“I want to tell you a story about me,” Elizabeth Warren said, on Tuesday night, in Detroit, when the early results from the Super Tuesday primaries showed that she’d finished third in her home state of Massachusetts, done no better anywhere else, and would not be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. Every politician has a small batch of stories they turn to, but, during this campaign, Warren had one in particular, about a precarious period of childhood, in Oklahoma, when her father lost his job and as a result her family lost its station wagon. In Detroit, she told it again:

One day I walked into my folks’ bedroom. And laid out on the bed was the dress. Now, some of you in this room will know the dress. It’s the one that only comes out for weddings, funerals, and graduations. And there, down by the foot of the bed, was my mother. And she had on her slip, and she’s in her stocking feet, and she was pacing back and forth. And she was saying, ‘We will not lose this house. We will not lose this house. We will not lose this house.’ She was fifty years old, she had never worked outside the home, and she was terrified. So she looks up and she sees me standing in the doorway. I’m just a kid. And she looks at me, she looks at that dress, she looks back at me. And she walks over. And she pulls that dress on, she puts on her high heels, and she walks to the Sears, where she gets a full-time, minimum-wage job answering phones. And that minimum-wage job saved our house, and it also saved our family. And that is the first lesson my mother taught me—and that is that, no matter how scared you are, no matter how hard it looks, you get out there, and you fight for the people you love.

Warren told this story the first time I saw her on the campaign trail, more than a year ago, in Iowa, and the last time I saw her there, a little less than a month ago, in New Hampshire, and countless times in between—drawing on the same phrases (“stocking feet”) and the same rhythm, eliciting the same appreciative hush from audiences, many of whom must have heard her tell it a dozen times, and some of whom might have known it verbatim. (“This is insane,” a reporter friend texted me, on Super Tuesday, when MSNBC cut to Warren’s speech. “She’s still telling the dress story?”) Warren told the dress story so often that it seemed clear that it had some extra-electoral meaning to her. Many features of her campaign were like that—the selfie line, the pinkie promises with little girls—they had a symbolic heft that emerged through repetition. Above all, there were the plans. Roll out one major plan, like Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal, and the campaign is about the plan. Roll out a major plan a week, as Warren did at times, and the campaign is, at least in part, about the process of planning and the character of the planner. “Just one example,” Warren told her staff, on Thursday, during a phone call thanking them and disbanding her campaign. “Our disability plan is a model for our country, and, even more importantly, the way we relied on the disability communities to help us get it right will be a more important model.” There was a weightiness to each and every aspect of her run: she thought she had to overthrow so much.

One story that Warren never told was why she was a Republican until 1996, when she was forty-seven and had held a named chair at an Ivy League law school (first Penn, then Harvard) for nearly a decade. There were good electoral reasons to duck the question, as a Presidential candidate at a time when partisan antagonisms are sharp, but there were also some good reasons to embrace it. The strength of Warren’s biography—one reason her mother’s dress functioned as such a touchstone—was in how characteristic it was. In her account, Warren grew up modestly, in a conservative and unimportant place, wanting simple things (a husband, a child, a teaching job). Her feminism was expressed in personal and professional spheres, until her work, as an academic, brought her into politics, through her studies of the ways bankruptcy courts stacked the deck against women and their families. This sort of gradual awakening is also the story of the radicalization of professional women—first in the nineties, in a wave that Warren joined, and then over the past decade, in one that she led. Their desire for reform, if not quite revolution, now supplies the core energy of the Democratic Party.

Exactly how far that energy might go—how radical it could be—has been a central question of the Presidential primaries, and it is being asked with special urgency by the Sanders camp. “This campaign is about asking one fundamental question: Which side are you on?” Sanders tweeted on Wednesday. Warren might have framed it differently. More than any other candidate, she adopted the intersectional language of activists and academics. She gave a memorable speech, in New York’s Washington Square, in September, about the legacy of Frances Perkins, the sociologist and advocate who became F.D.R.’s Secretary of Labor, and another, in Atlanta, in November, about a Reconstruction-era strike that was organized by the city’s black washerwomen. This approach won her the allegiance of some prominent black and Latino activists and intellectuals, if not the mass support of black and Latino voters. This fall, when Warren embraced Medicare for All and promised she could pay for it, she spooked part of her own base, losing her status as a front-runner and a loose group of college-educated white voters who, in the early primaries, always seemed to decide at the last minute, settling in Iowa on Pete Buttigieg and in New Hampshire on Amy Klobuchar, before settling on Joe Biden on Super Tuesday. Having spent much of her adult life embodying the radicalization of professionals, and coaxing it out of law students and Senate staffers, Warren may have found its limit.

On Thursday, Stacey Abrams tweeted that Warren “gives form to brainy, compassionate, determined, indefatigable leadership.” The sentiment was significant because of its author—Abrams, who is widely seen as a possible Vice-Presidential candidate in this election, is an obvious heir to the Warren ethos—but also because of the striking phrase “gives form.” The last phase of Warren’s campaign, from the New Hampshire primary to this past week, made less sense as a quest for votes than an expression of character. Its central act, the evisceration of Michael Bloomberg on the debate stage in Nevada and the destruction of his hopes for the nomination, was a demonstration of the power of attention to detail, moral clarity, and pugnacity against wealth and entitlement. The fight helped shore up the Party’s right flank; it also all but guaranteed that there will be more Democratic candidates like Warren to come. Elizabeth Warren will not be President next January, but in this campaign she has managed to do something decidedly Presidential: she has defined a particular way of being American.