Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., announced Friday that she will seek re-election to the Senate in 2018, and told her supporters that it is “no time to quit.”
“Nobody expected 2017 to start this way,” Warren wrote in an email to supporters. “This isn’t a fight we were expecting to fight.”
“The people of Massachusetts didn’t send me to Washington to roll over and play dead while [President-elect] Trump and his team of billionaires, bigots, and Wall Street bankers crush the working people of our Commonwealth and this country,” Warren continued. “This is no time to quit.”
Warren is speculated to be an early contender for the Democratic nomination in 2020 after backing Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful campaign in 2016. She won a spot on the Senate Armed Services Committee, which lead to increased speculation about her future intentions.
She is expected to receive a challenge on the right from Curt Schilling, a former MLB pitcher turned conservative talking head, who is considering challenging the liberal favorite.
“I don’t kid myself: the upcoming fights in the Senate — and our campaign in Massachusetts in 2018 — are likely to be uglier and nastier than anything we’ve ever imagined,” she wrote. “I’m not taking anything for granted.”
“Representing Massachusetts in the United States Senate and fighting for working families and all across this country is the best job in the whole world and the greatest honor of my life,” Warren wrote. “But I also know this: We fought our hearts out to win in 2012 and I expect we’ll have a bigger and even more expensive fight in 2018.”
“The smears and right-wing attacks from Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, the Koch Brothers and Wall Street aren’t about to get a little worse — they’re about to get A LOT worse,” she continued. “We cannot and will not allow the Republicans and the powerful interests to sink our campaign the same way they sank so many campaigns in 2016.”
This will be Warren’s first re-election campaign after defeating former Sen. Scott Brown in 2012.
