Thomas Kaplan

In a new TV ad, Warren singles out a series of billionaires who have criticized her, showing footage of them and repeating her call for a wealth tax on the fortunes of the richest Americans.

The ad, set to air Thursday on CNBC, is the latest volley in the back-and-forth between Warren and the country’s billionaires — or at least an outspoken handful of them who have criticized her candidacy publicly. And it comes as Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire and former New York City mayor, is preparing to enter the presidential race.

“It is time for a wealth tax in America,” Warren says in the ad, which shows her speaking at a recent town hall. “I’ve heard that there are some billionaires who don’t support this plan.”

Then the ad gets specific, identifying four of them and helpfully informing viewers of their estimated net worth. First is the hedge fund manager Leon G. Cooperman, who has publicly sparred with Warren (his net worth: $3.2 billion).

“The vilification of billionaires makes no sense to me,” he is shown saying in the ad. “It’s bull.” Then this flashes onscreen: “Charged with insider trading.” (The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Cooperman and his firm, Omega Advisors, in 2016; he and the firm settled in 2017.)

The ad also shows footage of Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade; Lloyd Blankfein, former chief executive of Goldman Sachs; and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

The ad closes with Warren asking the richest Americans to “pitch in two cents,” along with a list of social programs that could be funded with the revenue from her proposed wealth tax. Warren wants to impose an annual tax of 2% on net worth above $50 million, and 6% above $1 billion. She would use the revenue from that tax to fund proposals like universal child care, free public college and student debt cancellation, as well as to help pay for “Medicare for all.”

In the primary race, Warren generally has avoided taking shots at her Democratic rivals, but she has embraced the fight with her billionaire critics. Last week, her campaign rolled out an online calculator showing what a billionaire would owe under her wealth tax, depending on the size of their fortune. The calculator includes a link to show what Cooperman, specifically, would owe under the wealth tax.

Cooperman fired back Wednesday after Warren’s new ad was reported by CNBC, calling her “disgraceful” in an interview with the cable network.

“In my opinion, she represents the worst in politicians as she’s trying to demonize wealthy people, because there are more poor people than wealthy people,” Cooperman said.

This article originally appeared in

Warren Singles Out Billionaires in New TV Ad

WASHINGTON — Sen. Elizabeth Warren has found a favorite set of adversaries in the 2020 presidential race: America’s billionaires.

On Saturday night, Warren presented an even narrower description of who would face higher taxes under her plan. She told reporters that billionaires would be the only people to see their taxes go up — a misstatement of what she had proposed a day earlier.

“It doesn’t raise taxes on anybody but billionaires,” Warren told reporters in Dubuque, Iowa, when asked what income bracket she defined as “middle class.” She added, “And you know what? The billionaires can afford it.”

Anyone with under $1 billion in net worth, she said, “is not paying a penny more.” Asked again how she defined middle class, she repeated the assertion. “Understand this,” she said. “This is no increase in taxes for anyone except billionaires. Period. Done.”

But that is not what she proposed Friday. Warren’s plan for Medicare for All, which calls for $20.5 trillion in new federal spending over a decade, would be financed through a mix of sources, including $3 trillion in total from two proposals to tax wealthy Americans.

One of those taxes — accounting for $2 trillion of the $3 trillion total — would go far beyond billionaires. For the top 1% of households, Warren would increase taxes on investment gains. She would put in place a new system in which capital gains are taxed annually instead of when investments are sold, and she would raise the tax rate on capital gains to be the same as on ordinary income like wages.

The campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden, one of Warren’s top rivals, quickly criticized her over the comments.

“The American people have to be able to trust whoever our party nominates to take on Donald Trump to be straight with them about health care,” Kate Bedingfield, a deputy campaign manager for Biden, said in a statement. “Sen. Warren said tonight that her single-payer plan won’t raise taxes on anyone but billionaires, but that’s simply not true.”

Bedingfield argued that two other taxes proposed by Warren would also affect a broader population than just billionaires: a tax on employers that is similar to what they are currently spending on their employees’ health care, and a tax on financial transactions like stock trades.

The issue of Medicare for All has been a major and escalating point of tension between Warren and Biden and a central fault line in the Democratic presidential primary. Biden supports adding a public health insurance option that people can purchase and building on the Affordable Care Act. He has cast Warren’s more expansive plan as costly and unrealistic, telling reporters in Des Moines on Saturday that “getting that plan through even a Democratic Congress would be difficult.”

Warren’s proposal to increase taxes on investment gains did not precisely describe how she would define the top 1% of households. In 2017, the top 1% of tax returns had income above roughly $515,000, according to the Internal Revenue Service — about 1.4 million tax returns in total. Earlier this year, Forbes said there were 607 billionaires in the United States.

The other new tax on wealthy Americans that Warren proposed Friday would affect only billionaires. She would increase her proposed wealth tax on net worth above $1 billion to 6% annually, from 3%. (Her wealth tax also includes a 2% tax on net worth over $50 million, but that remains unchanged from what she proposed in January.)

Asked about Warren’s comments, a spokeswoman for her campaign acknowledged that taxes would increase on the top 1% and said Warren had been referring to her wealth tax proposal when she said taxes would increase only on billionaires.

Billionaires Only? Warren Errs in Saying Whom Her Health Plan Would Tax

WASHINGTON — When Sen. Elizabeth Warren laid out her plan for “Medicare for All” Friday, she said she would raise taxes on the top 1% of households to help pay for it. The middle class, she said, would not pay “one penny” more.

Warren has become known for her towering stack of policy plans, having offered dozens of proposals on a wide variety of subjects. But on health care, she has not been similarly forthcoming, and her refusal to say whether she would raise taxes on the middle class to help finance Medicare for All has drawn sharp criticism from some of her Democratic rivals.

In remarks at a town hall event Sunday afternoon, Warren said, “I plan over the next few weeks to put out a plan that talks about, specifically, the cost of Medicare for All and, specifically, how we pay for it.”

Warren’s repeated refusal to directly answer that question stood in stark contrast to how she has talked about other policy areas — providing lengthy, detailed plans and explaining how she would create a tax on the wealth of the richest Americans in order to finance other major proposals like student debt cancellation and universal child care.

On the subject of health care, Warren has aligned herself with one of her top rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, saying on the debate stage in June, “I’m with Bernie on Medicare for All.” But Sanders has openly acknowledged that taxes would increase for the middle class, something Warren has been unwilling to acknowledge despite repeated questions from the news media.

Instead, Warren has sought to reframe the question around the total costs that families would face under her plan. She has said that costs would go up for wealthy people and big corporations, but would go down for middle-class families.

“I will not sign a bill into law that does not lower costs for middle-class families,” she said at last week’s debate.

Warren’s campaign had previously said that she was reviewing “revenue options” for paying for Medicare for All. But she has not offered details, and her lack of specificity has offered an opening for her opponents to criticize her.

Last month, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, called Warren “extremely evasive” on the subject, and at last week’s debate, he pressed the point further after Warren again declined to directly answer whether she would raise taxes on the middle class.

“We heard it tonight,” Buttigieg said. “A yes-or-no question that didn’t get a yes-or-no answer. Look, this is why people here in the Midwest are so frustrated with Washington in general and Capitol Hill in particular. Your signature, senator, is to have a plan for everything — except this.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota offered a similar critique. “At least Bernie’s being honest here and saying how he’s going to pay for this and that taxes are going to go up,” she said at the debate. “And I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but you have not said that, and I think we owe it to the American people to tell them where we’re going to send the invoice.”

Elizabeth Warren Says She Will Release a Plan to Finance 'Medicare for All'

INDIANOLA, Iowa — Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said Sunday that she will release a plan to finance “Medicare for All” in the coming weeks, bowing to critics from the left and the right who have criticized her for not outlining how she would pay for a single-payer health care system.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and his allies have struggled for months to come up with effective ways to confront Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose steady rise in the polls put the lie to Trump’s boasts last spring that she was “finished” and “gone,” undone by her past claims of Native American ancestry.

Republicans have tried to brand her as a socialist, attack her policy ideas and portray her as too left-wing for the U.S. electorate. None of those arguments have diminished her political momentum, robust fundraising or polling.

But in the past week, conservative news sites have challenged Warren’s story about how a public school principal forced her out of a teaching job in 1971 because she was “visibly pregnant,” and the Republican National Committee grabbed onto the issue to wage its own attack. In doing so, Republicans employed a tactic — questioning a female candidate’s authenticity — that is at once often a sexist trope in politics and a strategy used against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Warren and her team, in turn, have confidently parried those attacks and used them to rally supporters. Rather than take a defensive posture, Warren has responded by offering her personal story as one of countless instances of pregnancy discrimination that have occurred in U.S. workplaces, where it remains a widespread problem. In a video that has been viewed more than 1 million times across social media platforms, Warren read messages from women sharing their own experiences.

Christina Reynolds, who was an aide on Clinton’s campaign and is now a spokeswoman for EMILY’s List, which supports female Democratic candidates who back abortion rights, said the Warren campaign’s move to solicit stories from people was a better response to the Republican attack “than just saying, ‘No, it’s not true.’”

“I think it’s a really powerful thing that she’s done,” she said, “which is turn this into a learning opportunity for all of us as to what women have faced at past times, what they might still face and how can we do better.”

Well before Warren’s story about losing her teaching job became the subject of news articles, she was being challenged over how she has presented her biography. Since she first ran for the Senate in 2012, she has faced questions over having identified herself as Native American during her career as a law professor, and she drew a backlash last year when she released a DNA test offering evidence that she had a Native American ancestor. Warren later apologized in private and in public.

An email from the Republican National Committee on Tuesday offered a clear preview of how the party would seek to undermine her if she becomes the Democratic nominee: “It’s not just her heritage Fauxcahontas has been lying about to get ahead,” the subject line said. A spokeswoman for the committee, Liz Harrington, said Wednesday, “Like her false claim of Native American status, this is another example of Warren seemingly shifting the facts of her life story for personal gain.” (Warren has said she did not advance her career by identifying herself as Native American, an assertion backed up by an extensive Boston Globe investigation.)

“The more examples like this that surface, the more it will stick with voters that this is someone who cannot be trusted,” Harrington said.

Trump has slurred Warren for years over her ancestry claims, and the personal attacks on her come out of the Trump playbook from 2016 that targeted both Republicans and Clinton. Michael Steel, a Republican strategist who was an adviser for former Gov. Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign, said Trump would need to “tear down” whoever is the eventual Democratic nominee in order to win reelection, given his low approval ratings.

“One of Senator Warren’s great strengths is her ability to connect her biography to her record to her plans for the future,” he said. “That gets undermined if she can’t rely on her biography as the foundation of that progression.”

All year, Warren has framed her personal story to voters as one of perseverance, focusing on her upbringing in Oklahoma, her family’s financial struggles and her winding path to an eventual career as a law professor. Voters often praise her biographical stories as a powerful part of her pitch, which centers on bringing about big change to an economic and political system that she describes as rigged against ordinary people.

As part of that story, Warren tells crowds that at the end of her first year as a public-school teacher, she was “visibly pregnant” and lost her job. A retired teacher from Warren’s school in New Jersey told CBS News, “The rule was at five months you had to leave when you were pregnant.”

Teachers in the United States were commonly pushed out of their jobs during pregnancy at the time, either through termination or the requirement of an unpaid leave of absence. Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, which barred employers from treating pregnant women differently from other people “similar in their ability or inability to work,” but claims of discrimination persist to this day.

“These attacks on Senator Warren are absurd,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who dropped out of the presidential race in August. “Of course pregnancy discrimination was a serious problem in 1971, and it continues to a widespread issue today despite a law banning it.” She added that “the stories that women are sharing are real and powerful.”

Regardless, the Republican National Committee dismissed Warren’s description of why she lost her job, citing a 2007 interview in which she discussed her public-school teaching career but did not mention being forced out, as well as records showing that the school board had approved a contract for Warren for the next school year.

The records were reported Monday by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website. “Another Elizabeth Warren lie about Elizabeth Warren?” asked Kellyanne Conway, a top aide to Trump, as she shared The Free Beacon’s article on Twitter.

Warren told CBS News that she had not revealed her pregnancy when the contract was approved, and that two months later, when she was showing, the principal told her that she would not be welcomed back. Addressing the 2007 interview, she said: “After becoming a public figure, I opened up more about different pieces in my life, and this was one of them.”

The attacks are the latest evidence of how Republicans are reviving tactics Trump used to caricature Clinton, whom he branded as “Crooked Hillary,” as dishonest.

Attacking authenticity has been a common strategy targeting women running for office for decades: Long before Clinton, Geraldine Ferraro faced it in 1984, when she was the first woman to appear on a major party’s presidential ticket.

“This is a tried and true tactic when it comes to women candidates and elected officials, because women pay a much higher price when their honesty and integrity is called into question,” said Amanda Hunter, research and communications director at the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which supports women in politics.

“Our research shows that voters historically give women what we call a virtue advantage, but then the other side of that is they punish them for any real or manufactured ethical infraction,” she said. “And once women are knocked off that pedestal, it’s a lot more difficult for them to climb all the way back up.”

Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said the broadsides against Warren reflected her increasing status as a front-runner for the Democratic nomination.

“They’re going to come for her in every possible way that they can, and her honesty and truthfulness will be one tactic,” she said. “We certainly saw this as a tactic when Hillary Clinton was running, to constantly question her veracity.”

Walsh said she thought Warren’s story of experiencing pregnancy discrimination would “make her relatable for an awful lot of women out there who understand that this has been how the world works.”

Warren’s campaign demonstrated readiness for the attacks as news outlets began publishing articles in recent days about her public-school teaching career and pregnancy. Warren spoke with CBS News to go into greater detail about her story, and she and her campaign sought to shift the focus onto the broader issue of pregnancy discrimination.

Her admirers praised her on social media and others offered support, including some rivals in the 2020 race, a sign of the protectiveness that many Democrats feel toward their candidates in the face of Republican attacks.

Jennifer Palmieri, who was the communications director for Clinton’s 2016 campaign, noted the extent of that unity around Warren. “This could have been something that really got pounced on by her opponents,” she said, “and that didn’t happen.”

As Warren Rises, GOP Deploys an Old Tactic

(News Analysis)

In recent days, a conservative news site and other outlets have cited evidence that challenges her account, including past remarks by Warren in which she did not mention being forced to leave the school and minutes from a school board meeting showing that her contract was initially extended for the next school year.

Warren is now pushing back against any suggestion that she has misrepresented the circumstances of her departure and pointing to the discrimination that many pregnant women have faced on the job.

The school board did extend her contract early in her pregnancy, before she had told people about it, she said in an interview with CBS News. But two months later, when it was clear that she was pregnant, she lost the job.

“When I was 22 and finishing my first year of teaching, I had an experience millions of women will recognize,” she wrote on Twitter. “By June I was visibly pregnant — and the principal told me the job I’d already been promised for the next year would go to someone else.”

She added: “This was 1971, years before Congress outlawed pregnancy discrimination — but we know it still happens in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. We can fight back by telling our stories. I tell mine on the campaign trail, and I hope to hear yours.”

Warren did not name the principal in her tweets. News accounts show that the principal at the time was Edward Pruzinsky. He died in 1999.

Warren has frequently cited her experience with pregnancy discrimination as she lays out her political biography to voters, explaining why she went from a public-school teaching career into law and politics and how her professional development was affected by a form of workplace bias that many women encounter.

Historically, it was common for U.S. teachers to be pushed out of their jobs during pregnancy, either through termination or the requirement of an unpaid leave of absence.

In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled some of these policies unconstitutional. But not all such policies were explicitly written down and tracked, giving many female teachers little legal recourse.

CBS News quoted a retired teacher from Warren’s school, Trudy Randall, who suggested Warren would have been unwelcome at the school given her pregnancy.

“The rule was at five months you had to leave when you were pregnant. Now, if you didn’t tell anybody you were pregnant, and they didn’t know, you could fudge it and try to stay on a little bit longer,” Randall was quoted as saying. “But they kind of wanted you out if you were pregnant.”

At issue are the circumstances that brought to an end Warren’s brief career as a special needs teacher at an elementary school in Riverdale, New Jersey, where she worked from 1970-71, when she was just out of college. On the campaign trail, Warren’s personal story is a central part of her stump speech, beginning with her upbringing in Oklahoma and, eventually, her experience as a teacher. As Warren tells it, she had wanted to be a teacher since she was in second grade.

“I loved that work, and I would probably still be doing that work today, but my story has some more turns,” she told a crowd in Nevada last week. “By the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant, and the principal did what principals did in those days: wished me luck and hired someone else for the job.”

She included a similar account in her 2014 memoir. In retellings earlier this year, she said the principal “showed me the door.”

In a post on Twitter last week, Meagan Day, a writer for socialist magazine Jacobin, drew attention to an interview Warren gave in 2007 in which she recalled the end of her teaching career and did not describe being forced out because she was pregnant, instead suggesting she left teaching because she lacked the education courses she needed.

“I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, ‘I don’t think this is going to work out for me,’ ” Warren said in the interview.

Addressing the differences in her accounts, Warren said in a statement to CBS News, “After becoming a public figure I opened up more about different pieces in my life, and this was one of them.”

On Monday, a conservative website, The Washington Free Beacon, published minutes from meetings of the Riverdale Board of Education that referred to her employment status.

Minutes of a meeting April 21, 1971, show that the board approved the issuance of a “2nd Year” contract to Warren. “Mrs. Elizabeth Warren — 2 days per week, Speech,” the minutes say.

Warren told CBS News that she had been hiding her pregnancy from the school.

“I was pregnant, but nobody knew it,” she said. “And then a couple of months later when I was six months pregnant, and it was pretty obvious, the principal called me in, wished me luck and said he was going to hire someone else for the job.”

Minutes of another school board meeting June 16, 1971, say that Warren’s resignation, effective June 30, “was accepted with regret.”

Warren’s first child, Amelia, was born Sept. 2, 1971.

Pregnancy discrimination can begin as soon as women reveal they are pregnant or are visibly showing and can continue to affect them for years. In physically demanding jobs, pregnant women risk being fired if they ask to take rest breaks, and in the corporate world, women and mothers may be steered away from prestigious assignments or excluded from client meetings if a boss perceives them to be less committed to their work than other employees.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote on Twitter about Warren’s experience, “This happened to women ALL the time.”

Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, which made it illegal to treat pregnant women differently from other people “similar in their ability or inability to work.” But the law did not solve the problem. Employers argued successfully in court that pregnant workers were comparable to people who got injured off the job and did not deserve to be accommodated.

Joan C. Williams, founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings, said that discrimination against pregnant women and mothers is the “strongest form of gender discrimination there is.”

Although many U.S. companies have made efforts to become more welcoming to women and retain mothers, pregnancy discrimination remains widespread. The number of pregnancy discrimination claims filed annually with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been steadily rising for two decades.

Warren Details Her Account of Losing Teaching Job Because of Pregnancy

WASHINGTON — It is one of Elizabeth Warren’s signature anecdotes in her stump speech: By the end of her first year as a public-school teacher, she was “visibly pregnant,” and the principal wished her luck and hired another teacher to replace her.

But when Warren looked out at the audience, she saw mostly white faces. The view reflected perhaps her biggest political challenge as she seeks the Democratic presidential nomination: adding black voters to her base of support.

African Americans were critical to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton winning competitive primary contests and capturing the nomination. Like those earlier candidates, Warren faces multiple rivals who may splinter the electorate this winter, and running up the vote margin in predominantly black areas could once again deliver troves of delegates needed for the nomination.

While Warren is rising in polls thanks to support among liberals, women, young people and college-educated whites, black voters, who are the most essential part of the traditional Democratic coalition, have yet to embrace her in large numbers.

“I just think people don’t know her yet,” said Kim Ume, 51, who came to see Warren in Rock Hill. But Ume, like some other black admirers here, was hopeful: “All she needs to do is put herself in front of people.”

Part of Warren’s challenge is that her leading rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, appears to have strong support among black Democrats, which could help him in delegate-rich states with heavily black districts like the Carolinas, Texas and Virginia that hold early primaries. (In interviews with black voters in South Carolina recently, President Donald Trump’s attacks on Biden over Ukraine did not appear to worry them.) Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, the two leading black Democrats in the race, are also courting African American voters.

But more broadly, Warren is running an ideologically left-wing campaign and basing her appeal on policy proposals more so than long-standing relationships and endorsements. Sen. Bernie Sanders ran a similar campaign in 2016 and lost black voters in landslides to Hillary Clinton, who was well-known among them and had key allies among black leaders, most importantly Obama. Warren has several months to build ties, of course, but many black voters measure political relationships in years, not months.

“I’ve heard very little about her,” Charles Rodgers, 57, said after leaving a library in downtown Columbia. He said he had not yet paid close attention to the primary race, given the size of the field.

The clear deficit with black votes stands out in part because, on so many other fronts, Warren is excelling. She is now running closely with Biden in polls in the first two states to vote, Iowa and New Hampshire, where the electorate is largely white. She is well positioned to navigate the rushing political waters of impeachment, having called for the House to begin an inquiry for months. And the sizable crowd in Rock Hill, which her campaign put at 1,400, was another sign of the palpable interest in her candidacy.

At the same time, the largely white audience was only the latest sign that she still has a long way to go in increasing her support among black voters. Six weeks earlier, when she held a rally in Aiken, South Carolina, the crowd that turned out was also predominantly white.

Asked recently about her limited support among black voters, Warren refrained from offering a political analysis. Instead, she ticked off a number of policy issues that are important to African American communities, and that she has plans to address, such as housing and maternal mortality.

“The way I see this is that African American women have really been the backbone of the Democratic Party for generations now,” Warren said as she spoke with reporters. “They get out there and they fight for people. And what I’m doing is showing up and trying to talk to people about why I’m in this fight.”

Six in 10 voters in South Carolina’s Democratic primary in 2016 were black, and they favored Clinton over Sanders by 72 percentage points, according to exit polls. This time, it is Biden who is counting on black voters to propel him to a victory in South Carolina, the fourth state to hold a nominating contest in 2020.

In a CNN poll released this past week, Biden was supported by 37% of likely voters in South Carolina overall, followed by Warren with 16%. Among white voters in the state, they were neck-and-neck, at 29% and 28%, respectively. But Warren was all but invisible among black voters: Biden was supported by 45%, compared with just 4% for Warren. A Winthrop University poll released this past week painted a similar picture, with a 37-point gap between the two candidates among black voters in the state.

A national poll released by Quinnipiac University last month offered a brighter picture for Warren: It found her at 19% among black voters, an improvement of 9 percentage points from a poll conducted a month earlier.

Interviews with black voters at Warren’s rally in Rock Hill and elsewhere in South Carolina showed the steepness of the challenge she faces in spreading the word about her candidacy — but also the enthusiasm she generates among voters whom she has been able to reach.

After attending worship services at Zion Baptist Church in downtown Columbia on a recent Sunday, Ty Washington, 66, said he favored Biden, citing his experience and his time in the Obama administration. He was not drawn to Warren in the same way.

“I like her ideas, but she doesn’t come across as strong to me,” he said. “And it’s not her being a woman, because I can deal with women rulers. It’s something about her that just does not resonate with me, because she speaks well, she talks well, but she doesn’t have that strength that I think we need in a presidential candidate.”

Denise Hodges, 63, Washington’s cousin, also favored Biden. “I never followed her as close as I’ve been following him,” she said. “Because we’ve been seeing him, we’re used to him, so we’re comfortable.”

Asked whom he liked in the 2020 race, the Rev. Israel Gist, an associate minister at the church, quickly offered a name: Biden. Then he offered another. “What’s her name? Warren?” he said. “She’s coming along pretty well.”

But he immediately quickly flagged a concern. “I don’t think pushing ‘Medicare for All’ is a winning strategy,” he said, referring to her support of a single-payer health care system, a key difference between her and Biden.

Part of the challenge facing Warren is the warm feelings that many black voters have for Biden after he served two terms as Obama’s vice president.

“I think it’s really hard for candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, anybody, when you’re going against Joe Biden, who can drop, ‘Obama, Obama,’ and African Americans are like, ‘Yes, yes,’” said Jazmine Curenton, 19, who came to a block party for Booker in Columbia.

Biden’s reputation may be particularly hard for Warren to overcome among older voters.

“I think that there are a lot of younger people who not only are really open to her, but truly like her and truly like what she’s saying,” said Uchechi Kalu, 26, who has canvassed for Warren’s campaign and attended her event in Rock Hill. “And then there’s an older generation that is sticking to people who are familiar with the Democratic base.”

Warren’s team is counting on her standing to improve as she becomes more familiar to black voters.

“What we see is that folks who have an opinion, and have heard of Elizabeth Warren, tend to have a favorable opinion and like her,” Joe Rospars, Warren’s chief strategist, said in a podcast interview with David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 campaign. “What we also see is that people of color are disproportionately likely to not have heard of, and not have an opinion about, Elizabeth Warren.”

Warren is making a concerted effort to build relationships with black leaders.

“Every couple of weeks, she’ll call just out of nowhere,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has yet to endorse a candidate. When Sharpton became a grandfather late last year, Warren was quick to offer congratulations. And last month, when Sharpton received an award and gave a speech at the annual Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner in Washington, he immediately received a text from Warren.

“She’s the only one that does that,” he said. “Friends of mine didn’t text.”

Beyond personal overtures, Warren is leaning on what has been a defining quality of her campaign: producing policy plan after policy plan on a wide range of subjects.

Racial justice is a common thread throughout her proposals. Her housing plan would provide down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers who live in formerly redlined neighborhoods. She has a plan to reduce maternal mortality among black women, who die of pregnancy-related causes at a much higher rate than white women. She has a proposal to provide grants to minority entrepreneurs, and her child care plan would raise the wages of child care workers, who are disproportionately women of color.

Her plan for higher education calls for providing at least $50 billion for historically black colleges and universities as well as minority-serving institutions, and her campaign has made a point of highlighting how her student debt cancellation plan would help narrow the black-white wealth gap in the United States.

Warren also has a powerful partner for her debt cancellation plan, which is being sponsored in the House by Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the majority whip and the highest-ranking African American in Congress. On Wednesday, she will join Clyburn at a town hall on student debt at his alma mater, South Carolina State University, a historically black college in Orangeburg.

“I’ve got a lot of plans,” Warren said, “and what I want to do is talk to people about all of them.”

Elizabeth Warren's Big Challenge: Winning Black Voters

ROCK HILL, S.C. — For her most recent rally in South Carolina, Sen. Elizabeth Warren chose Clinton College, a historically black institution in this racially diverse city. Her campaign handed out signs reading, “African Americans With Warren.” And in smaller print: “Black issues are American issues.”

Warren’s total offers further evidence of her steady rise to the top of the pack in the Democratic primary race, where she now rivals former Vice President Joe Biden as a leading contender for the party’s nomination.

Her fundraising in the past three months far exceeded that of Biden, who raised $15.2 million, his campaign said Thursday — an indicator of the gulf between the two candidates in attracting grassroots support.

Warren’s haul is also the latest sign of the importance of online donors in the Democratic primary. Both Warren and Sanders have sworn off private fundraisers with wealthy donors, yet they announced larger totals for the quarter than rivals who are relying on the traditional fundraising circuit in addition to online giving. Sanders raised $25.3 million in the quarter, his campaign said this week.

Warren received 943,000 donations in the quarter from 509,000 donors, and more than 300,000 of those donors gave to her presidential campaign for the first time, her team said. The average donation was $26, and Warren ended the quarter with $25.7 million in cash on hand, according to her campaign.

Roger Lau, Warren’s campaign manager, announced her fundraising haul in an email to supporters Friday morning.

“This means our grassroots movement is in an incredible position — to double down on our investments in grassroots organizing, to keep getting Elizabeth’s plans for big, structural change in front of more caucusgoers and voters, and to bring more people into this fight,” he wrote. “Please take a moment to be proud of the movement you’re helping build.”

While Warren fell short of Sanders’ total, she outpaced Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, who had been the top second-quarter fundraiser, with $24.8 million. His campaign announced this week that it had raised more than $19.1 million in the third quarter.

In the past three months, Buttigieg and Biden saw their fundraising dip from the previous quarter, but Warren’s continued to grow. Her $24.6 million total surpassed the $19.2 million she raised in the second quarter, which dwarfed the $6 million she collected in the first three months of the year.

Presidential candidates must report their fundraising for the third quarter, which covered July through September, to the Federal Election Commission by Oct. 15.

Beating Sanders’ total for the past three months would have given another jolt of momentum to Warren’s campaign. Instead, Sanders’ status as the top fundraiser for the quarter provides a reminder of his sizable following, even as other indicators like polling are less favorable.

In the long run, Sanders’ slight financial edge over Warren in the quarter is unlikely to make a major difference in the perceptions of their candidacies. Sanders entered the race having already established an enormous network of donors during his 2016 presidential campaign, and he raised slightly less in the third quarter of 2019 than he did during the same time period in 2015.

Warren’s fundraising in the quarter was a fraction of what President Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee brought in, though those numbers are not directly comparable. Trump’s reelection campaign and the RNC raised a combined $125 million in the past three months, officials said this week.

Warren struggled with fundraising at the beginning of her presidential campaign, but those struggles ended up being short-lived. Her third-quarter haul is another validation of her strategy to rely on online donors to finance her campaign.

That choice is central to her bid for the presidency, freeing up her schedule and creating a tidy contrast with some of her rivals: While other candidates gather with rich donors, Warren spends hours taking pictures with voters who wait in the “selfie line” at her town hall events.

“I made the decision early on I was not going to spend my time behind closed doors with corporate executives and bazillionaires,” Warren told the crowd at a town hall in Carson City, Nevada, on Wednesday night. “I was going to spend my time here.”

At a town hall in San Diego on Thursday night, she reached her latest selfie-related milestone: She has now taken pictures with 70,000 people since beginning her campaign. She made it to the end of the selfie line just before midnight.

Warren Nets $24.6 Million in Third-Quarter Fundraising, Narrowly Trailing Sanders

SAN DIEGO — Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts raised $24.6 million in the past three months, her presidential campaign announced Friday, trailing only Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont for the largest fundraising haul in the most recent quarter.

With the proposal, Sanders is embracing an idea that has been a centerpiece of the campaign of his top progressive rival, Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But while Warren came first, Sanders is going bigger. His wealth tax would apply to a larger number of households, impose a higher top rate and raise more money.

Sanders’ plan to tax accumulated wealth, not just income, is particularly aggressive in how it would erode the fortunes of billionaires. His tax would cut in half the wealth of the typical billionaire after 15 years, according to two economists who worked with the Sanders campaign on the plan. Sanders would use the money generated by his wealth tax to fund the housing plan he released last week and a forthcoming plan for universal child care, as well as to help pay for “Medicare for all.”

“Let me be very clear: As president of the United States, I will reduce the outrageous and grotesque and immoral level of income and wealth inequality,” Sanders said in an interview. “What we are trying to do is demand and implement a policy which significantly reduces income and wealth inequality in America by telling the wealthiest families in this country they cannot have so much wealth.”

Asked if he thought billionaires should exist in the United States, Sanders said, “I hope the day comes when they don’t.” He added, “It’s not going to be tomorrow.”

“I don’t think that billionaires should exist,” he said, adding that there would always be rich people and others with less money. “This proposal does not eliminate billionaires, but it eliminates a lot of the wealth that billionaires have, and I think that’s exactly what we should be doing.”

The proposal from Sanders is the latest sign of the push in the Democratic Party to develop policies for collecting substantially more revenue from the wealthiest Americans by rethinking how they are taxed — a move that could provide large sums of money that could be used to finance new social programs. And it is a significant development in the competition of ideas between Sanders and Warren, the two leading progressive candidates in the Democratic primary race.

Both of their plans would need to be passed by Congress in order to take effect — a virtual impossibility unless Democrats win control of the Senate in the 2020 elections, and far from a sure thing even then. Warren’s plan touched off a number of questions about the feasibility of creating a wealth tax, including whether such a tax would be constitutional, how it would be enforced and whether it would generate as much money as has been projected.

Sanders, of Vermont, would create an annual tax that would apply to households with a net worth above $32 million — about 180,000 households in total, or about the top 0.1%, according to the economists who worked on the plan.

He would create a 1% tax on net worth above $32 million, with increasing marginal rates topping out at 8% on net worth over $10 billion. For single filers, the brackets would be halved, meaning the tax would kick in at $16 million.

By contrast, the wealth tax proposed by Warren, of Massachusetts, would apply to households with a net worth above $50 million — an estimated 70,000 households in total.

The structure of her plan is simpler: She would apply a 2% tax on net worth from $50 million to $1 billion, and a 3% tax on net worth above $1 billion. Unlike the Sanders plan, the tax brackets would be the same for married and single filers.

Sanders’ wealth tax proposal

— $32 million to $50 million net worth: 1% marginal tax rate

— $50 million to $250 million: 2%

— $250 million to $500 million: 3%

— $500 million to $1 billion: 4%

— $1 billion to $2.5 billion: 5%

— $2.5 billion to $5 billion: 6%

Warren’s wealth tax proposal

Note: The brackets shown for the Sanders proposal are for married filers; the brackets would be halved for single filers. The Warren proposal uses the same brackets for married and single filers.

Sanders’ tax is projected to raise $4.35 trillion over a decade, while Warren’s is projected to raise $2.6 trillion over the same time period. Those estimates were produced by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, two economists at the University of California, Berkeley, with whom both the Sanders and Warren campaigns consulted as they developed their proposals. (The projection for Warren’s plan differs slightly from their original estimate of $2.75 trillion earlier this year.)

“The Sanders plan is really pitched at the idea that we don’t want billionaires and decabillionaires to be billionaires and decabillionaires for as long as they currently are,” Saez said. “It’s going to erode their fortunes much faster than the Warren wealth tax.”

Sanders included several steps in his plan to enforce the tax, including creating a “national wealth registry,” increasing funding for the Internal Revenue Service and requiring audits of many taxpayers who are subject to the wealth tax, including all billionaires.

Saez and Zucman calculated how the Warren and Sanders wealth taxes would have affected the fortunes of the richest Americans had each been in effect since 1982. The fortune of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who Forbes said was worth $160 billion last year, would have been $87 billion under the Warren plan and $43 billion under the Sanders plan.

Overall, the economists found, the cumulative wealth of the top 15 richest Americans in 2018 — amounting to $943 billion — would have been $434 billion under the Warren plan and $196 billion under the Sanders plan.

Sanders is hardly a newcomer to the idea of a wealth tax. In a 1997 book, he wrote that it was “time, high time, to establish a tax on wealth similar to those that exist in most European countries.” In 2017, he included a wealth tax on a list of financing options for Medicare for all.

Warren was quick to harness the idea in the 2020 race. She released her wealth tax proposal in January, weeks before Sanders began his campaign.

Since then, the proposal has become a centerpiece of Warren’s campaign and a fixture of her stump speech, even prompting chants of “Two cents!” from crowds. The money would go toward other Warren policy plans, including her proposals for universal child care, student debt cancellation and tuition-free public college.

Sanders Proposes a Wealth Tax, Taking Aim at Billionaires

WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday unveiled a proposal to create a new tax on the wealth of the richest Americans, including a steep tax on billionaires that could greatly diminish their fortunes.

Addressing thousands of supporters in Washington Square Park, some holding up “I’m a Warren Democrat” signs, Warren pressed her case to bring sweeping change to an economic and political system she views as fundamentally tilted to favor the wealthy and powerful.

She spoke near the site of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911, which killed 146 garment workers, most of them women. The fire spurred a push to improve workplace safety, which Warren harnessed as a parallel for the far-reaching change she wants to pursue as president.

And once again, she urged Democrats to embrace her call for fundamental change — not the kind of incremental approach favored most notably by Joe Biden, the former vice president and the primary race’s front-runner.

“There’s a lot at stake in this election, and I know people are scared,” Warren said from a lectern in front of the park’s marble arch. “But we can’t choose a candidate we don’t believe in just because we’re too scared to do anything else. And Democrats can’t win if we’re scared and looking backward.”

Warren was introduced by Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, which announced its endorsement of Warren earlier Monday. In her speech, Warren described President Donald Trump as “corruption in the flesh,” but added that “our problems didn’t start with Donald Trump.”

Throughout her remarks, Warren was repeatedly met with enthusiastic cheers, and the crowd broke into chants of “two cents” when Warren brought up her proposal to impose a 2% tax on the fortunes of the super rich.

Beyond amplifying her call to confront corruption, a hallmark of her presidential bid, the speech was another chance for Warren to draw a big crowd on the campaign trail and put on display the enthusiasm she is generating among voters. In August, she drew 15,000 people in Seattle and 12,000 in St. Paul, Minnesota, according to her campaign.

The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation said a crowd of 8,000 to 10,000 people was anticipated for Monday’s speech. Warren’s campaign said the crowd exceeded 20,000, though that estimate could not be independently verified.

With each big rally, Warren is solidifying her place in an exclusive club of presidential candidates who have become crowd magnets, exhilarating fans at events that can sometimes feel like rock concerts. In the 2004 election, it was Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, whose enormous crowds offered a visibly striking signal of interest in his candidacy, including a big showing in Bryant Park in Manhattan in August 2003.

Barack Obama drew enormous crowds in the 2008 race, including at a giant rally in Washington Square Park in September 2007. And in the 2016 election, Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont were both buoyed by the electric crowds they commanded. Sanders, too, held an enormous event in Washington Square Park, drawing a crowd before the 2016 New York primary that his campaign put at 27,000 people, though he went on to lose that contest to Hillary Clinton. Sanders has drawn big crowds this year as well.

The recent history of crowd-magnet candidates offers a mixed track record of electoral success. Joe Trippi, who was Dean’s campaign manager, said Warren was well positioned to draw big crowds in large cities, given her large email list and many grassroots donors around the country. That is particularly true in a Democratic stronghold like New York; for example, through the end of June, Warren had an estimated 1,300 donors in a single ZIP code in Brooklyn that includes most of Park Slope.

But Trippi cautioned that drawing a large audience in a big city does not necessarily translate to success in the early voting states. “The question is, can you build beyond that core into a more diverse Democratic constituency?” Trippi asked. “Fifteen thousand people in Seattle does not equal winning South Carolina.”

Asked last week whether she thought crowd size mattered, Warren replied, “I think it matters getting to talk to lots and lots and lots and lots of people.”

“I believe that we not only have to fight for big ideas in 2020; we’ve got to rebuild our democracy,” she said. “And the way we do that is giving people a reason to get in the fight and coming off the sidelines.”

Earlier Monday, Warren unveiled a sweeping plan to attack corruption in government, a central theme of her campaign. The plan is based on a wide-ranging anti-corruption package that she first proposed last year. On the campaign trail, she has referred to it as “the biggest anti-corruption plan since Watergate.”

Warren kicked off her campaign with a speech in Lawrence, Massachusetts, at the Everett Mills, where textile workers went on strike in 1912. On Monday, Warren again invoked the setting of her speech, recalling the horrific scene of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire. Before the fire, she said, factory workers across New York had been “sounding the alarm” about their working conditions, but were no match for wealthy and well-connected factory owners.

“The tragic story of the Triangle factory fire is a story about power,” she said. “A story of what happens when the rich and the powerful take control of government and use it to increase their own profits while they stick it to working people. But what happened in the aftermath of the fire is a different story about power — a story about our power, a story about what’s possible when we fight together as one.”

NEW YORK — Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts brought her ascendant presidential campaign to New York City on Monday night, unspooling a forceful argument for attacking corruption in government in a defining speech of her White House bid.

Thomas Kaplan

Articles written by the author

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