Elizabeth Warren is thought to be one of the Democratic front-runners for the mid-term elections in 2020. But if recent polling is to be believed, she may not survive her Senate re-election campaign in 2018.
According to Boston’s WBUR, while Sen. Warren enjoys a 50% approval rating among her Massachusetts constituents, only 44% of those same voters say that Warren deserves re-election. Forty-six percent say they’d prefer to see someone else in the seat she occupies.
“No one’s going to look at a 44 percent reelect number and think that that’s a good number,” said a spokesperson for the polling group, MassINC. “No one’s going to look at it being close to even between ‘reelect’ and ‘give someone else a chance’ and think that that’s reassuring.”
And, as she’s aggressively approached Donald Trump’s incoming Cabinet picks, it seems she’s lost some momentum—her approval rating is down two percentage points from just a month ago.
Part of that may be that Massachusetts voters relish their representatives’ independence, and expect a more progressive politician to voice their interests, and of late, Warren has been more intimately involved with Democratic Party politics than her own state’s, likely to elevate her name recognition in advance of a nation-wide run.
But while 2018 may seem far off, a number of major Congressional campaigns have already started. Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp are already laying the groundwork for their own re-elections, in states that have high blue-collar populations (and also, in 2016, high percentages of Trump voters), and most House members have already scheduled meetings with their party infrastructure.
Warren is starting from a rough position, and that could swiftly bring an end to her ambition.
