Briahna Joy Gray, former national press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) 2020 presidential campaign, told Hill.TV it was “really frustrating” when fellow White House candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) did not endorse Sanders before he dropped out.
Gray’s comments follow an interview published this month in which Warren said she “wanted to wait until there was just one person in the race, and get 100 percent behind that person.”
Warren ultimately threw her support behind President Biden, once he was the only candidate left in the Democratic field.
Gray told Hill.TV’s “Rising” that Warren’s strategy “defies the purpose of an endorsement.”
“As far as I understand it, the point of an endorsement is to help undecided voters choose between more than one remaining candidate, and the idea of waiting until the pool whittles down till no choice remains kind of defies the purpose of an endorsement,” Gray said.
She said it was a “particularly remarkable choice” for Warren to not endorse a candidate until Biden was the only one left in the race because of the similarities between Sanders’s and Warren’s platforms.
“At that time it was a particularly remarkable choice to stay out of the endorsement process since so much of the race was defined by the fact that there were these progressive candidates in Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and so much of the pitch for Elizabeth Warren at the time was, ‘Well, she believes everything Bernie believes but she has a plan for it, and you get the added benefit of having a level of gender diversity that we’ve never had in the White House,’” Gray said.
“If that identity of interest is true, if that simpatico on these big substantive issues that we were all supposed to be very committed to was valid, then the idea that you wouldn’t endorse the sole remaining person in the race that supported health care as a human right, that supported a wealth tax, that supported a free child care plan and on and on and on down the line, was really frustrating,” Gray added.
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