For those of you who haven’t been keeping track, there are (just) thirteen months until the Iowa caucuses. By releasing a campaign video on New Year’s Eve and planning a trip to the Hawkeye State this weekend, Elizabeth Warren, the sixty-nine-year-old Democratic senator from Massachusetts, has effectively fired the starting gun in the 2020 Democratic primary, and indicated that she’s ready to go the full distance. In prediction markets, which are already accepting bets on the final outcome, Warren is in the second tier of candidates, behind the early favorites Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris. Her record suggests that she will be a formidable presence in the contest. Certainly, she will be a forceful one.

The rap on Warren is that she missed her best chance, in 2016, allowing Bernie Sanders to seize the mantle of populist tribune, and blundered last fall by rekindling the controversy over her ancestry. These are backward-looking critiques, the force of which is yet to be determined. What we know for sure is that, with at least a dozen Democrats thinking seriously about entering the primary, it will take someone resolute, resilient, and well organized to prevail. The successful candidate will need a message that distinguishes her or his campaign from the pack and resonates with Democratic voters. Since the prize is a head-to-head contest with Donald Trump, the winner will have to be someone who doesn’t shy away from confrontation.

On all of these grounds, an argument can be made for Warren, who has been in the Senate since 2012. Ever since Trump launched his 2016 Presidential bid, she has been mocking him. “Let’s be honest—Donald Trump is a loser,” she wrote in March, 2016. “Count all his failed businesses. See how he kept his father’s empire afloat by cheating people with scams like Trump University and by using strategic corporate bankruptcy (excuse me, bankruptcies) to skip out on debt.” At other points, Warren called Trump a “small, insecure money-grubber,” a “loud, nasty, thin-skinned fraud,” and “a large orange elephant.”

Trump isn’t the only powerful man Warren has taken to task. At a 2016 hearing of the Banking Committee, on which she sits, she told the chief executive of the scandal-plagued Wells Fargo that he should resign immediately and “give back the money you took while the scam was going on.” Before the February, 2017, confirmation vote for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Republicans used an obscure Senate rule to silence Warren as she tried to read a 1986 letter from Coretta Scott King, in which the civil-rights leader opposed Sessions’s nomination to a federal judgeship. “She was warned,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, said subsequently. “She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

She did the same thing during the early stages of the Obama Administration, when she was still a law professor. In chairing a congressional-oversight panel that was established to oversee the federal bailout of big banks, she pressed Timothy Geithner, then the Treasury Secretary, to provide more details about how the taxpayers’ money was being used, and she also pushed for the establishment of a new agency to protect the public from the predatory behavior of banks and other financial institutions. Thanks largely to her efforts, Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-reform act. The biggest testimony to the success of the new watchdog is that, for the past two years, the Trump Administration, at the behest of the financial industry, has been busy undermining it.

The controversy over Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry has obscured the fact she has an uplifting personal story to tell. Born into a middle-class family in Oklahoma City—her mother was a homemaker and her father was a salesman—she became a schoolteacher, enrolled in Rutgers Law School after her first child was born, and became one of the country’s leading experts on bankruptcy law. Eventually, Harvard Law School hired her, and the Boston Globe recently confirmed that her claims to Native American ancestry played no role in the hiring. “She was not on the radar screen at all in terms of a racial minority hire,” Randall Kennedy, a law professor who was in charge of recruiting minority candidates to Harvard Law School, told the paper. “It was just not an issue. I can’t remember anybody ever mentioning her in this context.”

Warren frequently refers to her modest background. “In our country, if you work hard and play by the rules you ought to be able to take care of yourself and the people you love,” she says in her video message. “Growing up in Oklahoma, that promise came true for me and my family.” The mention of ordinary Americans who play by the rules harked back to Bill Clinton in 1992 and Barack Obama in 2008. Where Warren parts ways from the last two Democratic Presidents is in her diagnosis of what has ailed middle-class Americans. Although Clinton and Obama criticized powerful special interests and their political allies, they also emphasized the challenges presented by technological progress, globalization, and an educational system that had failed to prepare Americans to compete in a modern economy. Warren’s emphasis is different.

“I’ve spent my career getting to the bottom of why America’s promise works for some families but others who work just as hard slip through the cracks into disaster, and what I’ve found is terrifying,” she says in the video. “These aren’t cracks that families are falling into: they are traps. America’s middle class is under attack. How did we get here? Billionaires and big corporations decided they wanted more of the pie, and they enlisted politicians to cut them a fatter slice. They crippled unions so no one could stop them. They dismantled the financial rules meant to keep us safe after the Great Depression, and they cut their own taxes so they paid less than their secretaries and janitors.” Warren adds, “Our government is supposed to work for all of us, but instead it has become a tool for the wealthy and well-connected.”

This is the sort of critique that enabled Sanders to carry twenty-two states in the 2016 primary. But Warren isn’t merely talking the talk. In the past few years, she has put together a policy agenda designed to level the economic playing field in favor of workers, consumers, and small businesses. To be sure, she supports some things that virtually all Democrats now favor, such as enacting a national minimum wage of fifteen dollars, further expanding access to health care, and building more public housing. But she also has some more distinctive ideas, such as breaking up monopolies and promoting competition, making it easier for unions to organize, and forcing any public company with revenues of more than a billion dollars to set aside forty per cent of the seats on its board of directors for workers’ representatives. The latter proposal was contained in Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act, which she unveiled last summer. This draft legislation would also place limits on stock-based compensation for senior executives and force companies to get the approval of three-quarters of their shareholders for any political activities they are involved in.