Elizabeth Warren announces 2020 presidential exploratory committee

Elizabeth Warren is making it official Monday, announcing an exploratory committee for a 2020 run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, and releasing an accompanying video that emphasizes her working-class roots in Oklahoma and the theme that opportunity has declined over the years.

“America’s middle class is under attack,” Warren says, blaming “billionaires and corporations who wanted more of the pie.”

The overall pitch is, as you would expect from Warren, pretty oriented around straight economic populism. But she also specifically calls out the notion that “families of color face a path that is steeper and taller” than the already daunting challenges she sees facing working- and middle-class Americans in general.

Before the Bernie Sanders campaign caught fire, many progressives urged Warren to enter the 2016 primary and give Hillary Clinton a real fight for the nomination.

She ultimately chose not to do so, but emerged as a leading 2020 contender almost immediately after Donald Trump won on Election Day 2016. Former Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid acted during the lame-duck session to install Warren in a seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee so she could bolster her commander-in-chief credentials, and reportedly urged Warren to run for president. Now she’s doing it.

Warren is a supporter of Medicare-for-all legislation introduced by Sanders and also has an ambitious set of her own legislative proposals starting with a sweeping anti-corruption bill, a plan to give workers voices on the boards of large companies, a major investment in housing affordability, and a plan to create a public option for generic drug manufacturing.

Her star outside Washington faded somewhat relative to Sanders as a result of the 2016 campaign, but she remains the major intellectual leader among progressives on Capitol Hill, which is reflected in the big-name lineup of House co-sponsors for her various legislative ideas.

Warren has always been a big ideas person. As a professor at Harvard Law School, she authored an influential 2007 article calling for the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She came to Washington first as an aide to congressional Democrats doing oversight of the Bush-era bank bailout program, and then shaping the creation of the CFPB on both the legislative and administrative fronts. Later, she was recruited by Massachusetts Democrats to successfully challenge Scott Brown and, from her vantage point in the Senate, served as a frequent thorn in the Obama administration’s side, particularly on matters related to financial regulation and regulatory personnel.

But despite her strong network of support and record of intellectual leadership, her polling has lagged pretty badly behind Sanders and Joe Biden, the other two widely known 2020 prospects. This in part stems from the fact that her effort to put long-simmering controversy about her past claims of Native American heritage to rest by releasing a DNA test seems to have largely backfired, alienating the institutional Cherokee Nation without particularly assuaging her critics on the right.

Warren is presumably hoping that the early announcement of a campaign will let her draw more attention to the set of ideas she’s running on and orient public perception more around that vision.