words. Sitting on her sofa, she rebuffed any attempt to get
her to revisit her thinking and what she’d have done differ-
ently. “I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t.”
Friends say what’s driving her now is a desire to correct
that mistake and a conviction that Trump’s election showed
voters want change on a scale most Democrats don’t compre-
hend. She believes Democrats lost in 2016 because they were
timid. Trump ditched Republican orthodoxies and brought
along union members, blue-collar workers, and other tradi-
tionally Democratic voters in the bargain. Warren is making
a big bet that taking Trump down requires beating him at his
own game: go big and bold or risk losing again on warmed-
over incrementalism. That’s why the sweep of her agenda aims
for the New Deal or the Great Society. “We need to fight harder
for what we believe in,” she told me.
If Trumpism is a hypertrophied version of conservatism,
then Warrenism is, by design, liberalism jacked up on steroids.
“It’s all a response to Trump,” says former Massachusetts
Representative Barney Frank, a Warren ally who’s neutral in
the race. “It’s meant to be earthshaking.”
Until now, few Democrats would have embraced such an
agenda for fear of being branded radical, tax-and-spend lib-
erals. For many party regulars, that remains a live concern.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spends much of her energy try-
ing to contain the progressive exuberance Warren and other
Democrats to her left have eagerly unleashed. Right now,
the central strategic divide in Democratic circles is between
Pelosi’s desire not to spook voters and jeopardize her par-
ty’s chance to beat Trump and Warren’s conviction that they
won’t show up unless Democrats aggressively reclaim their
historic mantle. Wake someone up in the dark of night during
a Warren administration, she seems to promise, and they’ll
know damn well what the Democrats stand for.
Her push for enormous changes to the structure of the U.S.
political economy is taking not only her party out of its comfort
zone, but also Warren herself. For all her provocations, she has
long been a believer in institutions who spent her career as an
academic, government regulator, and senator carefully working
within those systems. Her considerable success came because
she taught herself to master the establishment, not blow it up.
That’s changed. Her decision to abandon the constraints
and conventions of how a Democrat traditionally runs for pres-
ident has revivified a campaign many observers, not just the
president, had written off. Suddenly, she’s one of the hottest
candidates in the field.
“What I’ve seen in the last six weeks for Warren in terms
of grassroots energy is like a rocket ship taking off,” says an
independent digital strategist closely tracking the Democratic
campaigns. More than anyone else, Warren has set the terms
of the race and forced other candidates to respond as a mat-
ter of strategic necessity. As the first primary debates in Miami
showed, Democrats’ plans for a post-Trump future are far
more sweeping than just about anybody expected them to
be even a few months ago. Kamala Harris, a supposed mod-
erate, has endorsed “Medicare for All,” and even Biden was
compelled to produce a far more robust health-care plan than
the one he helped pass as Obama’s vice president.
All of this raises a thorny question: Is WarrenWarren supporters
at a Chicago town hall
on June 28
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