Saagar Enjeti: Why Warren’s ‘Medicare For All’ rollout has contributed to polling drop

Opinion by: Saagar Enjeti

Elizabeth Warren is paying a major price in the polls for the botched roll out of her Medicare For All plan in a new national poll of Democratic voters from Quinnipiac.

The Massachusetts senator has fallen 14 points in just the last month with even more revealing information about her precipitous fall in the cross tabulations.

As Bloomberg journalist Sahil Kapur points out, Warren has fallen 7 points in the last month on the question of who has the best policy ideas, she’s fallen 10 points on whether she is the most electable, 14 points on whether she cares about people like you, 9 points on most honest, and 14 points on most intelligent.

Gee, I wonder what exactly happened in the last month which would cause Warren to dramatically fall overall nationally and take huge hits to as to whether she has the best policy ideas, is the most electable, honest, or more intelligent. Its because she twisted herself into knots in releasing a Medicare for All financing plan which required immigration reform, a renewed Wealth Tax, and a whole host of other terrible ideas just to get around saying middle-class taxes would go up while she was on the debate stage.

Warren and every single other person who knows anything about healthcare knows the only conceivable way any single pay option would happen is with a payroll tax, but just to avoid a possible Republican targeting ad while she is in the general election she went out of her way to engineer this ridiculous proposal. Warren then poured gasoline on the fire 2 weeks ago with the release of her Medicare for All transition plan which claimed she would immediately expand Obamacare and then maybe if the midterm elections go well, she’d pass it in year 3. Because you know, that’s how that works.

Warren’s botched case for Medicare For All really just highlights all of her problems as a politician, her dishonest roll out of Medicare For All was always meant to reap the electoral benefits of proving progressive left bonfides while trying to protect the suburban middle-class vote in the general election. She only instead managed to lose both sides because people can see right through her lack of authenticity.

Warren’s central problem in this race is that she has a theory of the case that basically doesn’t align with the Democratic electorate. As journalist Zaid Jilani has pointed out on this show, Warren is basically running for Secretary of the Treasury during an election where healthcare is the number one issue for Democratic voters, she never particularly cared about healthcare, just remember where she stood as recently as 2012.

Warren: think right now what we have to do, I think we gotta stay with what’s possible. And I think what we’re doing Look at the dust up around this, we really need to consolidate our gains.
Jim Braude: But you do support single payer healthcare
Warren: No, what I’ve got right now… Oh I think you need to go back and take a look at.. But the point is what we’ve got to do is keep moving in the direction of getting more families covered and lowering the cost of healthcare.

Warren’s falling poll numbers and shaky political brand validate what I’ve said here on the show from the very beginning, that voters care a lot less about the actual policy that you’re proposing than whether you’re being honest with them about your priorities and whether you’ll fight as hard as you possibly can to get something that’s as close as you can possibly get after a policy is mangled by our political process in Congress.

Warren of all people has the largest trust deficit to make up with the American people, given that most people know her as the person who lied about her heritage for decades in order to benefit her career only to take a bizarre DNA test that didn’t prove her actual claim and then get called out by the Cherokee nation. Every move she makes for political expediency just validates the political narrative that most people already have about her, and this is no exception.