The draft Warren movement needs to end

Imagine your perfect car: comfortable seats, room for your whole family, great gas mileage, quick acceleration and performance brakes. Best of all, it’s within your budget and currently on the market—as long as you buy it soon. But instead of signing the papers, you allow a friend to convince you to hold out for a fancy prototype model that remains unavailable to regular consumers. Suddenly, the first car is off the market and you’re stuck driving the old junker you hate.

For voters who want a progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders is the best car on the market. Senator Elizabeth Warren — a charismatic populist with national name-recognition and an impressive donor base — would make a phenomenal candidate, but she’s rejected the possibility every chance she gets. The quicker her fans stop waiting in vain, the better chance Sanders will have to fight for the values voters associate with Warren.

Progressives have spent several years dreading an uncontested primary season dominated by Hillary Clinton, who has made little effort to conceal her closeness to Wall Street or her hawkish record of supporting the Iraq War and the Patriot Act (twice). After the 2014 elections, progressive nonprofits Democracy for America (DFA) and MoveOn asked their members  which candidate they would support in the 2016 primary. With over 164,000 votes cast, 42 percent of DFA members (including me) supported Elizabeth Warren. Bernie Sanders came in second with 24 percent, with Hillary Clinton right behind him at 23 percent. A Warren candidacy was possible then, but now that she’s demurred, Sanders is the obvious choice to inherit Warren’s base.

However, Sanders has only a short window of time to win over these Warren holdouts, who could provide him with the poll numbers and donations he needs to have a fighting chance in the early primaries. DFA and MoveOn – who have collectively raised $1.25 million for their Run Warren Run campaign — mean well, but are doing more harm than good by doubling down on their determination to draft Warren.

In a phone interview, Democracy for America executive director Charles Chamberlain argued that Warren might still enter. “Look at Bill Clinton, he didn’t announce he was running until October,” Chamberlain told me. “We’re building this race to make it possible for her to get in as late as she needs.” He’s is right that Bill Clinton didn’t officially announce his campaign until October 3, 1991. But unlike Warren, Clinton had never decisively ruled out running. He had announced his presidential exploratory committee in August, and according to Clinton insider David Brock, had been “seriously considering” a presidential run ever since late spring of 1991. As a two-term governor and former state attorney general, Clinton was also highly experienced in campaigning. He didn’t need any persuasion from advocacy groups to enter the race.

By contrast, it took months of intense public pressure for Warren to enter her first political campaign, against Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown. And as soon as the presidential buzz started in December of 2013, Warren did her best to stifle that conversation by pledging to serve the length of her term, which ends in 2019. She’s gone on record six times saying she’s not running for president in 2016. Referencing MoveOn’s persistent efforts to draft Warren, Late Night host Seth Meyers recently joked, “If you asked a girl to prom this many times without a yes, they would ask you to transfer schools.”

Despite Meyers’s plea, MoveOn is refusing to move on. In a phone interview, Washington director Ben Wikler said the organization’s members overwhelmingly support Warren in polls and that the campaign will continue indefinitely.

“MoveOn has committed $1 million, a majority of which was contributed by members to fund this campaign, and we’re deep in the process of spending it,” Wikler said. “Tomorrow, if Warren said, ‘I’m seriously considering it,’ that would cause a massive shockwave across American politics.”

Like Chamberlain, Wikler refused to say when his organization would poll its members again now that Bernie Sanders is officially running.

However, some Warren enthusiasts are already working to build support for Sanders. Charles Lenchner and  Winnie Wong, co-founders respectively of Ready for Warren and Artists for Warren, have publicly announced their support for Bernie Sanders. Drawing on their backgrounds in Occupy Wall Street, they put together peopleforbernie.com, which features an endorsement letter signed by over 50 leading activists from Occupy as well as from the labor and environmental movements. Wong said even if Warren were to enter the race further down the road, she would continue campaigning for Bernie Sanders.

“As individuals who have organized under the banner of Occupy Wall Street and organized the messaging and ideas that came out of Zuccotti Park, we endorse Bernie Sanders,” Wong told Al Jazeera America. “Many organizers are pro-Warren. We think that she’s a strong candidate to beat Hillary. That being said, she’s said repeatedly she’s not entering the race.”

To their credit, MoveOn issued a statement welcoming Sanders’ candidacy. Chamberlain noted DFA’s record of amplifying Sanders’s work in the U.S. Senate. For her part, Wong is quick to add that she neither wants to discourage Warren from running for president nor stop anyone from pushing for her to run.

But as long as a Warren candidacy is still seen as a possibility, Bernie Sanders’s long odds become even longer. Would-be supporters could be giving Sanders momentum in new polls. Would-be donors have resources that Sanders could put to use in critical early primary states such as Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

The worst-case scenario for progressives would be a two-candidate primary between Clinton and Sanders, in which Sanders is hopelessly behind in both money and polling by the time the New Hampshire primary comes around on February 20. Leaders of Democracy for America and MoveOn would be left wondering how the primaries might have gone if they hadn’t wasted $1.25 million on someone who, just like she said she would, never ended up running. There’s still time for Warren supporters to come around, but not a second to waste.