On Saturday morning, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, the state’s senior Democratic senator, announced her candidacy for President. Warren stood in subfreezing temperatures outside of the city’s Everett Mills, the site of the famous 1912 “Bread and Roses” strike, which led to higher wages and better working conditions for the city’s textile workers (and also lots of folk songs). “Children were forced to operate dangerous equipment—workers lost hands, arms, and legs in the gears of machines,” she told the crowd. “One out of every three adult millworkers died by the time they were twenty-five. Then, on January 11, 1912, a group of women who worked right here at the Everett Mill discovered that the bosses had cut their pay. And that was it—the women said enough is enough. They shut down their looms and walked out.” By organizing for fair wages, overtime pay, and the right to unionize, Warren added, “those workers did more than improve their own lives. They changed America.”

Less than two hours later, Anne Rodier and her son, Steven Fritzsche, were in a car, driving from their home, in Kennebunk, Maine, to Dover, New Hampshire, Warren’s first official campaign stop. The senator had dipped in and out of New Hampshire for weeks, as she considered running; now, hundreds of supporters and potential supporters were lined up to enter Dover City Hall. “I’m excited about Elizabeth Warren,” Rodier said. “She’s got great policies. She’s a quick thinker with an analytical mind, who attacks the problems we have. And she’s courageous. She takes stands that aren’t popular. She’s tackling income inequality head on.” Rodier is a retired high-school calculus teacher who had never been involved in politics until the 2018 midterms, when she went out canvassing in Maine with a group called Stand Up for Women. “We turned the state blue,” she said proudly. But it was Fritzsche, who is twenty-eight years old and a law student at the University of Maine, who got his mom to make the one-hour drive. “I’m excited to hear one of the candidates challenging the billionaires and standing up for the working class,” he said. “She has been saying this all along. It’s authentic Elizabeth Warren, as always.”

The doors opened and people streamed in. Donald Stearns, a retired machinist who worked at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, showed me a photo he’d just taken of Warren in front of the building. In it, she wears a black overcoat, her hair is windswept, and she appears to be listening intently to someone outside of the frame. Later, Warren promised not to leave Dover until everyone had a chance for a photo op, and scores of people stood in line to have a picture taken with her. But Stearns’s candid shot seemed to illustrate what he liked about Warren. “She represents the middle class, which is sorely underrepresented,” Stearns said, as the song “Hooked on a Feeling” blasted from loudspeakers. “The middle class is the majority, but they are not being heard at all.”

As attendees quickly filled the three hundred and fifty folding chairs, which faced a riser decorated with American and New Hampshire flags, the mood was upbeat, synched to a medley of songs that included Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” and Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” There were women—and at least one man—in “Nevertheless, she persisted” shirts, babies in strollers, college students gathering signatures for a petition to stop the Northeast Energy Direct pipeline, volunteers waving “NH for Warren” signs, and a young black man, Terkhur Riem—one of the few people of color in the audience—who had been a student of Warren’s at Harvard Law School. “I like her fiscal policy,” he told me.

I stopped to talk to a woman with a Beto pin attached to her bag—Beto O’Rourke being one of the few prominent Democrats yet to announce an anticipated Presidential candidacy. Her name was Lauren Garza, and she told me that she’d got the pin from her parents, who worked on O’Rourke’s Senate campaign, in Texas. “I haven’t been able to get my wisdom teeth out for six years because I can’t afford it,” she said. “I’m here because I love Warren’s policies. I love her consistency. Right now it’s so important to be a driving force for change, especially when it comes to reproductive rights, health care, and student-loan forgiveness.” Garza, who is twenty-seven years old and works at a community health center, in nearby Newmarket, owes more than eighty thousand dollars in student loans. Her second-choice candidate, she said, was Joe Biden. “I think he earned the respect of conservatives while he was the Vice-President, so it may be easier to get a victory with him,” she said. “But I also love Bernie, I love Beto, I love Warren! It’s exciting to have people running for President who aren’t scared to strive for change.”

Warren took the stage at 3:15 P.M., precisely on time. All the chairs had been claimed, and people were standing in the aisles. She introduced her husband, two of her grandchildren, and then, as if to underscore the dissimilarities between Warren and the current President—who hates dogs—her golden retriever, Bailey. “Our country is in trouble,” she told the crowd. “I’m grateful that, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, you’d come and take very seriously the responsibility of figuring out where we’re going to go, and how we’re going to get there.”

Warren is plain-spoken and direct. She comes across as a straight-talking Midwesterner—born and raised in Oklahoma—tossing out a “Here’s the deal” when she wants to emphasize a point. Her outfit, a long white blazer over black pants and a black top, seemed to serve as a visual metaphor for her unadorned rhetorical style. On a day when Trump was busy maligning her honesty on Twitter, she came across as forthright and sincere, using the story of her upbringing on “the ragged edge of the middle class” to launch into a blistering critique of the ways that government has failed all but the very wealthy. Her message was unabashedly progressive. She called for an end to “the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street” and “lobbying as we know it,” and endorsed a “wealth tax,” the Green New Deal, a constitutional amendment that insures both every citizen’s right to vote and that every vote be counted, and the elimination of Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that removed limits on corporate donations to political campaigns. “Democracy is not for sale!” she said, to thunderous applause.

Warren was a Republican until the nineteen-nineties. She changed parties because, as she told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, the G.O.P. defends Wall Street at a time “when the big financial institutions are just hammering middle-class American families.” Now she has either inherited the mantle of progressivism from Bernie Sanders or captured it, championing many of the policies that he has been advocating for years, while explaining—with lots of statistics—how badly the system is rigged, especially against women and people of color. “This is the moment we’re called to,” she said, after talking for nearly an hour. “We come together, we dream big, we fight hard, and we make the change America needs.”

Earlier, she said something similar—“This is the moment when we see what’s wrong, what we need to do, and to do it”—that almost sounded like an explanation for why she didn’t run the last time around, when many on the left were urging her to do so. But Warren, like many of the people I spoke with, sounded wounded by Trump’s America, and motivated by it, too. “I was so disturbed by the outcome of the 2016 election,” a young woman from Dover, Julia Kirchmer, told me before Warren’s speech, which she was attending with her partner, Robert Saulnier. “So disturbed. But it’s great to be moving forward. That’s why we’re here. We’re ready to feel differently about who is in office.” When I caught up with them afterward, Kirchmer had tears in her eyes. “I think I agreed with pretty much everything Warren said,” she told me. “I didn’t think I’d feel emotional talking about politics again, but I do. Now there’s a glimmer of hope.”