Along the way, each spot of drama—from the heritage controversy to whom she might pick as her campaign manager—has been hungrily covered by the press.

No other candidate has experienced anything quite like this this cycle. Then again, no other candidate has built herself up into quite this kind of dreadnought.

On Monday, Warren tried to rewind history, reminding voters in a launch video of who she was before. With home movies and old news clips flashing on the screen, she talks about being the daughter of a janitor who became a university professor—and later, after the 2008 crash, a central figure in the national reckoning over the economic system.

“These aren’t cracks that families are falling into—these are traps. America’s middle class is under attack. How did we get here? Billionaires and big corporations decided they wanted more of the pie, and they enlisted politicians to cut them a fatter slice,” she says in the video, narrating from her kitchen.

Read: Sanders and Warren are heading for a standoff

At the core of the video seems to be a Clintonesque assessment of the 2020 campaign: This isn’t going to be pretty, this isn’t going to be poetic, but it’s too important to get caught up in all of that. Even her announcement’s timing of New Year’s Eve morning—to the bewilderment of the chattering class—had that feel: The whole announcement game is silly, so she might as well just get it out of the way now and move on to the real stuff.

“If we organize together, if we fight together, if we persist together, we can win—we can and we will,” she says toward the close of the video.

According to Warren associates who’ve spent the past year with her preparing for her bid, she sees the road ahead as a long, hard slog, where she puts together enough of a coalition between Clinton and Sanders voters to win. Will it be a movement like the ones that propelled Barack Obama and Donald Trump to the presidency, or like the one her primary run against Clinton might have been in 2016? No.

But, her advisers believe, she will win. That’s the thing about a dreadnought: It might not have as flashy a design, but it blows a lot of other ships out of the water.

“She knows that this is going to be a fight,” said a current Warren campaign adviser, who requested anonymity in order to discuss internal thinking. “She’s a fighter.”

Warren’s team doesn’t like the Clinton comparisons. They see any of that talk as reeking of sexism, people seeing one woman as the same as another woman because of their gender and aspirations. But so far, at least, the Clinton comparisons aren’t being made about any of the other women who have been just as obvious in recent months about their 2020 intentions.

Some Clinton-campaign veterans say they’re sympathetic to what Warren is going through, but their own trauma from two years ago makes them skeptical she’ll be able to get out of it. “I’ve just seen how hard it can be to escape the tailspin of negative stories,” one former Clinton confidant said recently.