In the days since Hillary Clinton’s stunning electoral defeat to Donald Trump, the vacuum she left atop the Democratic Party hasn’t gone unfilled.
Elizabeth Warren has moved aggressively to occupy the space, a timely reminder to the party and its most ambitious members that all roads to 2020 — not to mention 2018 — go through her.
More than any other high-profile Democrat, the Massachusetts senator and liberal hero has gone out of her way to appear in Washington headlines nearly every day since Nov. 8. From a series of public appearances across town to letters from her Senate office to private Capitol Hill meetings with fellow elected officials, Warren is making clear that she intends to use her brand of no-holds-barred liberalism to illuminate the party’s path ahead while it embarks on a protracted period of soul-searching.
“This is a moment that cries out for Senator Warren’s fiery leadership and she is bringing the fire,” said Ben Wikler, the Washington director of MoveOn.org. "Progressives are beleaguered, they need a call to action, and she’s delivering it."
Her message: While Democrats can try to find common ground with Trump on certain issues, it’s more important than ever for the party to assert itself against the president-elect every step of the way, from loudly holding him accountable for his “drain the swamp” rhetoric to vigorously opposing his appointment of “a bigot beloved by white supremacists."
In Warren’s estimation, the time for mourning is over. Clinton — who Warren endorsed after her primary against Bernie Sanders — and the 2016 election are in the past. The future is now, and it requires that Democrats understand how Trump’s economic message appealed to voters Clinton couldn’t reach.
“Given what's just happened, there really is a question: who are the leaders of the party? It’s great to see her doing all that. I can tell you from being on the ground here in Ohio, no one electrifies voters like Elizabeth Warren,” said David Pepper, the chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. “There is a little bit of a void, and I think her voice coming through loud and clear is great."
Warren’s forceful ascension lands at a delicate time for Democrats, who are both looking for a new generation of leaders and puzzling through how to work with — or against — a Trump White House. That search is taking place against a backdrop of upheaval within party leadership across the board: Sen. Chuck Schumer will replace longtime Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, the Democratic National Committee will elect a new chairman and even Nancy Pelosi, the party’s longtime House leader, is getting a challenge.
But the irreverent first-term senator is one of the few with the stature to break through the muddle, and her move to promote her brand of no-apologies progressive warfare could have longer-term implications for the party’s direction, an emerging dynamic that’s cheered by liberals but far from embraced by the whole of the party.
Warren is hardly alone in seeking to shape the agenda, and Sanders has himself also been active, looking to reawaken his millions of supporters and voter networks across the country as he pushes Keith Ellison for DNC chair — an endorsement Warren has seconded. The Vermont senator has formally joined the Senate Democratic leadership ranks (like Warren), and is busy delivering a series of addresses promoting his new book and outlining his hopes for the opposition party during the Trump era.
But Sanders’ national profile is already much higher, so the Bostonian’s jolt in activity has been more noticeable in the capital.
It’s not that she’s aiming to give Schumer a run for his money in his formal role as the party’s highest-ranking official, or focused on anointing an acolyte at the DNC. It’s more about providing Democrats with a model for progress and a framework to talk about issues while Trump holds the White House.
“It’s really important for the Democratic Party to be aggressively articulating who we are, what we want, and what we don’t want,” said DNC vice chairman R.T. Rybak, the former Minneapolis mayor. "The lesson we should’ve learned from the first six months of the Reagan administration is if you’re not ready at the start, you’re going to get run over and spend many years trying to undo a lot of stuff. So I strongly applaud Democrats who want to stand up."
A large part of Warren’s push has included meeting with important Democratic constituencies to influence their conversations and use their platforms. With labor leaders cheering her on as one of their most prominent advocates, she spoke at the AFL-CIO just two days after Election Day, introduced by union chief Richard Trumka as “uniquely positioned to partner with us."
“We will stand up to bigotry. No compromises on this one, ever,” she said, in a speech that didn’t mention Clinton once, but which insisted her party must tune into the economic concerns of millions who voted for Trump. "In all its forms, we will fight back against attacks on Latinos, African Americans, women, Muslims, immigrants disabled Americans — on anyone. Whether Donald Trump sits in a glass tower or sits in the White House, we will not give an inch on this."
Four days later, at a closed-doors meeting of the liberal Democracy Alliance donor network, Warren insisted that Democrats need to step up their economic appeal to everyday voters. Two days after that, she privately met with the Congressional Progressive Caucus on the Hill to talk through the election’s results and lessons.
"It is a false choice to say fighting on economic issues means you don't fight on discrimination issues. Those issues were joined together by Martin Luther King in the 1963 March on Washington, and it is as important today — maybe more important — to join those issues together," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. "It is about signaling to the country how we actually do big things while being good, and not being racist, and not being discriminatory, and not being xenophobic."
A pair of formal letters signed by Warren has also drawn notice.
First came a detailed 8-page note on Tuesday, addressed to Trump himself, that ripped into him for appointing Wall Street officials and lobbyists to his transition team despite his promises to cleave such insiders’ influence.
“If you truly stand by your commitment to making government work for all Americans — not just those with armies of lobbyists on payroll — you must remove the lobbyists and financial bigwigs from your transition team and reinstate a group of advisors who will fight for the interests of all Americans,” Warren wrote. “Maintaining a transition team of Washington insiders sends a clear signal to all who are watching you — that you are already breaking your campaign promises to ‘drain the swamp’ and that you are selling out the American public.”
Warren’s team posted the missive on her Facebook page, and it was viewed over 10 million times in the ensuing two days.
Moves like sending that letter go “beyond rhetoric, and point a laser beam at the hypocrisy and potential for promise-breaking, and that’s the kind of merciless, principled opposition that’s going to be called for. And frankly it’s the right model for the rest of the Democratic caucus and for progressives everywhere,” said Wikler. “Before it was, ‘Don’t boo, vote.’ Now it’s, ‘Don’t boo, fight.’ This is how you fight."
The next day, Warren joined the chorus of Democrats opposing Trump’s choice of chief White House strategist Steve Bannon, writing to a group of banking industry honchos alongside Ellison, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, and California Rep. Maxine Waters to ask the recipients to pressure Trump against Bannon — “a bigot beloved by white supremacists and supported by the American Nazi Party and the KKK."
The flurry of action has not gone unnoticed among her Republican detractors, some of whom say they relish the chance to caricature Democrats as the out-of-touch party of a former Harvard Law School professor.
"If Elizabeth Warren were to become the new leader of the Democratic Party that would be great news for Republicans. Warren had a terrible election night. After she sat out most of the primary, drawing all those negative headlines, once she finally did endorse Clinton she became one of the lead surrogates for her, and Clinton lost to someone who had a 60 percent disapproval rating,” said Colin Reed, a senior advisor to former Republican Sen. Scott Brown when he ran against Warren, and now the executive director of the America Rising opposition research firm.
“Her message has no appeal in middle America, and certainly red state America. It is limited to the coasts, the academics and liberal elites," Reed said, noting that many of the Senate candidates Warren backed, such as Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold and Pennsylvania’s Katie McGinty, also lost on Election Day.
Meanwhile, centrist Democrats, who uniformly refuse to criticize her on the record — acknowledging in private that she is likely to be the face of the party for at least two years due to the lack of a natural successor to Clinton or Barack Obama, and the need for Schumer to focus on doing the legislative dirty-work — are wary of Warren’s enhanced role. Her message of combating a “rigged system" can only go so far after a billionaire Republican was elected to the White House with a similar theme, they insist.
Still, Warren allies are seeing evidence that her stepped-up presence — and pressure on Trump — is being felt.
“How is Donald Trump going to show that he actually heard that message [of change]? That’s the message that he ran on, but right now what he’s doing is putting together a transition team that is full of lobbyists and the kind of people he actually ran against. So part of what we have to assess here is, ‘what is the mandate coming out?’ And I think that the clearest point that comes out of this election is that the American people do not want Wall Street to run their government. They do not want corporate executives to be the ones calling the shots in Washington,” implored the senator at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO council — hardly her home turf — a week after Election Day.
The next day Vice President-elect Mike Pence started kicking lobbyists out of the transition operation.