2020 Vision: Why Warren's honeymoon may be coming to an end ? | 2019-09-22 08:59:50 (Visits: 790 Times) |  | | Andrew Romano and Dylan Stableford-,Yahoo News•September 20, 2019
Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks at the Massachusetts Democratic Party convention in Springfield on Saturday. (Photo: Jessica Hill/AP)
Welcome to 2020 Vision, the Yahoo News column covering the presidential race. Reminder: There are 136 days until the Iowa caucuses and 410 days until the 2020 presidential election.
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It’s an ironclad law of presidential primary politics: With increased success comes increased scrutiny. And it looks like Elizabeth Warren is about to get her turn in the hot seat.
After fumbling a Native American DNA test — a misstep that threatened to overshadow her nascent campaign — the Massachusetts senator went on to enjoy a months-long streak of positive press coverage. Her debate opponents mostly declined to attack her, choosing to target frontrunner former Vice President Joe Biden instead. As a result, Warren ticked up steadily in the polls, week after week; now she ranks second nationally in an average of recent polls, a bit ahead of fellow progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Yet there are signs the honeymoon may be ending. The first clue came during last week’s ABC News debate, during which Biden, Sen. Amy Klobuchar and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg all explicitly criticized Warren’s support for Medicare for All, claiming that it would cost too much, that it would raise taxes on the middle class, and that it would force people off their private insurance.
The more ominous development, however, is how Buttigieg in particular has decided to spend the week following the debate. Introducing his own health care proposal in a Thursday op-ed, Buttigieg took Warren and Sanders to task, by name, for wanting to “fli[p] a switch and kic[k] almost 160 million Americans off their private insurance, including 20 million seniors already choosing private plans within Medicare.”
Then he implied that Warren in particular was not being “honest and straightforward about the details” of how she would pay for her plan.“Senator Warren is known for being straightforward and was extremely evasive when asked that question — and we have seen that repeatedly,” Buttigieg added Thursday in an interview with Jake Tapper. “People are used to Washington politicians not giving straight answers to simple questions. But at a time like this, on an issue this important, that’s exactly what we need.”
The “kicking people off private insurance” argument certainly has some purchase among Democratic primary voters, which is why Democrats running to Warren’s right keep pushing it. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, for instance, found that 55 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents prefer to vote for a candidate who intends to build on the Affordable Care Act, while only 40 percent prefer to vote for a candidate who wants to replace the ACA with Medicare for All.
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