Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday took the first major step toward launching a widely anticipated campaign for the presidency, hoping her reputation as a populist fighter can help her navigate a Democratic field that could include nearly two dozen candidates.
“No matter what our differences, most of us want the same thing,” the 69-year-old Massachusetts Democrat said in a video that highlights her family’s history in Oklahoma. “To be able to work hard, play by the same set of rules and take care of the people we love. That’s what I’m fighting for and that’s why today I’m launching an exploratory committee for president.”
Warren burst onto the national scene a decade ago during the financial crisis with calls for greater consumer protections. She quickly became one of the party’s more prominent liberals even as she sometimes fought with Obama administration officials over their response to the market turmoil.
Now, as a likely presidential contender, she is making an appeal to the party’s base. Her video notes the economic challenges facing people of color along with images of a women’s march and Warren’s participation at an LGBT event.
In an email to supporters, Warren said she’d more formally announce a campaign plan early in 2019.
Warren is the most prominent Democrat yet to make a move toward a presidential bid and has long been a favorite target of President Donald Trump.
In mid-December, former Obama housing chief Julian Castro also announced a presidential exploratory committee, which legally allows potential candidates to begin raising money. Outgoing Maryland Rep. John Delaney is the only Democrat so far to have formally announced a presidential campaign.
But that’s likely to change quickly in the new year as other leading Democrats take steps toward White House runs.
Warren enters a Democratic field that’s shaping up as the most crowded in decades, with many of her Senate colleagues openly weighing their own campaigns, as well as governors, mayors and other prominent citizens. One of her most significant competitors could be Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who is eyeing another presidential run harnessing the same populist rhetoric.
She must also move past a widely panned October release of a DNA test meant to bolster her claim to Native American heritage. The move was intended to rebut Trump’s taunts of Warren as “Pocahontas.” Instead, her use of a genetic test to prove ethnicity spurred controversy that seemed to blunt any argument she sought to make. There was no direct mention of it in the video released Monday.
Warren has the benefit of higher name recognition than many others in the Democratic mix for 2020, thanks to her years as a prominent critic of Wall Street who originally conceived of what became the government’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
She now faces an arduous battle to raise money and capture Democratic primary voters’ attention before Iowa casts its first vote in more than a year. She has an advantage in the $12.5 million left over from her 2018 re-election campaign that she could use for a presidential run.
Warren’s campaign is likely to revolve around the same theme she’s woven into speeches and policy proposals in recent years: battling special interests, paying mind to the nexus between racial and economic inequities.
“America’s middle class is under attack,” Warren said in the video. “How did we get here? Billionaires and big corporations decided they wanted more of the pie. And they enlisted politicians to cut them a fatter slice.”
“Working families today face a lot tougher path than my family did, and families of color face a path that is steeper and rockier, a path made even harder by the impact of generations of discrimination,” she said.
A frequent critic of President Donald Trump and the first woman from Massachusetts to be elected to the U.S. Senate, Warren made official the persistent rumors that she was considering a presidential campaign at a late September town hall meeting in Holyoke, when she said it was “time for women to go to Washington and fix our broken government and that includes a woman at the top.”
Two polls conducted during the 2018 Senate campaign found a majority of Massachusetts voters did not think Warren should run for president. In a Suffolk University poll released in late October, 17 percent of respondents said Warren should run in 2020. In a MassINC poll that came out days later, 22 percent said she should.
Massachusetts has a long history of presidential aspirants, including former Sens. Edward Kennedy (1980), Paul Tsongas (1992), and John Kerry (2004), former Govs. Michael Dukakis (1988) and Mitt Romney (2008 and 2012), and Green-Rainbow Party candidate Jill Stein (2012 and 2016).
Earlier in December, former Gov. Deval Patrick decided against entering the 2020 fray.
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which ran a “Draft Elizabeth Warren for Senate” campaign in 2011, on Monday released a statement saying Warren “meets the moment” and, if she does ultimately run, would be “best equipped” to beat Trump, who has said he will seek a second term.
“Elizabeth Warren is the most electable among many potential contenders with progressive positions, and it will be a victory for all progressives as candidates race to the top on issues we’ve worked for years to push into the mainstream,” the group’s co-founders, Stephanie Taylor and Adam Green, said. “In addition to being most electable, Elizabeth Warren is the only candidate who would enter the White House with an army of heavy-hitting allies accumulated over a lifetime of fighting powerful interests – allies who are ready on Day One to use executive power to break up corporate monopolies, fight for equal rights and environmental justice, and restore sanity to our corrupt political and economic system.”
Associated Press and State House News Service writers contributed to this report.