The Massachusetts senator has said she will run against President Trump in 2020. The two already have a history of trading barbs on a range of topics, including Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Native American ancestry.

The Massachusetts senator has said she will run against President Trump in 2020. The two already have a history of trading barbs on a range of topics, including Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Native American ancestry. Credit... Image by Elizabeth Frantz for The New York Times

Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat and a sharp critic of big banks and unregulated capitalism, entered the 2020 race for president on Monday, becoming the first major candidate in what is likely to be a long and crowded primary marked by ideological and generational divisions in a Democratic Party determined to beat President Trump.

Ms. Warren quickly made plans to campaign this weekend in Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses in February 2020. The senator, who has not traveled to Iowa recently, announced Tuesday that she would visit several of the state’s major cities: Des Moines, Council Bluffs, Storm Lake and Sioux City.

[Here are five ways Elizabeth Warren and other 2020 hopefuls will campaign when there’s no campaign yet.]

The competition for the Democratic nomination is poised to be the most wide open since perhaps 1992: The party has no single leader, no obvious front-runner for 2020, and no broadly unifying ideology as it moves away from a quarter-century of dominance by the Clintons and Barack Obama.

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After a midterm election in which many women, liberals, minorities and young Democrats won, the presidential primaries and caucuses next year are likely to be fought over not only who is the right policy match for the party, but also which mix of identities should be reflected in the next nominee. The range of candidates will also force Democratic voters to consider which electoral approach is best suited to defeat Mr. Trump, balancing questions of ideological purity with how to appeal to a wide range of demographic groups like white rural voters, suburban women, college students, and black and Latino Democrats in the South and the Sun Belt.

Ms. Warren, 69, is among the best-known Democrats seeking to take on Mr. Trump, whom she has denounced in the past as “a thin-skinned racist bully” and a “wannabe tyrant.” Mr. Trump, who has already announced his re-election campaign, frequently mocks her as “Pocahontas” because of her claims to Native American ancestry, a slur Native American groups have denounced as a racist epithet.

While Ms. Warren’s stinging attacks on Mr. Trump and Wall Street have helped make her a favorite of grass-roots liberals, she also faces challenges as a presidential candidate: controversy over a DNA test to prove her Native American heritage, skepticism from the party establishment and a lack of experience in a national race.

The editorial board of The Boston Globe, her hometown newspaper, recently urged her not to run for president, saying she had become “a divisive figure.” And some in her party believe she missed her best chance to run in 2016, when liberal activists urged her to challenge Hillary Clinton.

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Two potential top-tier candidates who have run before, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders, are eyeing 2020 and are expected to disclose their plans this winter. Yet both men carry political baggage and would be in their late 70s on Election Day 2020, and many Democrats say they want a fresh face as their next nominee.

[Here’s the latest on the Democratic field of candidates.]

On Monday, Ms. Warren called Mr. Sanders — a fellow Senate liberal who is also popular with grass-roots activists — as a courtesy and had a brief, matter-of-fact conversation, according to a Democrat briefed on the call.

Image The presidential race is expected to draw several women and nonwhite contenders like Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California. Credit... Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times

More than three dozen Democratic senators, governors, mayors and business leaders are also weighing bids — most of whom have not sought the White House before. The race is expected to draw several women and nonwhite contenders, making for the most diverse field in history. Several Senate colleagues of Ms. Warren’s are likely to enter the race soon: Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. A mix of liberal and more moderate politicians are also considering a run, including Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York City mayor, who has said he is prepared to spend well over $100 million of his own money on the race.

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Getting a jump on the competition, Ms. Warren plans to head not just to Iowa but other early voting states in the coming weeks. According to a person familiar with Ms. Warren’s thinking, the timing of her announcement had been decided weeks in advance.

[How early do presidential campaigns start? Earlier than you may think.]

In an email to supporters on Monday — 13 months before votes will be cast in Iowa — Ms. Warren said she was forming an exploratory committee, which allows her to raise money and fill staff positions before a formal start of her presidential bid.

On Monday afternoon outside her home in Cambridge, Mass., flanked by her husband, Bruce H. Mann, a professor at Harvard Law School, and their golden retriever, Bailey, Ms. Warren leaned into her stinging criticisms of wealthy financial interests as she ripped Mr. Trump and branded herself as a champion of the middle class.

“The problem we’ve got right now in Washington is that it works great for those who’ve got money to buy influence, and I’m fighting against that,” Ms. Warren said. “And you bet it’s going to make a lot of people unhappy. But at the end of the day, I don’t go to Washington to work for them.”

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In her remarks before a pack of cameras, Ms. Warren shrugged at a question about how she had handled the release of her DNA test, reiterating that she had “put it all out there” and people could see the information for themselves.

She also took a revealing warning shot at the emerging field of presidential hopefuls. “I don’t think we ought to be running campaigns that are funded by billionaires, whether it goes through super PACs or their own money that they’re spending,” she said. “Democrats are the party of the people.”

Among grass-roots activists eager to highlight their message of a rigged economic system, there was particular excitement that a video released by Ms. Warren on Monday focused on issues like income inequality and corporate greed. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee said that “Elizabeth Warren meets the moment,” and Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for the leftist group Justice Democrats, said Ms. Warren’s “message of multiracial populism is exactly the right way to take on Trump’s divide-and-conquer agenda.”

In an interview set to air on Fox News on Monday night, Mr. Trump addressed Ms. Warren’s entrance into the race.

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“She did very badly in proving that she was of Indian heritage,” Mr. Trump said, according to a partial transcript. “That didn’t work out too well. So, we’ll see how she does. I wish her well, I hope she does well, I’d love to run against her.”

A longtime bankruptcy law professor at Harvard who never held public office before 2013, Ms. Warren became the first woman elected to the Senate from Massachusetts after defeating a self-styled moderate Republican incumbent, Scott Brown, with a populist message based on advocacy for strict Wall Street regulation.

Ms. Warren has both assets and possible drawbacks in a White House run. Strategists for several other likely Democratic candidates say private polling found Ms. Warren’s political brand — as a warrior against powerful corporate interests — to be exceptionally strong with Democratic primary voters. Her signature initiative in recent months has been a sweeping bill to crack down on government corruption, effectively adapting her longtime focus on private-sector greed for the public-sector scandals of the Trump era.

But Ms. Warren has also become a favorite target of conservatives, who have sought to label her as an out-of-touch liberal from academia. In 2012, the political director for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Ms. Warren represented a “threat to free enterprise,” and this year two Democratic senators — facing difficult re-election races in states Mr. Trump won in 2016 — took the unusual step of distancing themselves from Ms. Warren, their own colleague.

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Sue Dvorsky, a former chairwoman of the Iowa Democratic Party, said in an interview Monday that it had been a mistake for Ms. Warren to spend so much time sparring in personal terms with Mr. Trump and called that a losing path for her or any other presidential candidate.

But Ms. Dvorsky also said Ms. Warren’s announcement video — particularly her focus on “how the middle class is being destroyed” — would resonate in Iowa.

“She has always done well in Iowa,” said Ms. Dvorsky, who recalled hosting Ms. Warren when she campaigned there for Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections. “She had people eating out of her hand, in tears, because her story is extremely powerful and she is a powerful teller of it.”

A Quinnipiac University poll in mid-December underscored Ms. Warren’s strengths as a primary candidate, finding her better known, and better liked, by Democrats than any other candidate who had not run for president before. Three in five Democrats had a favorable opinion of her, compared with just 12 percent who viewed her unfavorably, a ratio outdone only by Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders.

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But the same poll pointed to Ms. Warren’s likely challenges. Voters at large were far more divided in their views of her: Only about 30 percent viewed her favorably, with 37 percent holding an unfavorable view and the rest undecided.

Image Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in New York in December. Mr. Biden is also eyeing a run in 2020. Credit... Krista Schlueter for The New York Times

To the extent that Democratic primary voters are inclined to cast their ballots tactically — in favor of a candidate who appears likeliest to beat Mr. Trump — Ms. Warren may have some serious convincing to do. She is regarded with anxiety by much of the Democratic political establishment, including some Senate colleagues who complain that she has pursued an inflexible agenda on matters like bank regulation at the cost of party unity.

During her Senate years, Ms. Warren has demonstrated the most influence as a member of the Banking Committee, aggressively questioning leaders of the financial industry about excesses and abuses, seeking accountability for the Great Recession and challenging the Obama and Trump administrations to take tougher lines on regulations and trade policy. In 2015, Ms. Warren sank the nomination of Antonio Weiss, the Wall Street banker selected by the Obama administration to serve as the third-ranking official at the Treasury Department, taking on her party on the grounds that Mr. Weiss, the former head of investment banking for Lazard, was too closely connected to the financial services industry to serve in public office.

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The map of states with early nominating contests appears, at least on the surface, to be an inviting one for Ms. Warren: The race begins in Iowa, where Farm Belt populism long defined Democratic politics, before moving to her political backyard of New Hampshire. During the midterm elections, she got a rousing reception in Nevada, an early state that suffered grievously in the 2008 financial crisis, and where rhetoric lashing Wall Street and major mortgage lenders tends to resonate.

Ms. Warren’s prospects may also depend, in part, on which Democrats decide to run. Like other white liberals in a historically diverse field, Ms. Warren may have to work harder to win over black primary voters. African-American Democrats have played a decisive role in settling the last two open contests for the party’s nomination, and Ms. Warren is expected to be competing against her party’s only two black senators, Ms. Harris and Mr. Booker.

And several other fiery economic populists could join the Democratic field, including Mr. Sanders and Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, potentially splintering the voters most energized by Ms. Warren’s core themes. Advisors to other top-tier candidates, who were granted anonymity because their campaigns are yet to be announced, said that while they were surprised that Ms. Warren had announced her candidacy before the new year, it would have no influence on their decisions.

Astead W. Herndon reported from New York and Alexander Burns from Boston. Jonathan Martin contributed reporting.

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