Last summer, Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor, held a series of houseparties around Massachusetts, to test support for a possible run for the United States Senate. A veteran Democratic activist in Andover named M J Powell recalled, “They called me on a Thursday and asked if I could have a meet-and-greet two days later. I figured I could probably get fifty people. It turned out we had a hundred and forty-eight. People overflowed to the porch.”

Warren described the scene to me: “It was incredibly hot. There were way too many people in this room. So the thing I have always hated is that I’m shouting, because they keep saying outside, ‘We can’t hear you!’ ”

At one point, someone asked Warren if she was engaging in class warfare. “No,” she said. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.” For decades, American politicians, including many Democrats, had celebrated private enterprise and offered only tepid, almost apologetic endorsements of public goods. Here, in contrast, was Warren’s rousing defense of the welfare state.

Warren didn’t know that several people in Powell’s house were shooting video of the event. A few days later, one of them posted her answers on YouTube, and the video received nearly a million views. She declared her candidacy for the Senate seat now held by Scott Brown, the Republican who won a special election in 2010, after the death of Edward M. Kennedy. The Warren-Brown contest has become the highest-profile, and most expensive, statewide race of the year. The polls have been close for months, and the latest independent surveys show Brown leading. But if Warren wins she will help the Democrats continue to control the Senate, and her race will likely be seen as the overture to a run for President four years from now.

Warren’s viral video, as everyone calls it, is also playing a role in this fall’s White House contest. In Roanoke, Virginia, in July, President Obama appeared to paraphrase Warren’s comments, concluding, “Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.” Republicans devoted most of the first day of the Republican Convention, in Tampa, to mocking Obama’s words. Also this summer, Brown’s campaign launched an online video about Warren’s statement, called “Let America Be America Again.” It has received even more hits on YouTube than Warren’s speech.

To a certain extent, the debate about Warren’s video turns on semantics. Brown and Mitt Romney acknowledge that businesses require schools, roads, and law enforcement in order to thrive. But Warren represents a genuine ideological challenge to Brown—and to her own party as well. She has drawn a rapturous response from liberal Democrats, including more than twenty-seven million dollars in campaign contributions, by far the most ever raised in a Massachusetts race. As she demonstrated in a fiery speech last week at the Democratic National Convention, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Warren is neither a Clintonesque triangulator nor an Obamaesque conciliator. She is a throwback to a more combative progressive tradition, and her candidacy is a test of whether that approach can still appeal to voters.

The city of Brockton is twenty-five miles from Harvard Square. In an unlovely strip mall, a few doors from a Dollar Tree store, the Warren campaign rented a storefront, one of thirty-five offices it has opened throughout Massachusetts. On a Tuesday night in July, Warren appeared for one of the “ice-cream socials” her campaign has been sponsoring around the state this summer. Almost three hundred people turned out in a thunderstorm to fill every folding chair and most of the space along the walls. Visitors were directed to sign-up sheets for door-to-door canvassing. Warren’s volunteers have knocked on four hundred thousand doors—a number said to be more than that of any other campaign in the history of Massachusetts.

Warren, who is a young-looking sixty-three, appeared precisely on time. She is a startling sight for anyone who has seen her only on television. She is tiny, and very slight. Her campaign uniform consists of colorful T-shirts topped by button-down shirts that flap behind her as she paces and talks. Her energy level is just short of manic. (Once, during a campaign swing through a Dunkin’ Donuts, I offered to buy her a cup of coffee. She declined, saying, “I once had half a cup, twenty years ago, and I’m still working it off.”) She tucked her blond pageboy behind her ears, adjusted her rimless glasses, and launched into a stump speech that is clearly informed by her years in the classroom. She’s a loud, lucid speaker, whose words unspool in full sentences and paragraphs.

“I talk a lot about working families,” Warren said. “I grew up in a working family.” As she invariably recites on the stump in Massachusetts, and as she told the delegates in Charlotte, her roots are modest. Warren’s father was a janitor; her mother took telephone orders at Sears. Her three older brothers all served in the military. “My oldest brother was career military—two hundred and eighty-eight combat missions in Vietnam,” she said, drawing applause in Brockton. “My second brother, John, when he got out of the military, he worked construction all his life. And I just want to say, he got ten good years as a crane operator in a union, and that’s why he has a pension today.” More applause. “My third brother, David, he was the one we always thought in the family had the special spark. David is the one who started a small business,” she said. “David could not imagine an America where he wasn’t out there every single day trying to live by his wits.

“I started working when I was nine,” Warren went on. “Family across the street had a new baby. New baby had colic. I was in business. For thirty-five cents an hour, I would have rocked that baby all night long.” Warren’s account might have left the impression that this all took place in Massachusetts, but she grew up in Oklahoma.

“ . . . and if anyone here knows any reason why these two should not be wed, any reason at all, like, say, something that might have happened after a long heart-to-heart and a few too many drinks, for instance, last week maybe, something you felt bad enough to bring to Confession, which you definitely should have, because it’s pretty serious—anyway, speak now . . . ” Facebook

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Warren’s own hold on middle-class life was tenuous at first. She married at nineteen, had her first child at twenty-two, and became a schoolteacher for special-needs children. On her daughter Amelia’s second birthday, Elizabeth started law school. It was difficult to find child care, she told the group in Brockton. “They would only take children who were dependably potty-trained,” she explained. “So I just want to say that I am here today courtesy of three bags of M&Ms. Think about it.” Raucous laughter.

The heart of Warren’s stump speech might be called a tale of two eras. “Here’s how I see the story,” she said. It started in the Great Depression. “In this hardest of times, what did we do? We looked into ourselves and we made a decision about what kind of people we are. We made a decision to invest in ourselves, invest in our kids, to invest in our future.” She described investments in education, in infrastructure (roads and bridges), and in research. “For half a century, that is exactly what we did. And we just watched it pay off. . . . Year over year, median family income—that family right in the middle—just kept going up with it.”

Warren continued, “Then, about thirty years ago, the country began to turn in another direction, and we had different leaders in Washington, and they told us another story about ourselves.” As it happened, this period marked a turning point in Warren’s life, too.

Warren graduated from the Rutgers School of Law, in Newark, in 1976, taught there for a couple of years, and then moved to the University of Houston, in 1978. (Two years later, she divorced her first husband.) Jay Westbrook, a professor at the University of Texas law school, in Austin, recalled, “A colleague saw her teach in Houston and thought she was great, and so she was invited to visit here in Austin, and ultimately she joined our faculty. By happy coincidence, Liz and I were both interested in the law in action, how it actually works in the real world. That’s kind of unusual for law professors, who tend to be more interested in theory and rules.”

In 1978, Congress had passed a major revision of the bankruptcy laws, and it went into effect the following year. Warren wondered how the new law was playing out, but she couldn’t find any reliable reports. “What I began to think about is nobody really knows what’s going on out there,” Warren told me. “So I started talking about: how would you find out?” Douglas Laycock, who taught the law of religion, suggested that she speak to his wife, Teresa Sullivan, a sociologist. Warren, Sullivan, and Westbrook had lunch together at a Mexican restaurant in Austin and decided to collaborate on a study of the new bankruptcy law. (Sullivan is now the president of the University of Virginia, where she recently survived an effort to unseat her.)

Warren spent about a decade searching through dusty records in Texas courthouses, and, along with Sullivan and Westbrook, she produced “As We Forgive Our Debtors,” a landmark book about consumer bankruptcy, in 1989. “What we found was very much counter to the conventional wisdom about bankruptcy,” Westbrook said. “Bankruptcy is a middle-class phenomenon. Previously, people had thought it was for day laborers and housemaids.” The leading causes were job loss and divorce. Illness and an inability to make mortgage payments were also prominent triggers. “We were way ahead of the curve on that one,” Westbrook said. “Too many people were stretched to the limit to buy as much house as they thought they could afford.” Warren conducted the research on the effects of housing and medical expenses on individuals’ decisions to declare bankruptcy.

“As We Forgive” recognizes the responsibility of debtors for creating some of their own problems, but it is unsparing in its assessment of how the financial industry preys on naïve consumers. “Credit card issuers were willing to give out the fifth, sixth, or seventh bank card and to approve charges after debtors already owed short-term debt so large that they could not possibly pay the interest, much less the principal,” the authors wrote. The trio collaborated on another book, “The Fragile Middle Class,” published in 2000, also relying on empirical research to demonstrate the precariousness of contemporary middle-class life. “Without universal health insurance to protect every family from the financial ravages of illness and without higher levels of unemployment compensation to cushion the effect of a layoff, each day, in good times and in bad, some families will fall over the financial edge,” they wrote.

Warren’s books are couched in academic prose, but the political content is unmistakable. The forces of capitalism, while often productive, are far from benign, especially at the top. As Warren told me, “So the first book says, ‘The system is being used the way that it should. Those people are in real trouble.’ Second book says, ‘And let’s tell you something about who those people are. They are surprisingly middle class.’ ” She went on, “The people who are filing for bankruptcy in increasing numbers every year, it’s not the poorest. It’s not the people at the economic fringes. It’s people who worked hard and played by the rules.” In front of the delegates in Charlotte, she put it this way: “For many years, our middle class has been chipped, squeezed, and hammered.”

The line from Warren’s academic work to the strip mall in Brockton is a direct one. As of 1980, she said in her speech, the “different leaders” in Washington “told us a story that said the job of government is not to help us make the investments together that none of us can make alone, that’s not the job—the job of government is to protect those who’ve already made it.

“Here’s what pulls me into this race,” she went on. “There are two visions for America and how to build that future. The Republicans have made their vision clear. They have said, ‘I got mine. The rest of you are on your own.’ . . . They said, ‘What we want to do is just cut taxes again for those who’ve already made it, leave more money for those who’ve already got it, cut regulations for those who are out there and building those successful businesses.’ ” She added, “What they say, in effect, is if you leave lots of money with the wealthiest and most powerful, the rest of you will be able to feed off the scraps. That’s their vision for how to build the future. That’s not our vision. It’s the wrong vision for America.”

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Warren concluded with the story of a young man she had just met who said he had done everything he was told to do. He got good grades, stayed out of trouble, borrowed money to go to school—and he couldn’t find full-time work. He told Warren, “I’ve moved back in with my mom and dad, and I’m getting scared about whether there’s a future out there for me.” Warren said, “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘I’m here because I’m looking for a fighter,’ and I said, ‘You found one.’ ”

While at Texas, Warren married Bruce Mann, a legal historian, and in 1987 they moved to the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and then to Harvard Law School, in 1992. Warren continued to be an active scholar, but she was largely apolitical, and certainly not a public figure outside the academy. Then, in the mid-nineties, Congress decided to overhaul the bankruptcy laws for the first time since 1978, and President Clinton appointed Mike Synar, a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma, to lead a commission to study the issue. Warren got a call from Synar, who asked her to be the adviser to the bankruptcy commission and help write its report and recommendations. Warren told me, “I said, ‘Not a chance. I am not doing this. No, it is politics.’ ” But it turned out that Synar had grown up near Warren in Oklahoma, and they had debated against each other in high school. Promised independence, Warren signed on.

As she describes it, this was where her real political education began. In 1997, the commission filed its report, which more or less reflected the findings of “As We Forgive Our Debtors.” As Warren later wrote, the commission “reaffirmed that the bankruptcy laws were, for the most part, working as Congress had originally intended: to offer families a fresh start in the wake of financial and personal disaster.” But the financial industry, especially the credit-card companies, wanted big changes in the law, all designed to make it more difficult for consumers to void their debts.

The bankruptcy wars, as Warren calls them, stretched on for a decade. In her telling, many senior Democrats ultimately joined the Republicans in betraying the middle class. In “The Two Income Trap,” a book she co-wrote with her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi, Warren describes briefing Hillary Clinton, when she was First Lady, about the bankruptcy bill backed by the financial industry. “It’s our job to stop that awful bill,” Warren quotes Clinton as saying. But several years later, when the bill came up for passage, Senator Clinton voted for it. “The bill was essentially the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not,” Warren wrote. As a senator, “she could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn’t coming from families in financial trouble.” When the bill finally passed, in 2005, then-Senator Joseph Biden was one of its biggest backers. “Senators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening,” Warren wrote.