Warren in June: Back in an Unflattering Spotlight

Warren Narrative Map as of May 31, 2019

Warren Narrative Commentary

• The lower attention level of Sen. Warren's narrative compared to that of other top candidates is, we think, indicative of two patterns.
  • The first is that Warren's campaign and its coverage have emphasized her role with respect to issues that are less relevant to overall election narratives. In particular, impeachment of President Trump continues to be an issue linked in media to Warren, but it is treated as a peripheral election issue in media, at best.
  • The second is that, even with respect to otherwise high attention topics like student loans, socialist or highly progressive policies, etc., the language used in coverage of Warren's policy ideas treats her association with them as almost 'accidental'.

• In a sense, our opinion is that Sen. Warren's attempts to balance support of centrists while still claiming the mantle of the 'very progressive' candidate - despite a track record that generally supports the latter contention - are not yet resonating in political media.

• They are resonating more than Biden's narrative, and we would not be surprised to see Warren take some of his early support.

• As Sen. Warren's very prominent senatorial activities take a backseat to campaigning over the coming months, we will be interested to see if the overall cohesion of and attention to her platform and candidacy improves from today's somewhat fractured narrative.

• If it is true that Warren's best opportunities lie ahead in the more wonkish phases of the primary season, we would also counsel monitoring the sentiment of her coverage, which, while not as abysmal as Biden's, has been increasingly negative over the course of 2019.

• The leading women candidates - Harris and Warren - have both been treated to far more negative language in political media in recent months than all of their non-Biden counterparts. On that basis, we counsel care in consuming potentially affected / opinion-influenced news content about these candidates.

• Topically, Warren appears to have attempted to carve herself out as THE anti-trust, anti-corporate power candidate, and as the solving-student-loans candidate. She's been prominent with her plan on the opioid epidemic, too. But the media have not yet fully embraced the relationship between these topics and Warren's policies. In other words, when they write about 'the student loan crisis', they only occasionally refer to Warren with language about her proposals. However internally coherent the platform may be, the link isn't nearly as connected in media election narratives as, say, Sanders and healthcare.

• These are both important issues to 2020 election narratives. We think closing the gap on her association with these issues would have a significant impact on the common knowledge promoted by media about her candidacy.

• The Native American claims issue is still there, albeit in mostly right-leaning media. It also remains surprisingly central to discussions of Warren. But it has declined substantially in quantity, attention and cohesion over the last few months.

Warren Narrative Attention as of May 31, 2019

• Whatever Warren Narrative exists is roughly average among candidates in terms of its consistency with broader election narratives and language.

• This does, however, represent a meaningful increase over the last few months as campaign dialogue has moved away from new candidate announcements and back toward more issue-focused language that has tended to align well with Warren's own coverage.

• In fact, Warren trailed only Kamala Harris in our attention measure for the month of May alone. Unfortunately, that higher attention has not been accompanied by positive coverage.

Warren Narrative Cohesion as of May 31, 2019

• Senator Warren's narrative has been very consistent (note the tightness of the Y-Axis scale on the above graphic) throughout early 2019, and ranking in the top half of candidates but soundly behind that of Sen. Sanders.

• The internal consistency of language used to describe Sen. Warren and her campaign has been moderate, but is probably being suppressed somewhat by her very public involvement in the US Senate and the added complexity of non-election issues on which she makes public statements.

• Regardless of the causes, as with most other candidates, a Warren Narrative has not yet crystallized in media in the same way that a Bernie Sanders Narrative (or for that matter, a Joe Biden narrative) has.

Warren Narrative Sentiment as of May 31, 2019

• While the data we are working with can't ascribe intent, we do note that each of Harris, Warren and Gabbard have been soundly in the bottom 4 of sentiment for the second quarter of 2019 (joined only by Biden).

• As important and central as sex and gender language have been thus far, it is striking that media accounts of the three most prominent woman candidates have tended toward such negative language in coverage.

• We would be mindful of this in reading all of the coverage of these candidates, but in the case of Warren in particular, whose descent in sentiment has been so consistent, we would be doubly cautious of the influence of the revealed preferences, if you will, of authors and news outlets.

• We also note that this has happened even as the broadly negative coverage of her prior comments about Native American ancestry have faded. This sentiment swing does not to be a feature of right-leaning publications alone.