Elizabeth Warren 2016: what will she do about Hillary Clinton?

By Will Stabley | April 13, 2015

Some liberals want Elizabeth Warren to run for President in 2016, even as Hillary Clinton announces her campaign and becomes the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee. Warren says she’s not running, and probably can’t win anyway in the current “Citizens United” campaign financing climate, but that hasn’t stopped her supporters from urging he to change her mind. But here’s why her power is best preserved by remaining in the Senate and endorsing Hillary.

Elizabeth Warren isn’t running for President in 2016 because she refuses to take any campaign donations from Wall Street, which are vital in order to properly fund a national campaign. Without that money, Warren would lack the ability to do significant advertising on television, and would struggle to get her populist message across to moderate, undecided, or uninformed voters. Even if she could somehow take the Democratic Party nomination away from Hillary Clinton, she’d be left campaigning with perhaps one tenth the funding that her Republican Party opponent would have.

Some have suggested that Elizabeth Warren should become Hillary Clinton’s Vice Presidential running mate as a way of ensuring that Hillary follows through on properly regulating the banks and Wall Street. However such a move would force Warren to tone down her message and become a surrogate for Hillary’s campaign, as well as forcing her to be a part of a campaign funded on the corporate donations she so thoroughly despises.

Instead, Elizabeth Warren would do well to conditionally endorse Hillary Clinton while remaining in the Senate. If Hillary wins and the democrats end up with a majority in Congress, Warren instantly becomes the most powerful Senator in the nation. Clinton will have to continue to grant her concessions on financial reform in order to retain popular support from the left. The rest of the Democratic Party will fall in line, and republicans in Congress will be afraid to take her on directly for fear she’ll focus in on which unseemly corporations have funded their campaigns.

The result: Elizabeth Warren becomes the most powerful Senator perhaps in all of American history. And because the left-leaning Massachusetts will continue to reelect her for decades to come whether she has corporate campaign financing or not, she’ll be in a position to continue delivering her populist message and flexing her newfound political muscle during the next several administrations.

And most importantly, with as many as four seats opening up on the Supreme Court over the next eight years on both sides of the political spectrum, President Hillary Clinton would appoint the kind of justices who would overturn Citizens United and limit the influence of corporate dollars on campaigns. That would in turn open the door for reformers like Elizabeth Warren to successfully run for President in the future. So the easiest way for Warren to get the changes she wants in campaign finance laws in the long run is to simply endorse Hillary Clinton in 2016.