Warren would like this all to end with her and her husband and the dog she’s slowly making famous by attaching a body camera to his leash all moving into the White House. But even if they don’t, she has a vision for what she wants her campaign to do in changing the rules for corporations and lobbyists, and in changing how her party works—beginning with how it picks a nominee.

Some campaigns decided that they weren’t quite ready to announce; others decided that there were specific advantages to waiting. Between them, there was a lot of snickering at Warren’s timing, announcing her exploratory committee early in the morning on New Year’s Eve. Most people were on vacation or sleeping in, they said. What a ridiculous time to announce, they said.

But now that the dam of Democrats is about to burst open, the result of Warren’s decision is that she had two weeks largely to herself to help define what’s ahead for all of them.

“If Democrats are going to win and make real change, we’ve got to build a movement, and that happens at the grass roots. It doesn’t happen from super PACs or self-funding billionaires or corporate money. It happens because we built it one person, one $10 contribution at a time all across this country,” she said.

Read: There’s a reason many voters have negative views of Warren—but the press won’t tell you why

Of course, that’s a pitch that describes exactly the campaign she wants to run, and that cuts at the campaigns some of her strongest competitors may try to mount.

Until Kirsten Gillibrand walked out onto Stephen Colbert’s set on Tuesday and then flew out to Iowa for the weekend, the only competition for attention among the expected heavyweights was Kamala Harris, who was doing a mostly biography-focused tour to promote the book she obviously wrote as a placeholder for launching her campaign. (Julián Castro announced last weekend and was here in New Hampshire on Wednesday, and John Delaney was campaigning here on Saturday after flying in from Iowa, but so far neither has generated nearly as much steam.)

For Warren, that was two weeks dominating media coverage, two weeks getting crowds of hundreds who probably would have showed up for whoever the first heavyweight to go to Iowa was.

That gave her the first crack at questions that dominated early speculation and coverage of the 2020 Democratic primary race: When was it going to get started already? What were people going to do about taking super-PAC money? What happens when Donald Trump tweets his way in? What happens when people bring up Hillary Clinton? How are people going to handle women running this time around? How open are campaigns going to be to reporters chasing them down for comment on everything?

Read: Elizabeth Warren illuminates the left’s foreign-policy divide

While the rest of her opponents have been huddling, locking down the final logistics around their launches, Warren has been laying down markers. She was even the first 2020 candidate to be portrayed on Saturday Night Live, played by Kate McKinnon this weekend.