On September 20, 2016, John Stumpf, the C.E.O. of Wells Fargo, appeared before the Senate Banking Committee to defend his company’s role in one of the biggest financial scandals in recent memory. Wells Fargo employees, who were under pressure from senior management to meet overly aggressive sales targets, had opened more than two million bank and credit-card accounts for customers who had never asked for them.

The tone of the questioning was initially courteous. Then Elizabeth Warren spoke. Peering over her glasses, she launched into a series of questions so scathing that the Senate chamber fell silent. “Since this massive, years-long scam came to light, you have said repeatedly, ‘I am accountable,’ ” Warren said to Stumpf. “But what have you actually done to hold yourself accountable? Have you resigned as C.E.O. or chairman of Wells Fargo? . . . Have you returned one nickel of the millions of dollars that you were paid while this scam was going on?”

Warren pressed Stumpf on whether he had fired any senior executives over the revelations (he hadn’t); paraphrased his comments, on an earnings call, about how lucrative the sales-quota strategy had been; and asked him to tell the audience how much money he had made personally as the company’s share price shot up during the years of the fraud. When Stumpf declined to answer, Warren supplied the number: two hundred million dollars.

“A cashier who steals a handful of twenties is held accountable, but Wall Street executives almost never hold themselves accountable,” Warren said. “Not now, and not in 2008, when they crushed the worldwide economy. The only way that Wall Street will change is if executives face jail time when they preside over massive frauds.” She declared that Stumpf should be criminally investigated, accusing him of “gutless leadership.”

A video of the exchange, posted on YouTube, became a sensation. One news site called it an “epic takedown”; another described Warren “verbally destroying” Stumpf. In May, when I met Warren on the campaign trail, she told me that she was “furious” as she went into the hearing. “He was building a business model for a huge financial institution that was built on knowingly cheating people,” she said. “I figured that he deserved every punch he got.”

The episode was a pointed demonstration of Warren’s ability to tap into public anger about economic unfairness. Warren is one of the country’s foremost critics of Wall Street firms and big banks, which make much of their profit, in her view, by abusing consumers and taxpayers. It’s a perspective that has grown out of Warren’s work as an academic and has shaped her ideas as a politician, propelling her from Harvard Law School, where she was a professor specializing in bankruptcy law, to the Senate, where she has represented Massachusetts since 2013.

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On many economic issues, Warren has been remarkably prescient. She has spent decades warning Americans about the pernicious effects of income inequality, predatory corporations, and consumer debt, and about the failures of our financial system—issues that are at the heart of the 2020 Presidential campaign. Now, as one of twenty-three candidates seeking to become the Democratic nominee for President, Warren is betting that the energy behind her ideas can appeal to enough swing-state voters to get her into office. At the same time, she is trying to expand her brand beyond that of a Wall Street critic. She is attempting to position herself as a pragmatic advocate for the middle class, someone who can bring systemic reforms to education, health care, and democracy itself. But, unlike the Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Warren doesn’t describe herself as a “democratic socialist,” and says that she isn’t trying to do away with capitalism. “I believe in markets,” she says, over and over. She says that she simply wants to make them work better for more people.

Warren, who is sixty-nine, is thin and sprightly, with bright-blue eyes and flushed cheeks. On campaign trips, she often makes three or more appearances each day, sometimes in different states. She rarely shows signs of fatigue. In March, a videographer for the gossip Web site TMZ captured Warren and three campaign staffers sprinting into Penn Station, in New York, to catch an Amtrak train. “You’re the fastest Presidential nominee I’ve ever seen!” the camera operator said, sounding breathless, as Warren streaked past wearing a small backpack, her purple jacket flapping.

I met Warren two days later, in Washington, D.C., at her apartment, a few blocks from the National Mall. The space has the spare feel of a hotel suite, with a beige couch and spotless surfaces. Warren’s husband, Bruce Mann, a law professor at Harvard, was working at the kitchen table, papers spread around him. Warren looked relaxed, dressed in sneakers, yoga pants, and a zip-up sweater. While we waited for water to boil for tea, she showed me a video on her phone of Bailey, the couple’s golden retriever, bounding through deep snow during a campaign trip to New Hampshire. Bailey, who is named for the community banker played by Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” features prominently on Warren’s campaign stops and in her social-media feeds, where his escapades help offset the more intimidating aspects of her persona.

In person, Warren is animated and folksy. As we moved to the living room, she spotted, on her coffee table, an Op-Ed in the Times titled “The Fleecing of Millennials,” about the dim financial prospects of young Americans. “This was going to be my next project, if I hadn’t run for office,” Warren said. “I was going to write a book about generational theft.” Warren’s campaign staff is emphasizing face-to-face encounters with voters. At coffee shops, she has been meeting with people who have donated sums as small as five dollars. At large events, she has been staying as long as necessary to take pictures with anyone who wants one. (According to the campaign, she has posed for more than thirty thousand photographs; the media-intelligence firm Zignal Labs recently described her as the candidate “most associated with the term ‘selfies.’ ”) “Is she knock-it-out-of-the-park every single time? No. But she has some gifts,” one of Warren’s former campaign staffers told me. “She can make someone feel like she has heard them, and has been responsive to their questions, in a way that no other politician I’ve heard can do.”

After being portrayed as a Presidential front-runner for much of 2018, Warren launched her campaign at an especially weak moment. Republicans had created a media tempest over revelations that Warren had claimed to have Cherokee ancestry. She’d also made a principled but politically risky decision not to hold high-dollar fund-raisers or to seek contributions from wealthy donors during the primaries. The strategy had prompted her finance director to leave the campaign, after voicing concerns that she might run out of money.

Since then, Warren’s poll numbers have steadily climbed; in early June, two polls, one national and one in Nevada, had her in second, behind Joe Biden but ahead of Sanders, for the first time. With the help of advisers working from her headquarters, in Boston, Warren has been releasing a torrent of detailed policy proposals. She has issued a plan to dramatically reduce student debt and to offer free tuition at public colleges; a plan to unwind large agriculture conglomerates in order to make the market more equitable for family farms; a plan to require large corporations to pay more in federal taxes; a plan to dismantle the behemoth technology companies and regulate them like utilities; and new legislation to address opioid addiction, modelled on a bill passed by Congress in 1990 to combat the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic. She has announced an “Economic Patriotism” plan, intended to create opportunities for American workers, and has issued proposals targeted at Donald Trump, including one that would make it permissible to indict a sitting President.