What if Elizabeth Warren blows it in Houston?

Get your skates on! The Democrats on Ice roadshow rolls into Houston this evening, and the media are poised for a slip-up.

Tonight is the night Brooklyn-based content creators have been yearning for: when Joe Biden finally lines up alongside the Anointed One, Elizabeth Warren. Surely it’s here, they speculate, that Uncle Joe will commit one blunder too many and the era of Elizabeth will be ushered in. How’s he gonna mess it up? Will he call Cory Booker ‘Barack’? Maybe both eyeballs will explode this time? Gosh I can’t wait!

Liberals online are so fixated on the narrative of ‘Biden gaffe-Warren competent’, that they’re not considering a series of other possibilities. While it’s true that the front three of Biden, Warren and Bernie Sanders have pulled ahead in recent polls, conflict between them is far from a foregone conclusion. Ahead of last round’s CNN debate, pundits were confident that a battle of the progressives was set to unfold, that Sanders would take Warren to task for her (relative to him) coziness to Wall Street. Then…that didn’t happen. Instead it was a case of ‘I agree with Bernie’ as the two New England senators fended off softballs from one percent centrist Democrats.

In Texas, some of that background noise has been drowned out by the higher entry thresholds — though we may be back to two nights for next month’s Ohio debate as billionaire Tom Steyer has bought his way in, and anti-war firebrand Rep. Tulsi Gabbard may have secured the numbers in one of the DNC’s preferred polls by then. But with 10 candidates on the stage tonight, we can expect similar congestion to the previous showcases, and more potshots at the podium from the less loved candidates. We may therefore see more unpredictable moments, like Gabbard’s Detroit drive-by on Kamala Harris. And truly, doesn’t Warren have the biggest target on her back at present? She’s excelled in previous debates and experts are advising her to simply keep the ship straight.

If you listen to those in the know, a Warren implosion is the least likely thing to happen. All the more reason to place a bet on it.