Why Elizabeth Warren lost her home state of Massachusetts

Sen. Elizabeth Warren was trounced by former Vice President Joe Biden and fellow progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders in her home state of Massachusetts on Tuesday night.

Though the proportionality rules mean Warren may still come away with some delegates, the result is a big symbolic loss. This wound up being a far closer race in Massachusetts than political experts in the state had predicted last year, and Biden’s late surge cut into Warren’s home-state advantage as well.

As of 10:25 Eastern, our partners at Decision Desk have called the race for Biden, with Sanders in second place around 28 percent and Warren in third at 22 percent.

Polls between Sanders and Warren were tight in the week leading up to Super Tuesday; a Saturday Suffolk University/Boston Globe/WBZ-TV poll found Warren in a statistical tie with Sanders, and an earlier WBUR poll found Sanders 8 points ahead of Warren. Biden, the eventual primary winner, was polling at just 11 percent in the Suffolk University poll.

“Last year, it was assumed Elizabeth Warren would carry Massachusetts and carry it comfortably,” Suffolk University pollster David Paleologos said in a Monday interview. She didn’t.

Warren has struggled to capture independent voters — especially men. As I wrote in July, Warren has long had a complicated relationship with voters in Massachusetts, a state she’s lived in for more than two decades and represented in the US Senate since 2012. The fact that she’s on Morning Consult’s list of the 10 most unpopular senators has raised eyebrows. If Warren’s such a great candidate, some have wondered, why didn’t she have better favorability ratings in her home state?

The answer is complex, and has to do with the gender politics Warren also has experienced nationally in the 2020 primary.

Gender politics have long been an issue for Warren

Warren has had a consistent gender imbalance when it comes to male and female voters. While she typically performs well among women (both in her home state and nationally), men present much more of a challenge. That was true on Super Tuesday as well.

CNN exit polling, tweeted by Massachusetts political reporter Nik DeCosta-Klipa, showed Warren faring poorly among voters without college degrees — and especially among white men without college degrees.

Despite the liberal reputation of Massachusetts, the state actually has a substantial number of unaffiliated, so-called “independent” voters. They make up 55 percent of the overall electorate and help explain why super-blue Massachusetts has a history of electing moderate Republican governors.

While Warren has high favorability ratings among women, it’s much lower among men — especially independent men in her home state. These are voters who are more politically aligned with the state’s moderate Republican Gov. Charlie Baker and see Warren as too far left. They’ve been a weak spot for Warren since she first ran in 2012. Exit polls from 2012 showed Brown did better with independent voters (particularly men), while enthusiasm among women and the Democratic base helped propel Warren to a win.

The recent Suffolk poll of 2020 candidates showed a continuation of this trend. The poll showed Warren as the leading candidate among women. But when results were broken out for men, she was tied for fourth place in her home state. Sanders was also beating her 35 percent to 23 percent among nonwhite voters and had a 23-point lead on Warren among voters under the age of 35.

“Warren would win the Massachusetts primary [on Tuesday] if only women were voting,” Paleologos said. Of course, they weren’t.

Some Massachusetts voters didn’t want her to run for president

As I interviewed some Massachusetts residents last summer, it became clear not everyone was ready for Warren to run for president.

For instance, voter Jared Manville liked Warren and told me he thought she’d “absolutely make mincemeat” out of Trump if she went up against him in November 2020. But he also understood why other Massachusetts voters didn’t see her Senate tenure in such glowing terms — in large part because they thought it was a box to check before running for president.

“The people that are anti-her [think] this is a stepping stone to get to the big seat,” he said.

Polling mirrored that sentiment; a fall 2018 Suffolk University poll before Warren entered the presidential race showed 58 percent of likely Massachusetts voters didn’t want her to run.

“The problems Warren has experienced really go back many, many months — even when she was deciding to run for president, a clear majority didn’t want her to run for president in the first place,” Paleologos told me. “Not because they didn’t like her — they loved her — but they just didn’t want her to run.”

A third-place finish in Massachusetts is certainly not the outcome she planned for.

Listen to Today, Explained

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