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Elizabeth Warren Is Winning the Ideas Primary

Katrina vanden Heuvel on the Democrats, John Nichols on Bernie and Socialism, and Sasha Abramsky on Florida voting rights.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

June 20, 2019

Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren speaks at an organizing event in Las Vegas on February 17, 2019.(AP Photo / John Locher)

Elizabeth Warren may be running third in the Democratic polls, after Biden and Bernie, but she seems to be the clear leader in what we call “the ideas primary.” Katrina vanden Heuvel comments—and suggests that foreign policy, where Warren has said little, should be a focus for the upcoming Democratic candidate debates.

Also: Trump declared in his State of the Union speech “America will never become a socialist country.” Of course that only makes it seem like maybe it will. Bernie Sanders gave an important speech on socialism last week, connecting this year’s campaign to FDR’s unfinished agenda—and John Nichols spoke with him about it.

Plus: One of the great progressive victories last November, along with the mid-term Congressional races, was the vote in Florida to restore voting rights to people who had been convicted of felonies and served their sentences–1.4 million people. But the voting rights news from Florida since then has NOT been so good—Sasha Abramsky explains.

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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