Elizabeth Warren Takes a Different Strategy to Court the Black Vote

“Race matters,” Senator Elizabeth Warren told me in an interview last Wednesday, “and we need to face it.” Two days earlier, Warren became the latest Democratic presidential hopeful to make the trek to North Philadelphia with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, to meet with union members. After Warren’s speech, she was pressed about the growing wall of student debt—and it drew out her higher-education pitch. Warren’s early 2020 platform has reflected a need to remedy that difference—and higher education is not the only arena where her policy approach addresses America’s legacy of discrimination.