As part of her final push before Super Tuesday voting, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren sat down for an emotional interview with Jimmy Kimmel that included tears from both Warren and Kimmel—and the requisite amount of shots fired at both former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Donald Trump.
Asked by Kimmel if she felt her entire campaign to win the Democratic nomination for president was riding on the results of Super Tuesday, Warren didn’t provide a direct answer. Instead, she focused on what she has learned from the campaign itself. “For me, it’s about having built this whole movement across the country,” she said, before citing her oft-discussed selfie lines, where supporters waited for hours to take a photo with Warren. “We’ve now done well over 100,000 selfies. A lot of them are just fun, people giggle and make funny faces. But there are also the ones where somebody comes through—the little girl is adorable and she passes on through, and the mom gives me a hug and says, please hang on to health care, she has brain cancer,” Warren said, holding back tears. “Someone will say to me, I have student loans and you’re my last hope. I am never going to get out of this hole in my whole life.”
An equally emotional Kimmel interrupted, tears in his eyes as well: “And you say, the other one has brain cancer, never mind you and your student loans.”
The audience’s laughter broke the tension—but Warren wasn’t through. “It’s about every 20th person. It’s all fun and then someone, it’s honestly like a knife between the ribs because it is so painful,” she said of the selfie lines. “They so much need a government on their side. They’re not asking for a handout—they’re just asking for a government that’s on their side.”
Warren spent more than 15 minutes talking with Kimmel on Monday night. And while neither of her two main competitors—former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders—came up specifically by name, she did discuss how people should think about voting in the primaries. (Warren currently trails both Sanders and Biden in the polls.)
“Number one, you have to vote for the person you think would make the best president of the United States, period. I think that’s people’s sacred obligation,” she said when asked by Kimmel whether it was more important to vote for the best candidate or the person who can defeat Trump. “But I also believe those things don’t diverge. Over time as more comes out about people, the person who will make the best president is also the person who has the best chance of beating Donald Trump. It’s going to take standing up against Donald Trump, you bet. But it’s also going to take talking about our affirmative vision of the kind of America we want to be. Do we just want to say, hey look, just get rid of Donald Trump and we’ll go back to the way things were before? No. We have this opportunity, an amazing opportunity in 2020, to fix a lot of what’s been broken for a long time in this country.”