Democratic presidential front-runners Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were not in the New York Times editorial board’s top four choices for the 2020 primary.
The editorial board revealed a combined endorsement of Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on Sunday night. While the board opted not to pick just one candidate, it also revealed who made the final cut: Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, despite the fact that he suspended his campaign last week, and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
The editorial board hit at Biden’s message of “returning the country to where things were before the Trump era,” claiming that doing so would “not get America where it needs to go as a society.” The board also pointed out Biden’s age, 77, and argued that it’s “time for him to pass the torch to a new generation of political leaders.”
Similarly, the editorial board expressed concern for Sanders’s health, noting his recent heart attack, while also attacking him for “boast[ing] that compromise is anathema to him.”
“Obviously, we are also extremely torn,” New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay said Monday in an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “The editorial board of the New York Times is really traditionalist. It’s an institutionalist newspaper, progressive to be sure, but this is an acknowledgment, especially our endorsement of Warren, Sen. Warren, that the institutions in this country need strengthening in a way that may require something far beyond what it did in the past.”
Gay also noted that the board’s decision to endorse two candidates shows “there’s more than one pathway forward.”
