Elizabeth Warren Announces Run for President: 'This Dark Path Doesn't Have to Be Our Future'
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has confirmed that she plans to run for president in 2020.
In a new video, the Massachusetts Democrat, 69, says she is launching an exploratory committee, a process that allows Warren to publicly raise money and hire campaign staffers.
“If you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to be able to take care of yourself and the people you love. That’s a fundamental promise of America,” Warren begins in the video.
“I’ve spent most of my career getting to the bottom of why America’s promise works for some families, but others who work just as hard slip through the cracks into disaster,” she continues, before emphasizing that “America’s middle class is under attack.”
“But this dark path doesn’t have to be our future,” Warren added. “We can make our democracy work for all of us. We can make our economy work for all of us.”
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She then asserts that “billionaires and big corporations” are responsible because they “decided they wanted more of the pie, and they enlisted politicians to cut them a fatter slice.”
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As Democrats work to stop President Donald Trump from winning a second term, the upcoming presidential race is likely to be a crowded one on the left. Two other well-known figures, former Vice President Joe Biden, 76, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 77, are expected to announce their plans this winter, the New York Times reported.
Some three dozen Democratic senators, governors, mayors and business leaders — most of whom have never run for the White House — are also considering throwing their hats in the ring, according to the Times.
The paper also reports that the former Harvard bankruptcy-law professor plans to start building momentum in early voting states, such as Iowa, in the coming weeks.
Her campaign is beginning just about six years after she first won public office, when she became the first woman to ever be elected to the Senate from Massachusetts.
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Warren’s campaign will not be without controversy, however. She’s been embattled in a debate with the 45th commander-in-chief over her Native American heritage. After Trump started referring to her as “Pocahontas,” she took a DNA test in October. The results “strongly support” that she has indigenous blood, according to The Boston Globe, which first obtained the results.
Afterward, prominent members of the Cherokee Nation — a tribe to which she’s claimed ancestry — criticized the move. In a statement posted to Twitter, Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. stated that a DNA test is “useless to determine tribal citizenship. Current DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America.”
Hoskin further clarified: “Sovereign tribal nations set their own requirements for citizenship, and while DNA tests can be used to determine lineage, such as paternity to an individual, it is not evidence for tribal affiliation. Using a DNA test to claim any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well-documented and whose heritage is proven.”
A Quinnipiac poll from mid-December found that Warren was favored by three out of five Democrats and was viewed unfavorably by some 12 percent, the Times reported. The only potential candidates with better numbers were Biden and Sanders, but unlike them, Warren has never before sought the presidency.
