Elizabeth Warren Drops Out of 2020 Race: 'We Made a Lasting Difference,' She Says (with Last Jab at Bloomberg)

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Thursday announced she was dropping out of the 2020 presidential race, effectively leaving the Democratic Party’s choice of a nominee between former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Warren’s team had said Wednesday she was weighing her options after a disappointing showing on “Super Tuesday,” in which 14 states all voted at once — and she failed to win a single contest, even coming in third in her home state of Massachusetts.

By contrast, Biden won 10 “Super Tuesday” states, including Massachusetts, and Sanders won four.

Those results were the clearest proof yet of Warren’s diminished place in the primary race and a dramatic reversal from her front-runner status last fall, when her can-do-it flurry of detailed policy proposals and vision of “big, structural change” in America put her at the top of many polls.

She and Sanders largely dominated the race’s most left-wing tranches. With plans to address health care, economic inequality and student debt, among other issues, she helped re-shape the Democratic primary — together with Sanders making it more liberal while insisting her ideas were more popular and more possible than had been believed.

That momentum did not ultimately carry her far enough, however.

Addressing her campaign staff in a call on Thursday morning, Warren, 70, spoke of the work she said the team had accomplished so far, even if they fell short of their goal, and she looked to the fights ahead. She also stung former rival Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire three-term mayor of New York City, one last time after going viral in a takedown of him at a February debate.

“In this campaign, we have been willing to fight, and, when necessary, we left plenty of blood and teeth on the floor. And I can think of one billionaire who has been denied the chance to buy this election,” she said.

Bloomberg dropped out of the race a day before Warren and immediately endorsed Biden. In comments later Thursday morning to reporters outside her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, Warren declined to give her endorsement to either Biden or Sanders, saying she was going to “take a breath” and take some time before any such announcement.

On her call that morning with her staff, she echoed the point-of-view that had made her a favorite of many Democrats in recent years: a modulation of Sanders’ call for “revolution” paired with an insistence on nitty-gritty details.

“I know that when we set out, this was not the call you ever wanted to hear,” she said. “It is not the call I ever wanted to make. But I refuse to let disappointment blind me — or you — to what we’ve accomplished. We didn’t reach our goal, but what we have done together — what you have done — has made a lasting difference. It’s not the scale of the difference we wanted to make, but it matters — and the changes will have ripples for years to come.”

“You know, I used to hate goodbyes,” Warren said. “Whenever I taught my last class or when we moved to a new city, those final goodbyes used to wrench my heart. But then I realized that there is no goodbye for much of what we do. When I left one place, I took everything I’d learned before and all the good ideas that were tucked into my brain and all the good friends that were tucked in my heart, and I brought it all forward with me — and it became part of what I did next. This campaign is no different.”

In a reflection of her years as a professor before she entered politics, Warren did not end her call with her staff without one last lesson.

“Choose to fight only righteous fights, because then when things get tough — and they will — you will know that there is only option ahead of you: Nevertheless, you must persist.”

Looking Back at Warren’s Campaign

Warren, a former law professor and consumer advocate turned senator, was long-thought to be one of the leading candidates in the Democratic Party’s 2020 race.

For much of last year, she polled near the top of the field and produced some of the primary’s most memorable moments, including appearing to duck Sanders’ handshake following a heated January debate — in which they disagreed over whether he had once told her a woman couldn’t beat President Donald Trump — and her viral takedown of Bloomberg in the Nevada debate a month later.

But that never translated to the voting booths. She earned just eight delegates in the first four state contests. She also failed to win a single state on “Super Tuesday,” picking up a few dozen delegates compared to the hundreds each for Biden and Sanders.

Warren stood out as the leading woman candidate in the Democratic race, championing a plan to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and making a promise to cancel student loan debt on her first day in office.

She grappled with controversy at times, including previously saying she was Native American (for which she has apologized). Trump regularly mocked her on Twitter as “Pocahontas,” a favorite slur.

Her progressive politics were also divisive for some liberal votes: either not quite bold enough, they argued, or much too sweeping — and other voters indicated a hesitance to support a woman after Hillary Clinton’s surprising loss to Trump in 2016.

But her base of support ran deep as well.

Warren popularized the use of “selfie lines” to connect with voters throughout the country and made striking impacts on young women who came to meet her on the campaign trail, including girls she routinely gave pinky promises and introduced herself, saying, “My name is Elizabeth, and I’m running for president because that’s what girls do.”

(“One of the hardest parts of this are all those pinky promises” to little girls who want a woman president and will “have to wait another four years,” Warren told reporters on Thursday.)

She was named one of PEOPLE’s “Women Changing the World” in 2019 alongside fellow Democratic candidates Sens. Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar, who have both since left the race.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is the only woman left in the 2020 presidential race, though she hasn’t polled well enough nationally to appear in the latest debates and hasn’t received any delegates so far in the primary.

“It’s pretty exciting that at every debate there have been multiple women on stage,” Warren told PEOPLE last year. “That when I go to the Iowa Wing Ding or to a small town in New Hampshire, the chances are that I could run into another woman running for president. That’s pretty amazing.”

“But it’s also about making change,” she continued. “It’s about the past, but it’s about the future. It’s about issues that have received lip service forever but never any really passionate push behind it.”