An Opening for Elizabeth Warren If She Wants It
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren told Fortune magazine this month that she won’t run for president in 2016, deepening the sense that the Democratic nomination is Hillary Clinton’s for the asking. Yet in contemporary politics the landscape can change dramatically, seemingly overnight. Before 2008 Barack Obama said repeatedly that he wasn’t running for president.
If Elizabeth Warren doesn’t change her mind, it could be because of intimidating national polls showing Mrs. Clinton with an overwhelming lead. Most recently, a CNN/ORC poll had the former secretary of state with a 66%-9% advantage over Ms. Warren.
 But these numbers don’t tell the whole story, and if Ms. Warren eventually does get into the race, it could be because the numbers in the crucial primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire are not nearly so scary.In my own recent polling there, I found a much more competitive landscape.
Telephone interviews with 400 likely caucusgoers in Iowa and 400 likely primary voters in New Hampshire, conducted Jan. 13-15, suggest that Ms. Warren is already considerably more competitive than national polls suggest. In a head-to-head Clinton-Warren matchup in Iowa, Mrs. Clinton ran 15 points ahead of Ms. Warren, at 51%-36%. Surprisingly, caucus-voting Iowa Democrats already appear to be thoroughly familiar with the Massachusetts senator, and well-disposed toward her, with a 75%-7% favorability rating. Mrs. Clinton has great favorables, too: 93%-6%.But Mrs. Clinton’s favorables don’t appear to make her invulnerable to a populist challenge from the left, as a Warren campaign would almost certainly be.
My polling shows that there is a significant opening with Democratic primary voters who are extremely liberal in ideology and populist in orientation.I also tested Mrs. Clinton’s message, based on her public statements, of charting a new direction and standing up for working people against Ms. Warren’s more explicitly populist direction in which government addresses fundamental unfairness in American society through more oversight of Wall Street and policies to reduce income inequality.
In that message comparison, Ms. Warren polled a mere four points behind Mrs. Clinton, at 31% to 35%.Ms. Warren could find similar encouragement in New Hampshire, the nation’s first primary state and neighbor of the senator’s state of Massachusetts. Among likely Democratic primary voters, Mrs. Clinton led Ms. Warren by only nine points, 51%-42%. The two had virtually identical favorable ratings at 89%-5% for Ms. Warren, 90%-5% for Mrs. Clinton.Ms. Warren’s populist message resonates more strongly in New Hampshire than in Iowa. New Hampshire residents, when polled on the specific Clinton and Warren messages, had Ms. Warren within hailing distance of Mrs. Clinton, at 38%-31%. When respondents were asked the sort of question that a campaign might pose—whether they’d vote for Mrs. Clinton, described as close to Wall Street and a supporter of the Iraq war, versus Ms. Warren as a true progressive who stands up to Wall Street—Ms. Warren polled ahead of Mrs. Clinton, at 47% to 42%.
Given that front-runners in primaries typically draw their highest poll numbers at the start of a race, when their name-recognition advantage is most pronounced, Mrs. Clinton’s best hope would be to solidify her current support. Worst case: She suffers the same slippage she did in Iowa in 2008 when she finished a poor third after showing a resounding lead of 58%-12% over then-Sen. Obama.
The implications are clear. Hillary Clinton is vulnerable in the Democratic primaries, something her new adviser Joel Benenson (currently an Obama pollster who previously worked for me) is presumably in the process of finding out. The results from my polling also suggest that potential candidates who would offer populist messages—former Sen. Jim Webb from Virginia and Sen.
Bernie Sanders from Vermont—also have the potential to narrow significantly Mrs. Clinton’s current lead.
If either Mr. Webb or Mr. Sanders gets into the race, Ms. Warren might have second thoughts—a split of the populist vote could pave the way for Mrs. Clinton. The former secretary of state could further complicate matters for potential challengers from the left by developing her own theme to appeal to an electorate that sees American society as fundamentally unfair.
Tom Donahue, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, last week attacked Ms. Warren’s “economic populism†and charged that she stands for more regulation and government control of business. That’s music to the ears of many Democratic primary voters, who seem ready to embrace candidates who take on big business, the banks and Wall Street—some of Ms. Warren’s favorite targets. In other words, the Democratic presidential contest could go very quickly from a foregone conclusion to a fierce contest.
Mr. Schoen served as a political adviser and pollster for President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000.
