Elizabeth Warren: who is the wannabe Democrat president?

One candidate emerged the clear winner in the first round of debates between US Democrats hoping to win their party’s nomination for the 2020 presidential race, according to many commentators.

As the BBC notes, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren “took centre stage” as ten contenders in the packed race went head-to-head in Florida on Wednesday. And the Harvard law professor proved she was “ready for the big show”, says Vox.

However, some observers pointed out that the 70-year-old progressive had an easy ride, avoiding high-profile rivals including Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, who will take part in a separate debate tonight.

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Nonetheless, with the Warren campaign gaining momentum, many believe she has a real chance of being the Democrats’ pick to challenge Donald Trump as he tries to win a second term as Republican president.

How did Warren get here?

Although Warren may look like a typical policy “wonk” and Harvard academic, her journey into politics is rooted in her personal experiences as “the young daughter who saw her parents fall from Oklahoma’s middle-class [and] a one-time single mother who struggled to make ends meet”, says BuzzFeed News reporter Ruby Cramer.

The Democrat hopeful was born Elizabeth Ann Herring in Oklahoma City in 1949, the daughter of a carpet salesman and a stay-at-home mother. While on the campaign trail to become a senator, Warren described her family as being “on the ragged edge of the middle class” and “hanging on at the edges by our fingernails”, The Boston Globe reports.

When she was 12, her father suffered a heart attack and had to take a lower-paid job, as a janitor. Her mother was forced to return to work, answering telephones in a Sears department store.

A gifted student, the future politician won a debate scholarship to George Washington University, but dropped out after two years to marry Jim Warren, who later worked for IBM. She resumed her studies in 1970 at the University of Houston, graduating with a degree in speech pathology and audiology.

Her marriage ended in divorce in 1978, and two years later she wed her current husband, Bruce Mann, although she chose to keep her first husband’s surname.

While raising her two children, she qualified as a lawyer at Rutgers University and went on to teach at prestigious law schools, including Rutgers, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard.

A specialist in financial law, Warren is “recognised as one of the nation’s top experts on bankruptcy and the financial pressures facing middle-class families”, according to her Harvard Law School profile. She first entered politics as an advisor on these issues, and was instrumental in the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, signed into being in 2010 by then-president Barack Obama.

A year later, Warren announced her intention to run for the Senate as the Democratic candidate for Massachusetts, and unseated the Republican incumbent with 53.7% of the vote to become the state’s first female senator. In 2018, she was re-elected for a second term with a landslide 60% of the vote.

What was that ‘Pocahontas’ business about?

US President Donald Trump has referred mockingly to Warren as “Pocahontas”, a racist epithet offensive to Native Americans, because of claims she exaggerated the extent of her Cherokee ancestry in order to advance her career. That allegation was found to be unfounded by a Boston Globe investigation that concluded last September.

Warren then published DNA test results that showed she had a pure Native American ancestor between six to ten generations ago, according to The Guardian. But she also apologised to the leadership of the Cherokee Nation, saying she understood that being Cherokee had nothing to do with DNA and everything to do with centuries of culture that she did not share.

So was Warren really the standout performer in the first debate?

Most commentators think so, although Buzzfeed News’s Cramer insists Warren did not “dominate” the televised debate - because she didn’t need to. For one “lengthy” period, in fact, “the Massachusetts senator didn’t say a word”, the reporter notes.

But when she did speak, Warren “showed the same command that, on the trail, can arrest a crowd into attentive silence or elicit cheers across the room”, says Cramer, who adds that politician’s words made her “stand apart” from the others.

For Politico’s Jeff Greenfield, Warren’s performance this week was derailed by an attack from no-hope candidate John Delaney, who criticised her opposition to private health insurance and warned that hospitals would close if the government became the only healthcare provider.

Greenfield claims that Warren’s insistence on sticking to her guns in her defence of state healthcare could be her undoing, with Delaney laying a mine for the Massachusetts senator that Republican opponents – particularly Trump – may detonate later in the race.

Meanwhile, the US president appears unimpressed by any of the candidates. Trump summed up his response to the TV debate in one word on Twitter: “BORING!”

Has she got a plan?

She certaintly thinks so. In fact, Warren’s campaign slogan is: “I’ve got a plan for that.” This slogan plays to her great strength with voters: she has a host of solid policy ideas and is widely percieved as someone who does her homework and knows what she’s talking about.

That may have helped Warren in the opening debate.

However, another factor in her favour was the random division of the candidates into two groups of ten for the forums. As it happened, all of Warren’s opponents on Wednesday are below her in the polls, with her key rivals, including Biden and Sanders, put into the debate on Thursday.

Will she be the next US president?

That, of course, is impossible to say. However, earlier this week NBC News reported that recent polls suggest Warren is the clear leader among left-leaning Democrat voters - and her strong performance in the debate will not have harmed her chances.

But even if she does secure her party’s nomination, it remains to be seen how a woman that the BBC calls a “liberal firebrand” will go down with mainstream America.