Biden allies attack Warren's electability

[pnwmom]

7. And here's an opposite point of view from MA insiders.

https://medium.com/gus_67169/the-hidden-story-behind-elizabeth-warrens-big-victory-a5d0cd181c95

In 2012, Elizabeth’s first-ever run for office was a very competitive race, that featured tens of millions in TV ads, a massive field and political operation, and an incredible amount of national and local media interest as Senate control hung in the balance. In the Massachusetts 2018 general election, despite the best efforts of both parties, there wasn’t a single competitive, high-profile race on the general election ballot. Despite that, Elizabeth received a nearly 7 percent higher vote share than 2012, while improving over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vote share. Not a lot of Democrats running for Senate in 2018 saw such an increase in their vote share from 2012 — in fact, the data suggests quite the opposite.

Folks who don’t know much about our state often assume everyone here is a Democrat — but, of course, Elizabeth beat an extremely popular incumbent Republican in 2012, and we’ve only had one Democratic governor since 1991. And while it’s true that Massachusetts is Democratic-leaning in nationalized federal elections, our state is not particularly elastic at the margins of the electorate. Our conservatives are extremely conservative (Donald Trump trounced his opponents in the 2016 Republican primary here) and they aren’t interested in voting for Democrats. Consider the last three presidential races in the state:
2008: Obama 61.8% — McCain 35.99%
2012: Obama 60.65% — Romney 37.51%
2016: Clinton 60.0% — Trump 32.8%

SNIP

The small differences in these margins don’t tell you much about the relative strength or weakness of these candidates nationally. After all, the weakest of these performances came from Trump, who won nationally, and the strongest came from Romney, who lost nationally. Taken together, though, the margins strongly suggest 60 percent or so is more or less the ceiling for a Democrat in a nationalized race in Massachusetts. And make no mistake — Elizabeth’s campaign was about as nationalized a race as you can have here without literally running for President. She has sky-high name recognition in the state, regularly spars with the President, openly contemplated running against him, and her actual opponent, Geoff Diehl was Donald Trump’s campaign co-chair in 2016. It’s no surprise that her numbers are nearly identical to the last three presidential elections.

2018: Warren 60.3% — Diehl 36.2%

While the overall margins aren’t that interesting, some of the vote breakdown is. Elizabeth improved a bit on Hillary Clinton’s performance overall, and in two key regional categories — rural areas and racially diverse areas — that improvement was substantial. In the 87 towns classified as rural, for example, Elizabeth saw on average a 6 percentage point improvement over Hillary Clinton’s vote share. And in Massachusetts’ most racially-diverse cities and towns (defined as those where more than 20% of the registered electorate are voters of color) Elizabeth gained 1.7% overall from Hillary Clinton’s vote share.