In an 8:30 a.m. email to supporters on New Year’s Eve — 13 months before the first votes will be cast in the Iowa caucuses — Warren said she was forming an exploratory committee, which allows her to raise money and fill key staff positions before a formal kickoff of her presidential bid. Warren also released a video that leaned on the populist, anti-Wall Street themes that are sure to be central to her campaign message.
“I’ve spent my career getting to the bottom of why America’s promise works for some families, but others, who work just as hard, slip through the cracks into disaster,” she said in the video. “And what I’ve found is terrifying: these aren’t cracks families are falling into, they’re traps. America’s middle class is under attack.”
“But this dark path doesn’t have to be our future,” she continued. “We can make our democracy work for all of us. We can make our economy work for all of us.”
The race for the 2020 Democratic nomination is poised to be the most wide open since perhaps 1992, with the party leaderless and lacking obvious front-runners. After a midterm election that saw many women, liberals, minorities and young Democrats win, the primaries and caucuses next year are likely to be fought over not only who is the most progressive candidate but also which mix of identities should be reflected in the next nominee.
Warren, 69, is among the best-known Democrats seeking to take on Trump, who has already announced his re-election campaign, but she also faces challenges: recent controversy over her claims to Native American heritage, skepticism from the party establishment and a lack of experience in a presidential race.
Two potential top-tier candidates who have run before, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, are eyeing 2020 and are expected to disclose their plans this winter. Yet both men carry political baggage and would be in their late 70s on Election Day 2020, and many Democrats say they want a fresh face as their next nominee.
More than three dozen Democratic senators, governors, mayors and business leaders are also weighing bids — most of whom have not sought the White House before. The race is expected to draw several women and nonwhite contenders as well as liberal and more moderate politicians — making for the most diverse field in history. Several Senate colleagues of Warren are likely to enter the race soon: Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.
Getting a jump on the competition, Warren plans to head to early voting states in the coming weeks, including Iowa, which holds its first-in-the-nation caucus in early February 2020. According to a person familiar with Warren’s thinking, the timing of her announcement had been decided weeks in advance.
Warren has ascended rapidly in politics. A longtime bankruptcy law professor at Harvard who never held public office before 2013, Warren became the first woman elected to the Senate from Massachusetts after defeating a self-styled moderate Republican incumbent, Scott Brown, with a populist message based on advocacy for strict Wall Street regulation. Now, just six years later, Warren is stepping into the 2020 race, particularly well regarded among liberal activists who often criticized Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, as insufficiently tough on bankers and Wall Street firms that had been allies and donors to her.
“How did we get here?” Warren said in her announcement video. “Billionaires and big corporations decided they wanted more of the pie, and they enlisted politicians to cut them a fatter slice.”
Warren has both assets and possible drawbacks in a White House run. Strategists for several other likely Democratic candidates say private polling found Warren’s political brand — as a warrior against big banks and other powerful corporate interests — to be exceptionally strong with Democratic primary voters. Her signature initiative in recent months has been a sweeping bill to crack down on government corruption, effectively adapting her longtime focus on private-sector greed for the public-sector scandals of the Trump era.
But Warren has also become a favorite target of conservatives, who have sought to brand her as an out-of-touch liberal from academia. In 2012, the political director for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Warren represented a “threat to free enterprise” and, this year, two Democratic senators — facing difficult re-election races in states Trump won in 2016 — took the unusual step of distancing themselves from Warren, their own colleague.
There is also the issue of her decades-old claim of Native American ancestry. Trump regularly slurs Warren as “Pocahontas,” a reliable applause line at his rallies. In October, Warren released results of a DNA test showing strong evidence that she has Native American pedigree dating “6-10 generations ago.” Not only did the test not quiet her critics, it puzzled many Democrats and angered leaders of several Native American tribes who said Warren’s actions contributed to a harmful narrative that blood, not cultural kinship, determines tribal affiliation.
The blowback over the DNA test has caused some longtime supporters to question Warren’s political acumen, since any Democratic nominee seeking to oppose Trump would have to deftly navigate his constant barbs and often inflammatory rhetoric.
“The biggest risk in engaging a bully is that bullies don’t usually stop, regardless of what the truth is,” Charles Chamberlain, executive director for the progressive political group Democracy for America, said earlier in December. The group began a “Run Warren Run” campaign in 2014 to encourage her to seek the 2016 presidential nomination, but was caught off guard by the DNA test decision.
“When you can’t win an argument,” he added, “then sometimes it’s not worth having that argument.”
A Quinnipiac University poll in mid-December underscored Warren’s strengths as a primary candidate, finding her better-known and better-liked by Democrats than any other candidate who had not run for president before. Three in five Democrats had a favorable opinion of her, compared with just 12 percent who viewed her unfavorably, a ratio outdone only by Biden and Sanders.
But the same poll pointed to Warren’s likely challenges. Voters at large were far more divided in their views of her: Only about 30 percent viewed her favorably, with 37 percent holding an unfavorable view and the rest undecided.
Another poll, taken recently by CNN and the Des Moines Register, found Warren in fourth place in Iowa, the leadoff caucus state, with 8 percent of the vote, far back from Biden and Sanders and slightly behind Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas.
To the extent that Democratic primary voters are inclined to cast their ballots tactically — in favor of a candidate who appears likeliest to beat Trump in the general election — Warren may have some serious convincing to do. If the clarity and intensity of her political message have made her a hero to many liberals, it may have left a less-favorable first impression elsewhere that could be difficult to change. And Warren is regarded with anxiety or worse by much of the Democratic political establishment, including some Senate colleagues who complain that she has pursued an inflexible agenda on matters like bank regulation, at the cost of party unity.
During her Senate years, Warren has demonstrated the most influence as a member of the Banking Committee, aggressively questioning leaders of the financial industry about excesses and abuses; seeking accountability for the Great Recession; and challenging the Obama and Trump administrations to take tougher lines on regulations and trade policy. In 2015, Warren sunk the nomination of Antonio Weiss, the Wall Street banker selected by the Obama administration to serve as the third-ranking official at the Treasury Department, taking on her party on the grounds that Weiss, the former head of investment banking for Lazard, was too closely connected to the financial services industry to serve in public office.
Warren is not known for shepherding major legislation successfully through Congress, though Democrats were never in control of both chambers during her time there. In recent years, Warren has also tried to shore up her foreign policy credentials: securing a spot on the Senate Armed Services Committee after the 2016 presidential election, and taking high-profile trips to visit troops with Republicans such as Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
“Whether our leaders recognize it or not, after years as the world’s lone superpower, the United States is entering a new period of competition,” Warren said in a foreign policy speech at American University in November. “Democracy is running headlong into the ideologies of nationalism, authoritarianism and corruption.”
The map of states with early nominating contests appears, at least on the surface, to be an inviting one for Warren: The race begins in Iowa, where Farm Belt populism long defined Democratic politics, before moving to her political backyard of New Hampshire. During the midterm elections, she got a rousing reception in Nevada, an early state that suffered grievously in the 2008 financial crisis, and where rhetoric lashing Wall Street and major mortgage lenders tends to resonate.
Warren’s prospects in the race may also depend, in part, on which other Democrats decide to run. Several other fiery economic populists could join the Democratic field, including Sanders and Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, potentially splintering the voters most energized by Warren’s core themes. Should most or all of those candidates stay out, Warren might face weaker competition on the left.
And like other white liberals in a historically diverse field, Warren may have to work harder to win over black primary voters in South Carolina, another early voting state, and across the country. African-American Democrats have played a decisive role in settling the last two open contests for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Warren is expected to be competing against her party’s only two black senators, Harris and Booker.
In Warren’s video announcing her candidacy, she pointed to the unique discrimination that nonwhite families face — another sign of how seriously she is taking outreach to minority voters, and particularly black Democrats.
Whatever obstacles her candidacy faces, Warren may be well positioned to serve as an ideological pole star in a diffuse field of Democratic candidates. And she has a history of surprising skeptics who might have been inclined to view her as a wild-eyed caricature. One of her potential foes for the Democratic nomination, Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York City mayor, confided to associates after a chance meeting with Warren that he found her impressive and smart despite their drastically different views of the economy.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.