It’s hard to escape the feeling that Elizabeth Warren is underperforming. On Monday, the Massachusetts senator rolled out the sort of education plan that millennial dreams are made of: a $1.25 trillion proposal to forgive up to $50,000 in student debt for households earning less than $100,000, to eliminate undergraduate tuition at public colleges and universities, to expand federal grants, and to invest $50 billion in historically black colleges and universities. Like all such Elizabeth Warren plans, the proposal comes with a price tag paid for by the rich—specifically, an annual 2 percent tax on families with a combined $50 million or more in total wealth—and a nearly 2,500-word Medium post laying out all the details.

Warren has laid out similarly ambitious plans to tackle income inequality, create single-payer health care, and break up Big Tech. And yet, the Harvard professor, who became a viral star in 2012, is struggling to make her mark in the 2020 cycle. On the same day that she announced her college-debt plan, the University of New Hampshire came out with a poll showing Warren at only 5 percent in New Hampshire, which shares a media market with Boston. If Warren can’t beat Pete Buttigieg in the Granite State, critics wonder, does she have any hope at winning in Iowa or South Carolina?

It’s still early days, of course, and polls and circumstances change. But, so far, it appears Warren is settling into a middling groove. According to the FiveThirtyEight poll tracker, she has never quite broken out of the tight field of candidates in the second tier, like Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, and, occasionally, Kamala Harris. And in a race in which donations speak louder than words, Warren’s money game is treading water compared to her opponents. In the first quarter of 2019, Warren raised about $6 million—more than some advisers feared, but definitively lagging fellow economic populist Bernie Sanders, who took in about three times that amount.

It’s a somewhat disappointing performance for someone with arguably the most fully articulated policy platform in the 2020 race. Possibly she got off on the wrong foot by announcing her presidential exploratory committee too early, on New Year’s Eve, practically guaranteeing that a later formal announcement would get lost in the mix. She also stumbled in her first high-profile confrontation with Donald Trump, in late 2018, when she attempted to head off his accusation that she lied about her Native American heritage by getting a DNA test. The results suggested that she had a distant Native ancestor—hardly enough to forcefully rebut Trump—while also exposing her to criticism from Native groups, who argued that tribal ancestry is about more than just blood. Among the political commentariat, some feared Warren’s misstep might portend other political weaknesses.

More recently, Warren has taken moves to stand out from her peers, forswearing high-dollar fund-raising events and becoming the first major candidate to call for Trump to be impeached. (That first, controversial decision led her finance director to quit.) The question is whether these bold moves are paying off with voters. Though Warren has high name recognition, according to recent polling, she also has extremely high unfavorables, relative to other Democratic candidates. (In one February 2019 poll, Warren had the second-highest unfavorables after Michael Bloomberg, putting her net favorability almost 10 points behind Sanders.)