It may, however, depend on whether Americans’ incomes and living standards are consistently rising.

In the months to come, I hope that every other 2020 candidate offers answers to the questions that Warren has taken on: How can corporate America again help create a prosperous, growing middle class, as it did from the 1940s through the 1970s? How can the power of giant corporations — over consumers, workers and smaller businesses — be constrained? How can the radical levels of wealth inequality be reversed? How can the yawning opportunity gaps for children of different backgrounds be reduced? How can the next president make changes that will endure, rather than be undone by a future president, as both Obama’s and Clinton’s top-end tax increases were?

It is not surprising that Warren has jumped out to an early lead in the ideas primary. The main theme in her life, both professional and personal, has been economic opportunity. Her father was a carpet salesman at Montgomery Ward in Oklahoma City in the 1960s, until he had a heart attack. He had to switch to lower-paying work as a janitor, and her mother got a minimum-wage job, answering phones at Sears.

Warren’s three older brothers all went into the military. “That was their chance to make it into the middle class,” she told me. Warren went to college and became a teacher, until the school chose not to renew her contract rather than give her maternity leave. She then went to a public law school — for $450 per semester — and became a bankruptcy expert, early on at the University of Houston and ultimately at Harvard.

“The way I see it is, I have lived opportunity,” she said. “I’ve lived the kind of opportunity that comes from a government that invests a little in its kids, a government that tries to keep the playing field a little bit level for folks like my family.”

Her theory of political change has been shaped by two experiences — one failure and one success. As a professor in the 1990s, she served on a federal bankruptcy commission and fought against legal changes that favored banks over borrowers. The fight went on for a decade, and Warren’s side lost. The defeat left her believing that a technocratic legislative debate — “the inside game,” as she calls it — almost always favors industry lobbyists.

The success came during the Obama administration, when she pushed for an agency to protect consumers against banks’ misbehavior. The idea was new. It was also simple enough for voters to understand. She hawked it on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.” This time, Warren’s side won. Trump has since constrained the agency, but it still exists and is still doing good .

Those experiences help explain why Warren thinks that bigger changes are sometimes more feasible than modest ones. Bigger changes — tangible, new ideas — can overcome voter cynicism. “A lot of people don’t believe you can actually make any change on economics,” Warren says. I would add another, even larger, example to the pattern: Obamacare. Trump has undone many of Obama’s more modest changes, on taxes, climate and other areas. But Obama’s grandest accomplishment endures. For all its flaws, it proved too popular to kill.