Amid all the chatter about whether the old white dudes of 2020—Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Wafflin’ Joe Biden—are too long in the tooth to be running for president, it’s been remarkable, and revealing, how rarely you hear that question asked about Elizabeth Warren. Age doesn’t really factor into assessments of the Massachusetts senator, who turns 70 in June (though gender does—read on). You can’t chalk this up to her newly revealed Game of Thrones fandom, nor to the more pertinent fact that she has so much antic energy that you could easily imagine this woman crossing the finish line at the Boston Marathon and then, without being winded in the least, rolling out a brilliantly devious new plan for defanging the plutocrats of Silicon Valley.

More than anything, it’s the bracingly different kind of campaign she’s running that makes Warren seem like 69 going on 29. Though she’s been hard-pressed to get any credit for it, in the very early going Warren is conducting the most cutting-edge effort of any 2020 contender—the closest thing to what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, if she weren’t literally 29, might be offering herself.

Warren has given the finger to big donors—so much so that her finance director resigned in frustration late last month. She’s banking on small donors and a big ground game. And she’s broadcasting her message not in scripted bits, but in her own feisty voice—the one that called so resonantly last week for impeachment proceedings against Trump, while Bernie Sanders avoided the question, Pete Buttigieg punted, and Kamala Harris won the gold medal for mealy-mouthedness (“I think that there is definitely a conversation to be had on that subject, but first I want to hear from Bob Mueller”) before reversing course on Monday.

But nothing is edgier than Warren’s stubborn insistence on grounding her effort on—heaven help her!—big, bold, fully cooked policy proposals. At times, she’s seemed to roll them out with the same numbing frequency that Trump tweets “Witch Hunt.” And for the first few months of her campaign, the senator’s weighty and worthy ideas about financial and democratic reform fell like trees in the proverbial forest, largely unheard. Stunningly enough, the senator whom the left had begged to run in 2016 was polling in single digits for 2020.

If there’s any justice—which is, of course, always debatable—that’s about to change. Riding the plaudits she won for her impeachment stance, Warren caught fire on Monday with a canny proposal for “universal free college” and student-loan debt relief. Younger liberals, in particular, cheered the plan, which would make public college tuition-free, boost low-income kids’ prospects of matriculating, and cancel up to $50,000 in student debt for households that make less than $100,000. (Smaller benefits would go to those making up to $250,000.) Just as helpfully, in terms of her political fortunes, the idea also revived right-wing pundits’ interest in railing at Warren. “This pander will not only be incredibly costly,” Philip Klein fumed at The Washington Examiner, “but it will be a slap in the face to those who have already struggled to pay off their student loans without government assistance.”