The Massachusetts Senator says that she isn’t running for President—but that doesn’t mean that she won’t. Here’s one scenario under which it might take place. Photograph by Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg via Getty

It is early afternoon on Tuesday, February 2, 2016, and this piece of news analysis has just hit the wires:

Last night, in the Iowa caucus, which began the 2016 Democratic primaries, Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, came close to defeating Hillary Clinton, the party’s front-runner. Ultimately, Clinton prevailed. But O’Malley, who spent a lot of time in Iowa and ran a vigorous campaign seeking to tie his opponent to Wall Street, came within three percentage points of victory. What happens now? Appearing on NBC’s “Today” show from a diner in New Hampshire, where he had flown in the pre-dawn hours, O’Malley said that he was already preparing for the Granite State primary, which takes place on February 9th, a week from today. “This race is wide open,” O’Malley said. “The Democratic Party wants a progressive alternative. America wants a progressive alternative.” Most analysts still think that Clinton will win in New Hampshire, where she is well ahead in the opinion polls, and cement the nomination with primary victories in the Carolinas and in Michigan. But there is another possibility looming. After Clinton’s struggles in Iowa, a number of progressive groups are reviving their calls for Senator Elizabeth Warren to enter the contest. Ready for Warren, a group that has been urging a Warren candidacy since 2014, posted an appeal to the senator on its Web site that read simply, “THIS IS THE TIME.” Repeated calls to Warren’s office weren’t answered, but some observers are speculating that she might be about to turn the 2016 race on its head, possibly by entering next week’s primary in New Hampshire as a write-in candidate. “This could be a version of 1968,” Norman Ornstein, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said. “You’d have Elizabeth Warren, as a late entrant, playing the role of Robert Kennedy.”

Is this scenario (or something resembling it) a fanciful one? Sure. Is it demented? After what we’ve seen in Washington this past week, not quite.

Right now, the Democratic Party has three leaders: President Obama, who is term-limited; Clinton, the establishment successor-in-waiting; and Warren, whose role is difficult to define, but also increasingly difficult to ignore. Of the three, there’s no doubt who is conveying the most consistent message and generating the most enthusiasm among liberal activists: it’s Warren, with her populist crusade against Wall Street and moneyed interests.

When internal documents emerged that suggested that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York might have gone easy in regulating Wall Street banks, it was Warren who grilled Bill Dudley, the former Goldman Sachs economist who presides over the New York Fed. When the Obama Administration, seeking a new Under Secretary for Domestic Finance, proposed Antonio Weiss, an investment banker at Lazard Frères who has helped companies to arrange deals to move some of their operations overseas for tax purposes, it was Warren who called foul. And when the White House recently signed on to an omnibus spending bill that included a clause, written by a Citigroup lobbyist, that rolled back some of the regulation contained in the Dodd–Frank financial-reform act, it was Warren who rallied the opposition.

Strictly speaking, her efforts were unsuccessful: the spending bill passed. But Warren won the political argument—even some Republicans are reluctant to publicly align themselves with bank lobbyists—and raised her national profile. For days, she was all over the mainstream media, and social media, too. The speech she delivered on the floor of the Senate on Friday evening has been viewed more than a quarter of a million times on YouTube. Also on Friday, more than three hundred people who worked on the Obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012 signed a public letter urging Warren to enter the Presidential race. “Rising income inequality is the challenge of our times, and we want someone who will stand up for working families and take on the Wall Street banks and special interests that took down our economy,” the letter said.