there’s a secret star chamber meeting where The Powers That Be conspire on a strategy to destroy Elizabeth Warren. I’m simply assuming that people with a vested financial interest will in the great majority of cases act in the furtherance of that interest — even if they don’t even realize they are doing so. That’s the only assumption you need to make for the forging hypothesis to ring true.

The reality is this: if you poll voters about what single-payer, universal coverage health care ACTUALLY does versus the cost, every aspect of it (except, I think, the impact on the jobs that currently exist in the for-profit health care industry) are wildly popular. But if you poll it within the frame supplied by conservatives and industry lobbyists (the same folks, by the way, who insisted the ACA would be a complete disaster but now defend it as the status quo that shouldn’t be messed with) which involves tropes like “take away your private insurance” and “giving you coverage you have no choice about” — both of which are nonsense arguments but propaganda never needed to actually be accurate — then it polls much more poorly. These polls are then turned into a narrative that voters will not support a candidate who intends to fight for M4A, even if it means four more years of Trump (an insane notion in itself). It’s not surprising that the right, and the industry, would pound the desk for this narrative. That’s to be expected. What is deeply disappointing, if not shocking, is how many compromised or cowardly (or both) centrist Dems are only too happy to ride that same train, and if they get themselves a helping of gravy along the way then that’s okay too, right?

Obviously, a go-along, get-along, change nothing status quo Democrat IS vastly better than Trump but that’s because Trump is so fantastically bad, not any credit to the SQD (Status Quo Democrat, I just made that up). Personally, as long as I have the choice, I’ll take my stand with a fighter who’s got a vision that goes beyond JUST beating Trump to beating back the corrupt system that produced Trump, no matter who’s campaign coffers take a hit.

Has Warren’s popularity with poll respondents taken a hit? It certainly seems so. Does that mean her campaign is on the road to extinction? Hardly. To be clear, Warren will be fighting from behind right up until the point where she’s either eliminated, or the presumptive nominee (and then be packaged as an underdog for the general election). I think she has a solid path but there are a LOT of people with a TON of resources who are prepared to do literally whatever it takes to see that she fails. And if she fails they will know that no one in the future will dare try to rock their boat. As Senator Warren often says on the stump — THIS IS OUR TIME. If we miss the chance it may well never come again, and her opponents know that as well as she does. If you like what she stands for, you — and I — need to be just as invested in supporting her as the rich and connected are to obstructing her. This is literally the fight of our lives.