Sen. Elizabeth Warren greets business leaders during a New England Council luncheon in Boston on March 27. | AP Photo Warren polishes national profile ahead of 2020

When Donald Trump suggested to a National Rifle Association crowd in Atlanta on Friday that he might face a challenge from Elizabeth Warren in three years, he voiced a thought shared by political pros in both parties.

Between her coast-to-coast book tour, a series of high-profile speeches and greater behind-the-scenes involvement in setting the party’s direction in Washington, the Massachusetts progressive the president derides as “Pocahontas” is providing plenty of evidence that she may be poised to go national after her Senate reelection campaign in 2018.


Warren — a fundraising juggernaut, an antagonist of big banks and a frequent GOP sparring partner — is primarily focused on crafting anti-Trump tactics on Capitol Hill, supporting her more electorally endangered colleagues and keeping an eye on her own backyard just in case a serious challenger emerges. But she’s also doing everything she needs to do to prepare for a presidential run just in case, cutting a noticeably high public profile and harnessing her political celebrity to shape the party’s future. It’s a future in which many expect she may be running for president, or at least to better position herself to shape the party’s priorities in the event she doesn’t run.

“She has a very legitimate claim to one of the fundamental arguments of our time, which is how you reverse the downward pressure on the middle class, and different people have different answers to that, but she was on this issue a long time ago, so she really rose to prominence on this issue,” said David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s top political adviser in 2008 and an architect of his rise to the presidency. “So given the saliency of it, it’s not surprising that she should be in the forefront on these discussions, and in this fight. The absence of a strong economic message was an obvious defect in 2016, so I’m sure she will have a role.”

“I look at the U.S. Senate as a parlor of prospective presidential candidates, and obviously her name is among the most prominent among them,” added Axelrod, who said he had coffee with Warren a few months back but hasn’t talked to her since.

As she hawks “This Fight Is Our Fight” — her 11th book and a New York Times best-seller — Warren has accepted invitations to speak to prominent left-leaning constituency groups like the NAACP and EMILY’s List, as well as to a conference later this month hosted by the liberal Center for American Progress think tank that’s a showcase for potential presidential hopefuls.

Along with that stature, her torrid fundraising has placed her in the top tier of national Democratic figures of influence. Using both in-person appeals and a growing online backing, she brought in more money than any other senator in the first quarter of 2017 — much of it raised online after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell silenced her on the Senate floor as she opposed the nomination of Jeff Sessions to be attorney general.

She subsequently used her leadership PAC to dole out $10,000 checks to a wide range of vulnerable Senate colleagues in April, according to previously unreported federal filings, solidifying her status as a top fundraising “get” for her colleagues. Before she took the stage at the NAACP’s annual dinner late last month, for example, she swung by a quick closed-door $25-per-ticket fundraiser for Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow. The event was expected to bring in just a few hundred local Democrats — 915 showed up instead.

That fundraising isn’t set to stop anytime soon: She’s due back in California for another big-money swing in June, multiple people familiar with the plans told Politico. There, she’ll appear with a handful of the party’s most prominent political financiers, including Esprit founder and close Clinton friend Susie Tompkins Buell and Guy Saperstein, the attorney and Oakland Athletics part-owner who offered her $1 million to run for president in 2016.

In Washington, Warren is playing an increasingly significant role in helping shape the Trump resistance after initially angering grass-roots supporters by voting to allow Ben Carson’s nomination as housing secretary to proceed in January, before apologizing. She’s been surfacing more on national television and appearing regularly at quietly organized, previously unreported private meetings with progressive group leaders that Oregon’s Jeff Merkley has started hosting in his Senate office to get everyone on the same page.

Fellow elected leaders and strategists say Warren advocates that the party do a better job of picking its fights against the new president, while raising the alarm about under-the-radar White House and GOP moves she feels aren’t getting enough attention. That tactic mirrors the one advocated by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former Barack Obama White House chief of staff and a prominent party strategist with whom she recently sat down — at his request — while on her book tour.

“I don’t get any sense that we’re in the Battle Plan Stage One of a presidentialrun,” said Neera Tanden, the CAP president and a Hillary Clinton ally who said she speaks with Warren regularly. “I think she really is trying to help create some centrifugal forces within the party to take on Trump and deal with the problems in front of us.”

But, Tanden added, “We’re in a situation where, without the White House, Democrats and progressives are looking for leaders who will take Trump on. [Warren] was that person before the election. She is that person now.”

As a result of that new role, her extensive fundraising network, and her growing online following, few serious conversations about Democrats’ 2020 primary get far before they settle on Warren’s name.

The lessons of the 2016 election are seared into the minds of those surrounding Warren, after she opted not to run and much of the early-voting state manpower and political infrastructure dedicated to drafting her turned into the foundation for Bernie Sanders’ organization.

“I adore her; I thought she was the candidate we should have run in 2016,” said Saperstein, explaining that in 2020 Warren is now his second choice for the presidency, behind former “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart. “The problem we had in 2016 is there was so much effort to clear the field for Hillary, and it was a very unhealthy thing.”

Declining to endorse either Sanders or Clinton until after the primary, Warren angered some die-hard supporters of the Vermont senator, but — in the minds of her political allies — she managed to shape some of the primary debate around her, tugging the economic conversation to the left.

Even against the backdrop of a prospective 2020 field of over two dozen Democrats, Warren’s political following is matched only by those of Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden, potentially allowing her to direct the 2020 contest in a similar way.

But that, and a recent book tour that has taken her from New York to Boston to Chicago to Los Angeles, has spurred Massachusetts Republicans to seize on Warren’s national moves, eyeing her as potentially vulnerable in 2018 after a January MassINC/WBUR poll showed that 46 percent of the state’s voters said someone else should have a chance at the Senate.

“She’s pretty much been nationally focused exclusively since she got elected, running around the country raising money, talking in extremely hyperpartisan doublespeak and really largely ignoring our home state,” said Kirsten Hughes, the Massachusetts GOP chair.

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No high-profile Republican has yet stepped up to the plate, but Warren isn’t taking chances. She’s held town hall meetings in her home state and has three Massachusetts commencement speeches scheduled for this spring, working with a campaign team that includes media consultant Mandy Grunwald, strategist Marla Romash, and adviser Kristen Orthman, an alum of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office, while her former chief of staff, Mindy Myers, runs the Senate Democrats’ campaign wing this cycle. The senator also frequently travels with her state director, Roger Lau, and relies on the work of her digital director, Lauren Miller.

Even if a serious Republican challenge to Warren’s reelection in 2018 never takes shape, national GOP leaders have identified that race as a prime opportunity to test lines of attack on her, starting with portraying her as an out-of-touch Harvard elitist whose political views are too far to the left. In recent years, she’s campaigned for a wide range of Democratic candidates in states the party needs, they note, but Senate hopefuls from Kentucky’s Alison Lundergan Grimes to Ohio’s Ted Strickland have fallen short.

Viewing her national book tour as a delicate endeavor at a time when Democrats continue to struggle to connect with middle-class voters, the GOP opposition research group America Rising is treating her much as it did Clinton in the run-up to 2016, monitoring her media appearances and badgering her at every turn in an attempt to tarnish her national image.

“We learned from our experience with Secretary Clinton that the earlier you start, the more chance you have for these narratives to sink in with the electorate,” said Colin Reed, the group’s executive director.

In a sign of how both sides are eager to leverage Warren for their own political advantage, though, her own party decided to use that GOP push as an alarm in itself.

“A shadowy conservative group called America Rising just announced new attacks on Senator Elizabeth Warren, saying they’re planning to do everything in their power to ‘make Warren’s life difficult,’” the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee emailed party members last month. “Now we’re counting on our best supporters to show we’ve got Senator Warren’s back.”

