The Summer of Warren By Julia Ioffe / GQ Magazine

gq.com
The Summer of Warren

By Julia Ioffe


August 21, 2019


28-35 minutes

Elizabeth Warren was ready for the question. She gets a variation of it almost everywhere she goes. Often, it’ll come after she’s outlined any number of the big, sweeping things she intends to do once she’s assumed the presidency—wipe out student debt, say, or bring the private equity industry to heel, or revamp the State Department. Her immodest plans tend to inspire at least a few people in every crowd to wonder the exact same thing: Really? And how do you expect you’ll do all that?

On a chilly summer evening in a high school gym in Milwaukee, I noticed she’d begun preempting the question by highlighting her own audacity.

She recounted a little story of a colleague who had once approached her on the Senate floor to suggest that an idea of hers was maybe a bit improbable. “That’s just too hard,” Warren said he told her, and added she should “smile more.” (The good, liberal crowd booed on cue.) “And here’s what I remember thinking,” she said, her voice resonating with the righteous disbelief she must have felt then. “What do you think they said to the abolitionists? ‘You’re not going to change this country, that’s too hard!’…What do you think they told the suffragettes? ‘Quit now. It’s just too hard.’ What did they say to the early union organizers? ‘Quit now. It’s just too hard.’ But here’s the thing. They didn’t quit. They persisted and they changed the course of American history!”

The stakes of Warren’s run are historically significant. She is vying to become not simply the country's first female president, but the architect of an ambitious rethinking of American government. (Her campaign’s central question is: Who does our government work for?) Yet for all the grandness of her vision, some of her shrewdest innovations on the trail can seem almost imperceptible. Consider her selfie strategy. “We’re going to take pictures,” Warren announced from the stage, shortly after invoking those trailblazers of yore. Here was a stealth weapon available to neither abolitionists nor suffragettes. “Someone will explain whether to go to that side or that side.”

For many of the hundreds of people who had turned out to hear Warren speak, this was the main event: a photo with the candidate. Quickly, a buzzing but orderly line began to snake across the gym, into the school’s hallway, and out the double doors into the street.

The selfie line has, by now, become a notorious feature of a Warren event—one that reflects the campaign’s savvy as well as the candidate's unique commitment and stamina: She stays as long as it takes to pose with every person who wants a picture. Sometimes the line is so long that this obligation requires hours of Warren’s time—as it did in Chicago in June, when over three thousand people took two and a half hours to shuffle through. “I don’t know how she does it after doing the speech and taking those questions, which is very hard,” said former Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid. “I’ve never known anyone to do that before. I know that when I finished my town halls, I just wanted to go home.”

Warren, however, told me that she finds the selfie line “energizing.” Earlier that day, as we chatted in her hotel, I asked her about these post-rally meet-and-greets. “The selfie line is the chance to have the direct touch,” she told me. “I get to hear from one person after another what they want me to hear. Anything! This is their chance, and they can tell me anything they want as they come through that selfie line. And it keeps me connected to people in a powerfully important way.”

What Warren has created is a contemporary twist on the age-old rope line, one that feels hipper than her age (Warren turned 70 in June) and is both more personal and more efficient than randomly reaching into a sea of anemone-like arms—or getting carpal tunnel from shaking too many hands, as George W. Bush did in 2000. Other 2020 hopefuls oblige random requests for selfies with voters, but no one has the casual spontaneity of picture-taking down to a perfectly engineered production the way the Warren campaign does.

As soon as Warren is done delivering her stump speech, she’ll answer three randomly selected audience questions, and then four of her staffers will swoop in to get the selfie assembly line moving. If Warren sees that the emerging line is a particularly long one, she’ll kick off her black mules and lace up her sneakers, preparing for the slog of retail politics with an eye toward orthopedic comfort.

She’ll find her place in front of a giant American flag, beaming, ready to hug or to listen or, if the person is a little girl, to bend down, reach out her right pinkie and loop into the pinkie of the little girl and tell her that “running for president is what little girls do!” It’s not clear why this is the subject of a pinkie swear, or why the selfie line is called a selfie line, because what actually happens is that, the moment one staffer ushers you toward Warren, another takes your bag, a third staffer grabs your phone, snaps your picture (not a selfie) with the senator, and a fourth staffer pushes you off the stage as the first staffer ushers in a new selfie—photo—subject.

Each photo and brief moment of chit-chat takes, according to the campaign’s estimate, an average of six seconds. By the summer’s end, the surging Warren campaign had taken more than 42,000 of these photos. Not everyone who comes to her town halls is a die-hard supporter. Most are undecided but Warren-curious. Others supported Bernie Sanders last time around and still share his ideals but are intrigued by the specificity of Warren’s vision. These people are crucial to her campaign, and Warren wants to send them all away with more than just a headful of policy details. Everyone who comes through the selfie line walks away dazzled and giddy and armed with a photo of Elizabeth Warren that they can blast to their social-media feeds. They may only be getting six seconds with the candidate, but those are six more seconds than they’re likely getting with anybody else running for the White House. And those pictures live forever.

Warren is able to devote herself to this kind of laborious, voter-by-voter outreach, her allies say, because she has freed up vast chunks of campaigning time by eschewing the typical fund-raising protocols of White House candidates. In February, just as her campaign was beginning, she forswore big-dollar fundraisers and said she wouldn’t be spending her time courting deep-pocketed donors, a move so controversial that her first finance director resigned in protest. It turned out that the pledge didn’t cost her, at least not much. In the second quarter of the year, Warren raised over $19 million, almost as much as the other front-runners. The average contribution to her campaign was $28. Warren highlights her grassroots donor base by randomly calling the people who have given her money—sometimes getting hung up on by people who believe that they are being pranked. (There is, of course, always a camera rolling when the calls go out.) “It’s revolutionary—I think voters don’t understand that,” says Jess McIntosh, a political commentator and Warren fan. “She’s working on policy proposals and taking 40,000 selfies because she’s not spending eight hours a day with rich people. And that’s huge.”

Elizabeth Warren has made the "selfie line" a strategic feature of each campaign stop—and has snapped roughly 42,000 photos with those who've turned out to hear her speak.

Elizabeth Warren was ebullient when I first met her. She had every reason to be. It was July, halfway through what was shaping up to be the Summer of Warren, and she bounded into the hotel conference room with obvious energy.

Tall and wiry, Warren visibly thrums with good cheer. She’s got that kind of pert friendliness stretched taut around a core of steel that some foreigners find confusing in certain willful Americans. But in Warren, both the chipper facade and the steel guts feel genuine: She is a very nice lady who will put up with exactly zero bullcrap. She carried a tiny banana smoothie and was dressed in her standard uniform: black slacks and a black shirt. On top of this neutral canvas, she usually wears either a simple jacket or a cardigan in a solid, bright color—professional but approachable and, as any TV producer will tell you, perfect for a screen. The cardigan on this day was a periwinkle number, which caught the lightly faded blue eyes behind her rimless glasses.

The Massachusetts senator was rising inexorably in the polls, gleefully capturing electoral territory from Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, two white men who many despairing Democrats believed in hindsight might’ve saved the country from Trump, had either been the nominee in 2016. Though the first primaries were still months off, Warren’s high-octane campaign had been scoring wins and gathering energy. By the end of August, she’d visited 27 states and Puerto Rico, held 128 town halls, dominated her opponents in two primary debates, and was holding steady at third place in most national polls. She had vaulted into first place in Iowa, and most head-to-head matchups with Trump had her winning.

Warren had also been—quite notoriously—cranking out progressive policy proposals in a steady volley. She outlined her intention to end the opioid crisis. She showed how she’d tackle housing costs and make amends for redlining and other policies that have held back black Americans. She announced plans to cancel student debt, prevent gun violence, and bring manufacturing jobs back to the Rust Belt. Most recently, she detailed how she intends to help Native American communities. On nearly any subject of national concern, she's offered a prescription that's gone far beyond cursory talking-points. And she's been deeply and personally involved in crafting each plan, often seeking out input from scholars in the relevant fields. It is a time-consuming process and one that would seem to be at odds with another lesson one could draw from Clinton’s campaign: You can’t win against Trump by running on policy. And yet the approach has become a key part of her appeal.

As I followed Warren this summer, through Midwestern states that Trump had won—places like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana—I watched her confront a myriad of issues and then shrug in playful self-deprecation, admitting that yes, she has a plan for that, too. The crowd would go wild. “I have a plan for that” has become the recognizable catchphrase of the campaign season—a wonky motto about old-fashioned preparedness and acumen that serves as a kind of anthem in the chaotic age of Trump. And her campaign has leaned into the marketing opportunity, spangling the phrase on all manner of merchandise, including the item handed out to black women at the New Orleans Essence Festival: Warren-branded day planners.

Preparedness aside, these months of pre-primary jockeying can be a grind for a candidate as well-traveled as Warren. It’s a routine that features crowded economy flights (Warren prefers the aisle), a blur of nondescript hotel rooms, and a diet of meals that would shear years off anyone’s life. Warren told me that she keeps up her energy, as well as her physical and psychological health, by walking. She tracks her miles on her iPhone and was pleased to show me that she’d already logged 4.1 that day. We flipped for a moment through her phone, studying the data. “My average for this month so far is 7.4,” she said, pointing to an orange bar. “And my yearly average to this point is 6.2. I really had a tough January, because it was soooo cooold!”

Some mornings, she gets up early to walk before the day’s whirlwind. Other days, she walks late at night, strolling through towns she’s stumping in but hasn’t gotten a chance to see. “Sometimes it just really means circling the parking lot, but each time thinking, ‘Okay, but I’m moving,’ ” she said. Often, she’ll listen to a book—she just finished Ballistic, part of a pulpy series by Mark Greaney about a shadowy ex-CIA officer. Now, she was on to Douglas Brinkley’s American Moonshot, a history of the space race. Sometimes she’ll just turn off the audio book and do silent laps around the parking lot, earbuds in her ears, hat on her head. “It’s very—relaxing is almost not the right word; it’s grounding. It’s okay, I’m walking, I’m reading a book, I’m unwinding from all of the things that come flying in during a presidential campaign.”

I asked her if she ever has moments where she’s just staring out into space, not moving, her mind suspended in silence. She looked at me, puzzled, then exclaimed, “Not really! That’s just kind of not me!”

When she speaks on stage, Warren insists that the house lights are turned up to illuminate the audience. "This is not a performance, this is a chance to engage," she says, "and I need to see faces when I’m talking through that.”
There is a story Warren has been telling lately, one that explains how she learned the words that have come to define her career—first as a law professor, and more recently as a politician: mortgage, foreclosure, bankruptcy. Long before she encountered them as cold legal terms, those words had a more powerful meaning as the ones whispered late at night by her parents in Oklahoma. This was after her father’s heart attack, when he’d spend long stretches out of work. The family had sold off the station wagon, but it wasn’t enough to keep the creditors at bay.

One spring day, 12-year-old Betsy found herself standing in her mother’s bedroom. “Laid out on the bed was the dress,” Warren nearly whispered to a crowd one scorching afternoon in Elkhart, Indiana. “Some of you in here know the dress,” she went on, scanning the predominantly silver-haired room. “It’s the one that only comes out for weddings, funerals, and graduations.” A faint and knowing “yeah” echoed where I sat. “And there’s my mom, and she’s in her slip and her stockinged feet, and she’s pacing and she’s crying. And she’s saying, ‘We will not lose this house. We will not lose this house. We will not lose this house.’ ” The audience was silent as she delivered the line, her voice crackling with tears.

Warren tells this story at each of her town halls, sometimes more than once a day, and every time she tells it, she is on the verge of crying. She doesn’t in the end, but people in the audience do. At every single event I attended, I saw people wiping away tears when she told the story. It was a masterful summoning of sentiment that calls to mind a method actor dredging up the same emotion in the same play, night after night, for a months-long run.

American voters demand authenticity of their candidates, despite the obvious and calculated performance of a political race. I wanted to know what happens in that moment—how does Warren manage to move a crowd to tears despite the repetition? I wanted to ask her if what I heard in her voice was real.

“Because I’m back in that room,” she told me, her eyes suddenly brimming. “I can describe the shade of the carpet to you and the bedspread, and I’m there with my mother. And I’m not only there as the little girl standing in the doorway, I’m there in my mother’s heart.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, her eyes blinked away the extra moisture. “She was so frightened,” Warren went on, reprising the story of how her mother—who, at 50, had never worked outside the home—walked to the local Sears, got a minimum-wage job, and saved the family from foreclosure.

“I knew how scary it was by the time I was standing in that doorway,” Warren said, her voice gravelly. “I’d heard her cry night after night after night, and I think that for kids sometimes, it’s harder to hear a parent cry, knowing they won’t do it in front of you. That’s really scary.”

That she elicited such empathy in that room in Elkhart was a special feat. It was a relatively conservative corner of a conservative state, and the audience was palpably cool to her when Warren took the stage. Several voters I spoke to before the event weren’t sure what to expect, and one man told me that, though he was curious about the Massachusetts senator, he was sure the country would not elect a woman.

Warren said she could sense that the audience wasn’t with her when she started. “Well, it’s not like I walked in and said, okay, diagnosis: Here’s the problem,” she explained. “It’s in the room. And even as I’m being introduced, I can see faces—I’m kind of standing off to the side—and as soon as I got on stage, I thought, the people standing here want to know me better, they want to know who I am and why I’m here. So let’s slow down a little bit, let’s talk a little more, but we got there.” By the end of her speech, most of the able-bodied people in the room were up on their feet, their fists and cheers churning the air.

Her trick isn’t to just read the energy in the room, it’s to feel the people there. And like all of her plans and strategies, she leaves nothing to chance, ensuring that the faces in her audiences are lit, that the crowds are never obscured to her by the curtain of darkness one sees from a bright stage. “It’s very important to me to be able to see faces when I’m doing a town hall,” Warren said. “I don’t want to be in a theater where I’m on stage and the audience is in the dark. This is not a performance, this is a chance to engage, for all of us in the room to think about what’s happening to our country, to our lives, and I need to see faces when I’m talking through that.”

Warren often talks about how she knew in second grade that she wanted to be a teacher. Though she eventually went from being a speech therapist to a tenured professor at Harvard Law School and a formidable presidential candidate, the guiding impulse is still obvious. Her stump speeches operate like a satisfying college lecture, the kind where you feel so engaged and entertained that you almost don’t realize you’re learning something.

“Better than anyone I’ve seen in public life, she can make that transition in a discussion that feels totally relatable and easy to follow,” says Andrew Crespo, a professor at Harvard Law School who was once Warren’s student. “She’s a natural teacher. On some level, teaching isn’t just about conveying information, it’s about capturing the attention and interest of your audience in a way that they come away with something new. She does that.”

With the primaries still months away, Warren has visited 27 states and Puerto Rico and has held 128 town halls.
One day last fall, a young woman in suburban Michigan named Mallory McMorrow watched a number she didn’t recognize flash on her phone’s screen. She was content to let the call go to voicemail, but at the last moment, she picked up. It was Warren.

Just two years earlier, McMorrow, who was then 30, was stunned to notice that a family down the street had taken down their American flag and put up a Trump sign. It was just after the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape. The family, McMorrow knew, had two daughters in middle school. What was happening?

Like so many women horrified by Trump’s election, McMorrow, a graphic designer, decided to quit her day job and run for office. On November 6, 2018, she flipped her district, snatching a seat in the Michigan state Senate away from a deep-pocketed Republican incumbent from a well-known political family.

Suddenly McMorrow was the youngest woman ever elected to the state Senate. She was still absorbing the wildness of it all when her phone rang with the senator from Massachusetts on the other end. She was calling to congratulate her—and to gather intelligence. “She said, ‘Mallory, I saw the results of your election. Wow!’ ” McMorrow recalled. “And she asked me, ‘Tell me about Michigan. Tell me about your district. Tell me about the people there. What were the conversations like? What were the people like? What do they care about?’ ”

McMorrow recounted this as she introduced Warren at a town hall in Lansing, Michigan, the capital of a state Warren was making a point to visit a full nine months before its primary. In 2016, Democrats had been sure that Michigan was a reliable brick in their “blue wall” across the Upper Midwest. Yet Clinton, who notoriously didn’t pay much attention to the area during the general election campaign, ended up losing the state by some 11,000 votes—and, with it, the presidency. By the 2018 midterms, most of the candidates atop the Democratic ticket in Michigan were women. “There was some skepticism about running so many women on the ticket, given how Secretary Clinton performed in Michigan,” says Lavora Barnes, the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party. But the mostly female ticket triumphed, sending a woman to the U.S. Senate and three more to the House of Representatives, part of a record-setting year for women getting elected across the country. “Some attribute it to her gender, but I don’t,” Barnes says of Clinton’s loss now. “Michiganders are comfortable voting for women. I think there were plenty of other factors that did it. It had nothing to do with her gender but more with her ability to connect to voters.”

When Warren announced on New Year’s Eve that she was forming an exploratory committee, becoming effectively the first Democrat in the 2020 race, a rash of articles appeared reprising the theme of likability. Politico asked if she was “too unlikable” to win. Vanity Fair wondered the same. But instead of feeding into a larger discussion, the publications were widely condemned for asking a question they would never ask about a male candidate. “When I see people talk about ‘likability’ now, at least it’s in a discussion about whether that’s an appropriate question to ask,” says Jennifer Palmieri, who worked for both President Obama and Hillary Clinton, “as opposed to 2016, when people asked, ‘Why does no one like her?’ ”

Things have changed since the last election. In part, this is because Clinton did smash a glass ceiling: She was the first woman nominee for president and won the popular vote by nearly three million votes. In part, it is because she still didn’t get the job. It went instead to a man who was not only comically less qualified than she was, but was also accused by two dozen women of sexual misconduct and, in some cases, sexual assault. The result was the Women’s March, which dwarfed Trump’s inauguration crowds the day before, the #MeToo movement, and a holy rage in women that most men can’t fathom.

Though she refuses “to relitigate 2016,” as she puts it, Warren accedes that what happened three years ago—Hillary Clinton’s run and Donald Trump’s win—makes her current quest for the White House a bit easier. “Of course, it helps that Hillary ran in 2016,” she told me. She is aware that the energy and momentum generated by a record number of women candidates in 2018—spurred on in part by the presence of a committed misogynist in the Oval Office—also help her. The path now, Warren thinks, is much better trodden. “I believe that having six women in the race right now makes it easier,” she said. “It’s good to not be the only one standing on stage who’s female. Having started teaching in law schools decades ago when there were very few women, I taught in commercial law, which was largely male. Commercial and corporate and all the money and finance courses stayed heavily male-dominated much longer than some of the other fields, and I’ve just lived through years of ‘Gentlemen! Oh. And lady.’ ” She rolled her eyes. “Years of, I’d look around the room and there’d be 50, 75, 100 people, and I’d be the only woman in the room. And the idea that right now, there are six women who held up their hands and said, ‘Yup! I’m in this race!’ It’s just fabulous!”

These days, it’s hard to find Democratic primary voters who will openly admit to a fear that a woman is unelectable in America. (I did find one in Elkhart.) Surveying a primary field unprecedented in its diversity, many voters I spoke to saw Warren’s gender as an advantage. Two Teamsters in Milwaukee, members of the elusive and coveted white working class, were avid Warren supporters. “I truly don’t think that’s an issue,” said Paul Host, a retired truck driver. “Hillary just didn’t understand the Midwest, that many of us are still treading water.” Warren, he felt, was different. They had met her several times in Washington when they came to lobby Congress to protect their pensions and she supported them, winning their undying loyalty. Host told me he liked her better than Biden or Bernie, who he said had “amazing” ideas but was not as electable as Warren. “She does a better job at explaining things,” Host said. “I think she’s got as good a chance as anyone,” his friend Bill Constable said. Most of the people he knew who wouldn’t vote for a woman were never going to vote for a Democrat anyway.

As she cranks out a litany of specific plans, Warren is hoping to refute a supposed lesson drawn from Hillary Clinton's failed run: That you can’t win against Trump by running on policy. So far, Warren has made her fluency with details a key part of her appeal.
On the same day that Warren and I met in Milwaukee, Donald Trump himself seemed to take note of the senator’s gathering momentum. With Warren climbing in the polls, the president lambasted her on Twitter. Again. “Could you imagine having Sleepy Joe Biden…or a very nervous and skinny version of Pocahontas (1000/24th), as your President,” he banged out, “rather than what you have now, so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius!”

Trump may not have understood the use of fractions, but he trusted his followers to comprehend the Native American slur, his preferred line of attack against Warren, who had quietly touted her faint lineage for decades until it became a national scandal during her first run for the Senate in 2012. Her rival at the time, Republican senator Scott Brown, suggested that Warren, a white woman, had been posing as a Native American in order to advance her career. The conservative Boston Herald dubbed her “Fauxcahontas,” and the controversy nearly sank Warren’s candidacy. Trump first picked it up in 2014 and dubbed Warren “Pocahontas”—nearly a year before he announced his own presidential run.

When I asked Warren about that morning’s iteration, with its bonus jab at her appearance, she batted it away. “It’s just Trump trying to find his way to be insulting,” she said with a shrug. “And he’ll try to find it for everyone because it worked for him. But it’s not going to work this time around.”

Last fall, Warren attempted to disarm Trump and put the ancestry issue to rest by releasing the results of a DNA test that strongly supported that she had one Native American ancestor six to ten generations back. It was a rare misstep that threatened to doom her campaign before she had even declared it. Warren was immediately buried under a landslide of criticism from progressives and Native Americans, who accused her of reducing indigenous culture and tribal membership to the morally dubious science of tracing racial bloodlines. Warren apologized to the Cherokee Nation (she had claimed her forebears came from their stock, as well as that of the Delawares), but two months after she declared her intention to run for president, most news stories were still centered on the fallout from this disastrous decision.

She worked hard to find her footing on the issue, learning to respond to pointed questions in a consistent way. “I’m not a person of color. I'm not a citizen of a tribe…and I shouldn't have done it,” she told Charlamagne tha God, host of The Breakfast Club, who was searing in his criticism of her. Undaunted, Warren soldiered on and made plans for a bold and lengthy run. She rolled over $10 million from her Senate re-election campaign fund, raised nearly $6 million more, hired 180 staffers and operatives, and for a long time had the biggest campaign team of any primary contender. Her inauspicious operation was burning nearly every cent she was taking in. The moves have paid off. So much so that the question central to her campaign now looms larger than ever: Can she truly beat Trump?

“I have heard so many people say that they believe in you and all your plans,” one woman told Warren at a Detroit town hall. “But then they follow up with the objection of wanting a male candidate who can beat Trump.” Warren seemed pleased for the chance to address the concern, presumably about toughness. “Let’s just start with one of those basic truths that you know somewhere deep in your bones,” she told the woman, “and that is you never back down from a bully.”

Warren intends to go straight at Trump in other ways, even co-opting aspects of his populism to promote progressive values. She has rolled out a plan for boosting quality of life in a rural America down on its luck. She notes that companies evading taxes or outsourcing labor are not “patriotic” or “loyal” to America. Her program for what she calls “economic patriotism” is so eerily similar to what Trump ran on in 2016 that Tucker Carlson mentioned the plan approvingly on his Fox show.

By summer’s end, all the plans, the town halls, and strong debate performances—to say nothing of those 42,000 selfies—had catapulted Warren to within striking distance of the nomination. And after following her around the populist-minded Midwest, I could see why. She shines on the stump, leaning into her wonkiness and her mom jokes; she takes obvious and real delight in meeting voters; she makes crowds loopy with enthusiasm. After two and a half years of a proudly ignorant president sitting atop a chaotic administration, suddenly the smart older lady who’s thought of everything doesn’t seem like a schoolmarm who reminds you of your ex-wife anymore. Suddenly, she was feeling like the most exciting thing in American politics.

“Great campaigns make people feel like they’re part of something larger than themselves, than just a movement to elect a person,” says one Wisconsin political insider. “When you see a group of Democrats and two of them have a SHE PERSISTED or I HAVE A PLAN FOR THAT T-shirts, you have the feeling that there’s something growing out there.”

Julia Ioffe is a GQ correspondent.

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