On a Thursday night last month, about 150 party-goers piled into the capacious Chinatown loft of filmmakers Julie Pacino (daughter of Al) and Jennifer DeLia. Chloë Sevigny was there, as was the punk-rock power couple of Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill/Le Tigre) and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz (Beastie Boys), Lava Records C.E.O. Jason Flom, and the trip-hop pioneer DJ Spooky. Sound engineer Dana Wachs and musician-actress Tennessee Thomas worked the turntables. The food, including charred broccoli with roasted eggplant and a meatless “Superiority Burger,” tasty enough to make your red-blooded, red-state uncle go veg, was being served up by 90s-era hardcore-drummer-turned-Del Posto-pastry-chef Brooks Headley.

On another night, the scene could have unfolded at any number of store or gallery openings in downtown Manhattan or across the river in Brooklyn. But the guests had assembled not to toast a new sneaker line or video installation. They were there to demonstrate a potential base of support for the as yet inchoate presidential prospects of Elizabeth Warren, the first-term Massachusetts senator whose every-woman rhetorical style and anti-Wall Street crusading has inspired a movement to draft her as the people’s candidate of 2016.

“Can you imagine that woman with mega-ton balls squaring off in any presidential debate?” said Laura Dawn, succinctly summing up the hopes of many in attendance. A Brooklyn-based political organizer, Dawn helped put together the evening's kickoff soiree for Artists for Warren, an offshoot of MoveOn.org’s million-dollar Run Warren Run campaign, which took flight in early December with plans for TV ads, petitions, and message-driven house parties around the country. The evening’s hosts included socialite-cum-anti-war-activist Michelle Manning Barish and Avengers co-star Mark Ruffalo, the indie-film staple turned box-office smashing Hulk.

“She can be a force to be reckoned with in the White House,” said Ilya Sheyman, MoveOn.org’s executive director, looking the part of a campaign wonk under white Christmas lights coiled around pipes hanging from the loft’s antique molded ceiling. Artists, he said, are “the heart and soul of how we make change in this country.”

That Warren has repeatedly dumped cold water on the prospect of a presidential run—most recently giving Fortune a definitive “no” in a January 13 interview that the magazine called the “final word” on the matter—has perhaps only made her more alluring to a set that understands the cool cultural capital of reluctance. But the Warren 2016 groundswell also has gained momentum in recent months thanks to the formation of a Ready for Warren super PAC and MoveOn.org’s Run Warren Run effort. Now, whether Warren’s presidential ambitions exist or not, they are getting a celebrity sheen. Inspired by the erstwhile consumer advocate’s fiercely populist agenda and armed with an earnest belief in the role of artists as instigators for social change, cultural tastemakers are lending their talents, their connections, or even just their names in hopes of making enough noise to convince Warren that she should take on Hillary Clinton, nominee presumptive, in the Democratic primary.

“If she primaries and doesn’t win the primary, she will at least push the conversation more toward the progressive values that we all share,” says Ruffalo in a selfie-style iPhone video (shared exclusively with Vanity Fair) that was meant to be played at the Artists for Warren bash but didn’t make the cut due to a technical snafu. (Ruffalo, though a host on the invite, was filming in London and therefore couldn’t attend.) In the video, the stubbly-jawed actor extols Warren’s progressive positions on the banking system, income inequality, racial inequality, family values, climate change, renewable energy, and other divisive political motifs before a call to arms: “As my brother and sister artists, I’m asking that you join me in getting on board with asking Elizabeth Warren to run.” (Warren’s communications office did not respond to repeated queries about whether the senator is aware of Artists for Warren and the other groups, like the Silicon Valley-oriented Tech for Warren, trying to draft her.)

Despite her reluctance and arguably long-shot odds—not to mention Hillary’s miles-long lead in national polls—the virtues of a Warren bid have been picking up steam in the national media. Just last week, The New York Times mapped the budding glee in the G.O.P. at the prospects of Clinton facing a serious challenge from Warren. (Mike Huckabee: “Please give us Elizabeth Warren. Please, God, let us have Elizabeth Warren.")“She’d seize the party and the national agenda,” David Frum argued in a January 13 piece on The Atlantic’s Web site. “Rank-and-file Democrats seethe with concern about stagnant wages, income inequality, and the malefactions of great wealth. . . . If a politician expresses ideas that are shared by literally tens of millions of people—and that are being expressed by no other first-tier political figure—she owes it to her supporters to take their cause to the open hearing and fair trial of the nation.” Writing in The Wall Street Journal on January 25, Douglas Schoen cited polling (of his own) in the key battlegrounds of Iowa and New Hampshire. “Ms. Warren is already considerably more competitive than national polls suggest. . . . Mrs. Clinton’s favorables don’t appear to make her invulnerable to a populist challenge from the left, as a Warren campaign would almost certainly be,” wrote Schoen, adding that there is “a significant opening with Democratic primary voters who are extremely liberal in ideology and populist in orientation.”