It is getting late, and I am getting tired, and the results are still coming in from the Super Tuesday primaries. The two largest and most important, Texas and California, are still outstanding, but one of the night's most important contests, Massachusetts, is more or less completed.
Massachusetts is the home state of Elizabeth Warren, who serves as a senator there. If Elizabeth Warren hopes to get a sizable amount of delegates, she would have to win her home state. Or at the very least, do a good job there. Tonight, she did not, ending up with 20% of the vote, behind Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders. There are a lot of ways to spin her third place finish: the liberal vote was split between her and Sanders, people already thought Sanders was going to win, Sanders comes from a neighboring state...but whatever the reason is, Warren didn't make a showing that would have even established a baseline of making this a three person race.
Around 12 weeks ago, Warren was leading in the polls. There is nothing intrinisic about Warren that makes her a non-serious candidate, as opposed to say, a tankie like Tulsi Gabbard or a vanity candidate like Michael Bloomberg. Warren is a serious, prepared and experienced candidate, who was at one time considered a good consensus candidate. But now the race has reverted to the mean, and three person races are not taken seriously. And so, with Warren fizzling out in Massachusetts, this becomes more or less a two man race.
In my view, Elizabeth Warren is the best Democratic candidate, but she just ended up on the wrong side of narrative and inevitability.