Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on Saturday made it official: She’s running for president.
Warren, who on the last day of last year announced she’d formed an exploratory committee in anticipation of a 2020 White House bid, told supporters at the Everett Mills business center in Lawrence, Mass., she’s ready to fight on behalf of working Americans, promising to build a small-dollar, grassroots movement around her cause. Lawrence, nicknamed the “Immigrant City,” was the perfect backdrop to launch her campaign, she said, given it was the setting of the 1912 Bread and Roses textile labor strike, a protest instigated by women.
“We are here to say: Enough is enough,” Warren, 69, said. “This is the fight of our lives, the fight to build an America where dreams are possible, an America that works for everyone. And that is why I stand here today to declare that I am a candidate for president of the United States of America.”
She said that President Trump is just the “latest and most extreme symptom of what’s gone wrong in America.”
Warren on Saturday was introduced and endorsed by fellow Massachusetts congressional delegation member Rep. Joe Kennedy III, of the Democratic dynasty, who was once a student of the Rutgers-trained bankruptcy and commercial law professor at Harvard.
Kennedy, who delivered the rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union in 2018, said this week that he is ruling out a run for president in 2020, freeing him up to endorse a candidate.
For Warren, who has served in the upper chamber since 2013, Saturday’s event marked the culmination of her, at times, rocky roll-out strategy. The fierce Wall Street critic, a driving force behind the Obama administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, released 10 years of her tax returns in August 2018 as she vied for re-election to the Senate. But it’s been the publication of her DNA analysis results that’s caused the pro-banking regulator, who was once a Republican, the most bumps on the pre-campaign trail.
President Trump has seized on allegations dredged up during her first senatorial race that Warren, a vocal detractor of the president, used claims to minority status as a Native American in the 1980s and ’90s to springboard her legal career, dubbing her “Pocahontas” ahead of the 2016 election. The Boston Globe reported in September that Harvard didn’t factor Warren’s ethnicity into its decision to hire her, nor did the other four law schools where she held academic posts. In October, however, as part of an effort to blunt future political attacks, Warren went public with her DNA data, revealing she’s between 1/1024 – 1/64 American Indian. She was widely panned due to the distance of her minority relations, her heritage stemming back six to 10 generations.
Warren has repeatedly been grilled over her decision to go on the offensive, telling voters in Iowa in January she understood she was not a person of color. News this month that she had offered a private apology to the Cherokee Nation for her handling of the situation was quickly overshadowed by the revelation she identified
her race as Native American when she registered for the State Bar of Texas in 1986.
“I can’t go back,” the Oklahoma-born Warren told the Washington Post this week. “But I am sorry for furthering confusion on tribal sovereignty and tribal citizenship and harm that resulted.”
Although the Democratic senator did not bring up her former claims to Native American heritage during her announcement Saturday, she did say that “race matters, and we need to say so.”
“We can’t be blind to the fact that the rules in our country have been rigged against other people for a long time,” Warren said. “Women, LGBTQ individuals, Latinos, Native Americans, immigrants, people with disabilities, and we need to call it out.”
Instead of mentioning her family’s racial background — which she has used as a talking point in bringing up her Native American heritage — she talked about their financial woes as a lower-middle-class family in Oklahoma.
The first high-profile woman to make moves toward the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination has also been hit with likability critiques. Negative reviews of a post-exploratory-committee-announcement livestream, during which she cracked open a beer, focused on whether the millionaire with working class roots seemed authentic. Regardless, her policy proposal to tax households with a net worth of more than $50 million starting at a 2 percent rate, rising to 3 percent for billionaire households, was generally well received by the more liberal portion of the Democratic base.
Warren’s official announcement on Saturday kicked off a campaign storm of seven states, including early-nominating Iowa and New Hampshire this weekend, before stops in South Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, and California.
“It won’t be enough to just undo the terrible acts of this administration,” Warren said during her announcement. “Our fight is for big, structural change.”
With her announcement, Warren officially enters a growing pool of Democratic primary candidates, including fellow Sens. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, former Obama administration Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, among others.
Katelyn Caralle contributed to this report.
