Happy New Year-- The Battle Over Who's Taking On Trump In 2020 Is Getting Going For Real

We covered the Elizabeth Warren announcement-- and video-- on Monday morning. She's the first top-tier candidate to jump into the 2020 race. I don't get the feeling she's going to go all the way, primarily because most of the progressive wing of the party is dedicated to Bernie and when he announces, much of her support will become shakier.

Confirmation: Blue America has raised money for both Bernie and Elizabeth Warren but the thermometer on the right, the 2020 presidential thermometer is a Bernie fundraising tool. Click it, donate and the money goes to Bernie's federal campaign. With that out of the way, let me note that not everyone agrees with me about the Bernie/Warren dynamic. Writing for CNN early Wednesday morning, David Axelrod asks if she is "the new and improved Bernie Sanders, a woman AND a populist, who could combine these robust bases to ride to the nomination? Or is she too strident? Too stilted? Too old? Too reactive, as reflected by the ill-conceived video she released shortly before the midterm elections to try to quell doubts about her claim to Native American ancestry? All she seemed to accomplish was to give President Donald Trump another opportunity to gleefully trot out his tiresome Pocahontas routine yet again." Whatever else she is, we can all agree she will be-- unlike most of the two-dozen potential candidates-- "a major player among the cavalcade of Democrats now queuing up."

We live in times of revolutionary change. Technology and globalization have created enormous opportunity for some, and disruption and stagnation for many. Decades of policies in Washington, pushed by an army of special interest lobbyists, have accelerated these trends. This is a case Warren has been making since long before she left Harvard and entered public life.

Her pioneering book, The Two Income Trap, about the mounting economic pressure on working families, was required reading among Democrats and progressive politicians in the mid-2000s.

If biography is prologue, the cause of the embattled middle class is a natural one for Warren. Her hardscrabble upbringing in rural Oklahoma and struggle as a young single mother to raise her children and pursue an education are powerful validators.

I served in the White House when Warren, then a special House counsel, was pummeling treasury officials over treatment of Wall Street executives who were culpable in the financial crisis. I saw her inaugurate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the government watchdog that saved billions for consumers before the Trump administration relegated it to the sidelines.

She has offered a series of serious ideas about government and Wall Street reform, and is one of the most incisive members of the Senate.

Warren also has laid the groundwork for her candidacy more assiduously than most, running an extensive, sophisticated operation in 2018 to help Democratic candidates around the country, even as she ran for re-election to the Senate. She raised tens of millions for these dual operations and still has $12 million in the bank.

As Sanders proved on 2016, there is an audience for the hard-edged populism Warren loudly proclaimed in her announcement video. Many Americans are fed up with the hegemony of Wall Street and the stranglehold of lobbyists, a trend made worse by Trump, despite his iconic campaign pledge to "drain the swamp."

The 2018 elections demonstrated the powerful appeal of women on the ballot, both in Democratic primaries and general elections. And the nation's first primary will take place in New Hampshire, which shares the Boston media market with Massachusetts.

All this makes Warren a contender. It doesn't mean she'll win. If Sanders or other populists-- Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jeff Merkley of Oregon-- enter the race, her climb becomes steeper. There will be other women, all younger than Warren, who is nearing 70. There will be candidates of color, better positioned to compete in the crucial state of South Carolina and beyond.

Democrats may, ultimately, choose a candidate with a more uplifting and unifying message in response to a relentlessly divisive President, or a candidate with a less edgy and dogmatic vision of capitalism than Warren's. Some fear Warren could drive away the suburban voters who delivered Democrats the House in 2018.

And, despite an extraordinary personal story and genuine, long-standing commitment to her principles, Warren's presentation sometimes can seem wooden and inauthentic.

Still, Warren is powerfully intelligent, and indefatigable in pursuit of her goals-- the very traits that helped lift the janitor's daughter from modest beginnings to this moment. These are indispensable qualities any winning candidate for president of the United States must own.

Nathaniel Rakich looked at her candidacy from a different perspective at FiveThirtyEight. "[I]f you listen to conventional wisdom-- and our favorite quasi-scientific tool, betting markets-- Warren’s star has dimmed in recent months. President Trump’s repeated references to her as “Pocahontas” have kept alive a seven-year-old controversy over Warren’s claims that she has Native American ancestry, which potentially helped advance her career. Her release of a DNA test in October 2018 that she hoped would settle the matter was not well received. And in a party reportedly thirsty for a new generation of leadership, the 69-year-old Warren may have missed her window. For the first but certainly not the last time this year, let’s take a look at the case for and against the chances of a major 2020 Democratic candidate.

Ideologically, Warren is right where a Democratic primary candidate should want to be-- it’s one of the strongest cards in her hand. According to FiveThirtyEight’s Trump Score, she votes with the president just 13.1 percent of the time, making her the third-most anti-Trump senator in the 115th Congress. Although she’s best known for her stands against income inequality and big banks, she is deeply liberal on both social and economic issues, according to an analysis of her votes and positions by OnTheIssues-- although not quite as liberal as Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of Warren’s potential 2020 rivals.

Warren’s base is likely to overlap quite a bit with Sanders’s, the self-described democratic socialist who turned heads in the 2016 presidential primaries by winning 40 percent of Democratic delegates. Warren even seemed to make an explicit play for Sanders voters when she devoted a full minute (mid-personal bio, no less) of her four-and-a-half-minute announcement video to an economic-populist message. “America’s middle class is under attack... Billionaires and big corporations decided they wanted more of the pie and they enlisted politicians to cut them a fatter slice.”

In fact, at least one poll suggests that Warren and Sanders (if he runs again in 2020) will be fighting over the same pool of voters. Back in April 2018, Suffolk University conducted a poll of two versions of the 2020 Democratic primary in New Hampshire: one without Warren and one with her. In the version without her, Sanders pulled 25 percent of the vote. In the version with her, he dropped to 13 percent; Warren got 26 percent. None of the other six candidates about whom the poll asked lost as much support as Sanders did with Warren in the field.

Sanders and Warren have something else in common: the support of small donors, or those who give $200 or less to a campaign. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, as of Nov. 1, small donors were behind 56 percent of all the money raised by Warren’s re-election campaign. The only 2018 Senate candidate whose fundraising was more reliant on small donors was Sanders himself.

And in terms of raw dollar amounts, Warren raised $10 million more from small donors than Sanders did, even though neither one was facing a competitive race. Warren’s $19.4 million small-donor haul was second only to Beto O’Rourke’s among 2018 general-election candidates for Senate or House. Presidential campaigns are expensive affairs, and being a strong fundraiser-- particularly among small donors, a well that is less likely to run dry-- is a huge advantage. It can also signal high voter enthusiasm for a candidate.

Warren’s deep pockets may also be financing her apparent strategy of building up goodwill among state-level Democrats who will be instrumental in primary and caucus field organizing. According to the Washington Post, she directed at least $7.6 million to Democratic campaigns for offices like state treasurer and legislator in 2018 -- more than any rumored 2020 contender not named Michael Bloomberg. As of mid-October, Warren had also made 172 post-primary congratulatory phone calls to Democratic candidates, blasted her email list on their behalf 180 times, shared policy documents with them 63 times, held 61 one-on-one meetings, hosted 41 fundraisers and shot 36 videos. That is how you develop a network.

Central to Warren’s grassroots networking strategy may be New Hampshire-- less than an hour’s drive away from her home base and the second state in the country (after Iowa) to cast primary ballots. While she sent one staffer each to Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada for the 2018 election, two of her aides moved to New Hampshire despite it not hosting any particularly competitive major elections. (They assumed pretty major roles there, too-- as the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s political director and communications director.)

The final Granite State Poll of 2018 (pre-Beto) for the presidential primary in New Hampshire shows Warren doing well-- but not well enough:

• Bernie- 30%
• Biden- 19%
• Warren- 17%
• Kennedy III- 7%
• Booker- 6%
• Kamala- 3%

"It’s unclear," continued Rakich, "what’s cooling voters on Warren. The fallout from her DNA test just weeks before Election Day is a decent guess. But the controversy over her ancestry may also be a proxy for other, less socially acceptable reasons why people dislike her, such as her gender or age. 'I don’t think America’s ready for another Hillary. It has to be someone young and dynamic,' one interviewee told Boston radio station WBUR-FM. Warren has long polarized audiences and was never the world’s most beloved politician to begin with. That may be because she’s a woman with a confrontational style. It may be sexism mixed with other reasons. Whatever the cause(s), Warren isn’t in the best starting position as she enters the fray. But she’s not in the worst position either-- she’ll likely find a receptive audience for her message in terms of policy and ideology. A well-run campaign would put her among the field’s top contenders. We’ll find out soon enough: Warren says she’ll announce for sure whether she’s running 'early in the new year.'"

There are going to be a flood of campaign announcements this month. Mike Allen wrote yesterday at Axios that he's expecting Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and John Hickenlooper to jump in quickly. A veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns told Allen that big-time hired guns-- he called them "aides"-- "will start to jump to campaigns this month. But many of the 'big-time consultants, many of whom have multiple possible 2020 clients,' will take longer."