NORFOLK, VIRGINIA—“I have to tell you all: running for president, it’s just an extraordinary experience,” Elizabeth Warren said on stage Friday night under the Old Dominion scoreboard at Chartwell Arena in southern Virginia. This was after she’d been speaking for about an hour to the crowd of about 4,000 who’d turned out waving banners reading “Dream Big, Fight Hard” and wearing shirts with the scolding phrase once directed at her that has become a feminist rallying cry, “Nevertheless, she persisted.”

Just then, a man toward the back of the floor shouted out: “We love you Elizabeth Warren!” and the cheering in the crowd swelled up.

“I am just gonna say, it’s extraordinary. It’s extraordinary because this is the moment. This is our moment. You know, when I first started running, people said to me,” she said, “what you’re doing isn’t going to work. It’s too hard.” She said she imagined that the same thing must have been said to the abolitionists, to the suffragettes, to the “foot soldiers” in the civil rights movement and to the LGBTQ advocates of equal marriage. “Too hard. Give up now. But here’s the thing: they didn’t give up. They didn’t give up. They got organized. They built a grass-roots movement. They persisted. They changed the course of American history. This is our moment in American history.”

It is hard to tell how it will figure into the grand scope of American history, but in the snapshot of the current Democratic party primary campaign for the 2020 presidential nomination, Warren is certainly having a moment. A candidate who was polling in the single digits at the beginning of the summer, the Massachusetts senator has seen a steady climb in the polls of Democratic voters over the past three months that now sees her tied or inching ahead of former vice-president Joe Biden, who had been leading ever since the race unofficially began last year. Warren won the viral sweepstakes at a televised LGBTQ forum a week ago with a quick, witty response to faith-based objections to same-sex marriage, and earlier in the week had found herself the focus of most of the other candidates’ criticism at the most recent debate. The candidate who had been dismissed as too wonky (one of her slogans is “Warren has a plan for that”) is now the apparent front-runner to take on President Donald Trump in next year’s election.

Trump has been having a moment of a different kind. In the two days leading up to this rally, he’d seen more apparently damaging testimony in the impeachment inquiry around his conduct in dealing with Ukraine, his acting chief-of-staff appeared to admit openly to the quid pro quo in that matter Trump has long denied (“Get over it. There is going to be political influence in foreign policy”) before walking his comments back, his sudden Syrian withdrawal and quickly announced “ceasefire” led to immediate reports of ethnic cleansing and that Republican congressman and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney said would be a “bloodstain on U.S. history,” and the administration announced it would award the hosting of the G7 summit to one of Trump’s own properties — directly funneling money into the president’s company.

“So many of my friends are diehard Trump supporters,” says Virginia Trager, who lives in Westmoreland County, about two hours’ drive north, standing with her daughter and her grandson. “I just don’t understand how they can support somebody that is flaunting illegal behaviour. Throwing the emoluments business down the tubes. I just don’t understand. These are people that say they support our troops. And when you have the Kurds being abandoned,” she said, “I don’t know what’s happening. So we’ve got to make a change.”

In pursuit of that change, Trager says next year she’s voting “blue no matter who” (in reference to the Democratic party’s traditional colour) but has been impressed by Warren. “I love her. She’s great. She’s got a lot of plans. She knows your business. She’s done her homework.” She said of being in this arena hearing Warren and seeing the crowds, “Feels like democracy is still working. I’m not sure how long, but it feels like it’s working.”

Perhaps strangely, Trump himself had said the night before that he also thought “the survival of American democracy” was at stake in the upcoming election. At a rally in Dallas, Texas, Trump’s warm-up speaker, Texas Lt.-Gov. Dan Patrick, said Democrats “are not our opponents. They are our enemy.” Then, as a reported 20,000 in the audience cheered and chanted, Trump himself said of the opposition party that “They hate our country” and accused them being “stupid” and “crazy” and in one instance of supporting a doctor who “executes” babies after they are born. He said they want to “shred our constitution.”

“Fairly progressive-minded Liberal” Tim Roth, a local man in his 60s who remains undecided in the primary race, decried the level of nasty polarization in the rhetoric. “I’m kind of as disgusted as at any time in my adult life. America, obviously, we’re polarized. I think it’s going to be challenging. Let’s put it this way. If one of the most progressive and open-minded candidates in my opinion was president for eight years, Barack Obama, and he couldn’t really move the needle much in terms of polarization, like, good luck. That said, I think Warren has the strongest chance so far of breaking through that lockdown because she’s proposing some ideas that are truly on paper bipartisan,” he said. “I think that’s kind of out-of-the-box thinking we’re going to have to have.”

The tone and focus of Warren’s speech is a stark contrast to Trump’s rally — focused not on her opponents but on her life and the plans she has for the country. She spoke of her father’s heart attack that left him unable to work and her mother’s tears as the family almost lost their home before she got a minimum-wage job. She spoke of abandoning her dreams of being a teacher when she got married young, but seeing them revived when she found a “$50 per semester” commuter college. Of being fired when she got pregnant and then attending law school and becoming a professor.

And she spoke of her plans — of which she famously has many, featuring much detail — which she boiled down to serving three main goals: to attack corruption, “basic structural change” in the economy, and “protect our democracy.”

“Those three, and we make this a country of opportunity for everyone,” she said. The specifics she outlined of accomplishing those goals contain many elements: enforcing antitrust laws and essentially outlawing lobbying, a wealth tax on the top fraction of 1 per cent to fund massive investments in preschool and post-secondary education, and outlawing gerrymandering, among many other things.

She tied the personal and political together by saying that in her family history and in her own life, she realized that personal hard work and sacrifice had been enabled by the foresight of those who’d built social and government structures to allow them “an opportunity.”

“Somebody somewhere had helped build that thing. That gave me a chance. That let me fall off the track and get back on. And when I did, I held on for dear life,” she said. “And then I got a chance to reach and help somebody else out,” she said in reference to her teaching work in public schools and universities.

“But then I started to figure out, when I made the decision to run for public office, is you could actually build structures that open up more possibilities for everybody else. It’s great to do it hand over hand, but it’s also great to do it big time.”

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Cara, a 17-year-old from Virginia Beach and a Warren supporter from the beginning of the campaign who cited struggles with health insurance for her ailing mother as one of the motivating factors in her political viewpoint, summed up the emotion of being in this arena with a crowd cheering a surging Warren campaign. “I feel very at peace. I think that I feel very calm right now being in the presence with all these people that I feel similar to how I do.”

After the speech, after questions from the audience, when the arena lights came up, the night wasn’t over for the candidate or for many of those who’d come to see her. As is her campaign tradition, Warren vowed to stay and take selfies (“the core part of democracy,” she joked) with as many people as wanted them. The line contained hundreds waiting, at this moment that the candidate spoke of, for their moment beside her.

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