Skip to main content
Blog Government & Politics

Raskin Formally Endorses Warren in a 6-Minute Video

It’s official: U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) has endorsed Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren for president.

Raskin hinted that he would, in an interview with The New York Times last October. But the official word came in a six-minute video that the Warren campaign released Wednesday.

The video mainly features Raskin speaking directly to the camera, though it is interspersed with some pictures of the congressman with the presidential contender at a rally in Silver Spring and on Capitol Hill. It opens with him expressing admiration for all of the Democratic presidential contenders.

“I’d be proud to campaign for anybody in this field,” Raskin says.

He describes President Trump as operating a criminal, money-making enterprise, and credits Warren for being the first member of Congress to call for Trump’s impeachment. He goes on to discuss how he first became impressed with Warren for her work during the Great Recession of 2008, warning against the “mortgage meltdown crisis” and creating the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.

“Think about it,” Raskin says. “Elizabeth Warren wasn’t in Congress then, but she organized the Senate and she organized the House” to pass legislation creating the new federal agency.

Raskin also compares Warren to former presidents, with a surprising ideological twist.

“Elizabeth Warren is not only a passionate liberal, in the spirit of another great Massachusetts senator, John F. Kennedy, and a truly effective progressive, in the traditional of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, but she is also the indispensabile conservative we need, like John Quincy Adams, to defend all of the institutions and values that Donald Trump and his Banana Republicans are seeking to destroy,” Raskin says.

Raskin says that in the centennial of American women getting the vote, supporting Warren is particularly timely, and says he’ll be doing so in honor of his mother, the late feminist author Barbara Raskin, his wife, his sisters, his daughters and his son.

Raskin becomes the third Democratic member of the Maryland congressional delegation to express a preference in the presidential election: Rep. David J. Trone has endorsed his predecessor, former Rep. John K. Delaney, while Rep. Anthony G. Brown is backing former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg.

(Disclosure: The David and June Trone Family Foundation is a financial supporter of Maryland Matters.)

According to a list maintained by Politico, Raskin is the 13th member of Congress to endorse Warren overall — and the seventh from outside Massachusetts.

[email protected]

 

 

REPUBLISHING TERMS

Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our website. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of photos and graphics.

If you have any questions, please email [email protected].

To republish, copy the following text and paste it into your HTML editor.

License

Creative Commons License AttributionCreative Commons Attribution
Raskin Formally Endorses Warren in a 6-Minute Video