But it was the Massachusetts senator who got a standing ovation before she’d even said a word, and another as soon as she’d finished speaking. From the start, Warren’s campaign was built on the theory that she’s an outsider whom insiders can live with, and an insider who has credibility with outsiders—in 2016 terms, someone who can attract both Sanders and Hillary Clinton voters. Primary voting is months away. The DNC’s 2020 convention is almost a year from now. But on Friday afternoon, in the huge, bland hotel ballroom where the DNC meeting was held, Warren’s theory seemed to be working out.

Read: Elizabeth Warren has momentum. Can she build a movement?

She “stretches across a broad spectrum of Democrats,” said Don Fowler, a DNC chair in the 1990s, a longtime Clinton-family loyalist, and someone who’s been to more DNC meetings over more election cycles than most people in Democratic politics today. Explaining what he thinks her appeal is to establishment Democrats, Fowler told me that for all of Warren’s talk of “big, structural change”—by fundamentally reworking the economy—“she does not include in her presentation the implication of being against things, except the current president.”

Warren’s insider-outsider routine is one reason, Democratic operatives and analysts told me—and one another, in private conversations—that they’ve begun to see her as the odds-on favorite to win her party’s nomination. However, a few of the Democrats I spoke with noted that her positioning could become a trap: With Sanders and Warren expected to battle even more intensely in the coming months, the change-hungry part of the Democratic base might begin to ask why establishment insiders seem so comfortable with her.

Jay Jacobs, the chair of the New York Democratic Party, told me a few hours after Warren’s Friday speech that although his politics aren’t as far left as Warren’s, “there wasn’t a thing she said today that I could not have written.” Jacobs, who was made chair by the Biden-backing Governor Andrew Cuomo, added, “The times do call for bolder action.”

“I hope Sanders supporters see Warren’s broadening support as a good thing and won’t now cynically try to paint her as beholden to insiders, because she’s not,” said a DNC member who isn’t currently committed to any candidates and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We will see.”

Most of the Democrats I talked to didn’t seem especially upset that Biden did not attend the summer meeting. But they did have their suspicions about why he skipped it: Multiple state-party chairs and other attendees told me—speaking only on the condition of anonymity—that they assumed he was wary of receiving a less-than-wild reception compared with other candidates.

Asked for comment on those assumptions, the Biden spokesman Andrew Bates wouldn’t say whether they were correct or not, but he noted that the former vice president often attends DNC events. “This weekend he was in New Hampshire, where he had great events speaking directly to voters about the stakes of this election,” Bates said.