A front-page New York Times news article reports about the backfiring of Senator Elizabeth Warren's decision to take a DNA test and disclose the results in connection with her claims of Native American ancestry: "Allies in Boston pointed out that, in Ms. Warren's recent re-election effort in Massachusetts, there was no evidence that the DNA announcement hurt her standing among voters."
These "allies" may have pointed that out, but it's the job of the Times to apply some skepticism and fact-checking before passing those claims along to Times readers. Here is a November 28, 2018, press release from UMass Amherst about the results of its most recent poll:
When asked who they would support today in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary among nine possible candidates, 19 percent of respondents indicated Biden, with 14 percent supporting Sanders and 11 percent supporting Warren...."While Senator Warren has emerged as a front runner for the Democratic nomination, she trails both Senator Sanders and former Vice President Biden in her own state. If she wants to win the White House she will have to tend to her own backyard," says Tatishe Nteta, associate professor of political science and director of the UMass Poll...Questions asked in the poll regarding current Massachusetts lawmakers' job approval sheds light on why Warren may have trouble in 2020. While her job approval among female voters was 62 percent, the poll found only 49 percent for male voters approve of her performance. The poll found that men were half as likely as women to support Warren in the 2020 presidential primary. And while 74 percent of young voters (age 18-29) approve of her performance in the Senate, only 48 percent of voters 55 or older approve. She holds the support of 6 percent of these older voters for a potential 2020 run for the White House.
Additionally, in the midterm election, Warren won re-election with 60.4% of the vote, while the state's Republican governor, Charlie Baker, won re-election with 66.8% of the vote. In other words, Warren ran 7 percentage points behind a Republican governor in the same election, in a Democratic state where President Trump isn't particularly popular. By contrast, Senator Edward Kennedy was reelected with 72.6% of the vote in 2000 and with 69.3% of the vote in 2006. It's not clear how much of all this is because of the Native American situation and how much is because of other issues, but as Professor Nteta observed, Warren's not without challenges among voters in Massachusetts.
Maybe it's a bit much to expect the Times to point this out in the context of what is, after all, a pretty negative story about Warren in the first place. But it's the reality. And given that a lot of the Times political editing team has been and is people with Massachusetts experience such as Carolyn Ryan and Patrick Healy, maybe it's not too much to expect. In any event, it didn't happen this time.