The question came at a campaign cattle call in April 2019, just a few months after Elizabeth Warren announced her presidential bid: How would she address “the urge to flee to the safety of a white male candidate?”
After a question-and-answer session spent presenting her plans to address maternal mortality, criminal justice, housing, redlining and tribal sovereignty, that remark came as “a big bucket of cold water,” Ms. Warren, the Massachusetts senator, writes in a new memoir about her failed campaign.
“We all knew the fear she was talking about,” she writes. “Could we — should we — support a woman?”
Her book, “Persist,” addresses Ms. Warren’s effort to grapple with that question. Obtained by The New York Times before its release next week, it offers a peek into Ms. Warren’s personal view of her loss — a defeat she largely blames on a failure to explain how she would pay for her health care plan, the established following of Senator Bernie Sanders, the name recognition of Joseph R. Biden Jr. — and her own shortcomings.
“There’s always another possibility, a much more painful one,” she writes. “In this moment, against this president, in this field of candidates, maybe I just wasn’t good enough to reassure the voters, to bring along the doubters, to embolden the hopeful.”
a private 2018 meeting that a woman could not defeat Mr. Trump is largely ignored.
But one former opponent gets far more withering treatment. Ms. Warren spends several pages detailing her determination to take down Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, in a February 2020 debate, saying she believed his decision to spend nearly a billion dollars of his personal fortune to skip the early primaries “undermined our democracy” by essentially handing the nomination to the richest man.