At least she was. She may very well find her forward momentum slowing as dyed-in-the-wool Democrats are threatening to turn from their own party. Some are even saying they’d side with their greatest enemy, President Donald Trump.

These Democrats aren’t just randos on Twitter either. These are names that can’t be ignored. Names like “Bill Gates.”

As Mediaite tells it, Gates was speaking at a forum in New York with The New York Times writer Andrew Ross Sorkin, when Warren’s name came up. Naturally, talking about Warren nowadays inevitably leads to her tax plans, which essentially amount to “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the success of a businessman. Be he alive or be he dead, I will tax his wealth to make my bread.”

Gates, despite being a Smurf-blue kinda guy, said there’s a limit to his generosity when it comes to taxes, and even went so far as to declare Warren unreasonable when it comes to wealthy people:

“If I had to pay $20 billion, it’s fine,” Gates said. “But when you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over.”

Sorkin asked Gates if he’d consider sitting down with the Massachusetts senator.

“I’m not sure how open minded she is — or that she’d even be willing to sit down with somebody who has large amounts of money,” Gates said.

It gets better.

Sorkin decided to test how far Gates would go in his disapproval of Warren and presented him with a hypothetical scenario where he had to choose between Warren or Trump. Gates didn’t give the answer anyone thought he would.

Then, Sorkin posed a scenario which, for the moment, is a hypothetical — albeit one which appears to have more of a chance of happening by the day. The Times writer asked Gates who he would back in a general election: Warren or President Donald Trump.

And despite being a vocal Trump critic in the past, Gates would not commit to supporting Warren to defeat the president.

“I’m not going to make political declarations,” Gates said. “But I do think no matter what policy somebody has in mind … whoever I decide will have the more professional approach in the current situation, probably is the thing I will weigh the most. And I hope that the more professional candidate is an electable candidate.”

Does that mean Gates would support Trump against Warren? No. It’s entirely possible that Gates would walk away from the voting booth altogether, or maybe even go third party should a suitable candidate arise. It’s also not a complete denial. He didn’t say he wouldn’t vote for Trump either.

Warren and Gates later had a Twitter exchange where she said she’d be willing to meet with him and explain what would happen to him under her wealth tax, promising it wouldn’t be $100 billion. CNBC crunched the numbers for him and found that he’d end up paying $13 billion, and that’s not including the money in his foundation, which Warren also has a plan to tax.

But while Gates didn’t say he’d definitively vote for Trump, other major Democratic donors have said that.

Back in September, a number of big Democratic donors threatened to pull their money from the DNC and hand it to Trump and the GOP.

(READ: Big Democrat Donors Threaten to Switch to Trump If Elizabeth Warren Wins the 2020 Nomination)

“You’re in a box because you’re a Democrat and you’re thinking, ‘I want to help the party, but she’s going to hurt me, so I’m going to help President Trump,’” said one anonymous executive.

Warren isn’t shy about her willingness to punish the successful for being successful, either.

I'm Elizabeth Warren and I approve this message. https://t.co/2Ewkbm0ZwA

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) September 10, 2019

So it’s no wonder that Democrats are going to turn tail and run in the opposite direction of Warren. These are true blue Democrats who are ready to betray their party for the man that they profess to hate the most. They aren’t even holding out hope that Warren might actually be kind to them if she ever reaches office.

Why don’t they hope that? Gates already said it.

“I’m not sure how open-minded she is.”

Warren, for all her demands of tolerance and acceptance, is one of the most closed-minded, self-absorbed, hateful people running in the 2020 race right now. “Hardliner” is a light description of her stances.

You can see the moment she went down that path, too. While she’s always been something of a hard-leftist, it wasn’t until the arrival of democratic socialist sweetheart Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that she shed any illusion of fair-mindedness and centrism. She saw that AOC and her uncompromising ways had developed a great following and wanted a piece of that, and so she began acting just like AOC did in various ways, be it awkward Facebook Lives or her promises to serve the rich up on a silver platter.

(READ: From Facebook Lives to Tax Plans, Elizabeth Warren Wants to Be Just Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)

Warren was even doing her best to make AOC like her by supporting things like her overtly socialist “Just Society Plan.” To be fair, her plan wasn’t awful. Act like Ocasio-Cortez and Ocasio-Cortez would endorse her, giving her that radical-left vote that so many 2020 candidates had been trying too hard to get (R.I.Pieces Beto’s campaign).

Not that it helped. AOC and at least two members of “The Squad” went on to endorse Sanders, especially Ocasio-Cortez, who made a very awkward and totally un-woke claim during a campaign video.

But while the radical Left is energized and ready to pull the lever for whoever it’s told to pull it for, it’s not a sentiment exactly shared with the rest of America, including Democrats. Time and again, we’ve seen polls that show the main body of the Democratic Party would rather have a more moderate candidate than an extreme one.

This couldn’t be more perfectly exhibited than Bill-freaking-Gates declining to say he wouldn’t vote for Trump in a general election against Warren. The two may have exchanged friendly messages on Twitter, but Warren never told Gates that she would discuss the issue with him; she told him she’d tell him how things would go.

Don’t think Gates didn’t notice that.

Don’t think the other CEOs didn’t either.

Warren is a non-starter for any successful person in the U.S., and she’s not only threatening them, but she’s also threatening their livelihoods and as such, the livelihoods of a lot of their employees. Layoffs and cutbacks galore would follow Warren wherever she went, and CEOs are wise to openly tell America that they’d rather vote Trump than embrace the socio-economic radicalism of Ocasio-Cortez.

It really gets across how deadly serious they are about how much they hate that kind of ideological asininity.