Warren says she doesn’t plan to immediately endorse in 2020 race

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) declined to make an endorsement in the Democratic presidential race on Thursday, saying that she would take her time to determine whom to support for her party’s nomination. 

Her remarks came shortly after she announced that she would suspend her presidential campaign following lackluster finishes across the map on Super Tuesday, including a third-place finish in her home state of Massachusetts.

Speaking outside her home in Cambridge, Mass., on Thursday, she suggested that she would endorse one of her rivals for the Democratic nomination eventually, but “not today.”

“Let’s take a deep breath and spend a little time on that,” Warren said. “We don’t have to decide that this minute.”

Warren’s endorsement would likely carry significant weight in the primary. She has received calls in recent days from former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the two top candidates remaining in the race, though it’s unclear whether either candidate explicitly asked for her backing. 

Over the course of her campaign, Warren sought to win the support of progressive voters in the primary contest, and a potential endorsement of Sanders, her chief ideological ally on the campaign trail, remains possible. 

But Warren and Sanders also clashed in January after the two candidates delivered conflicting accounts of a private meeting in 2018 in which Sanders allegedly told Warren that he did not think a woman could be elected president. Sanders has denied saying that.

Warren’s history with Biden has also been somewhat contentious. The two have butted heads over policy disagreements for years, and his more compromise-minded brand of politics would conflict with Warren’s push for sweeping political and regulatory change. 

In her remarks on Thursday, she offered no hints as to which candidate she is leaning toward, saying that she did not see her presidential campaign falling into either a progressive or moderate lane in the primary race. 

“I think I was told when I first got into this there are two lanes,” she said. “And I thought it was possible that that wasn’t the case. That there was more room and more room to run another kind of campaign.”