The Iowa caucuses are still more than a year away. The first Democratic primary debate won’t occur until this June. But some journalists are already declaring that one of the party’s 2020 frontrunners, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, is in serious trouble.

After it was revealed recently that Warren had listed her race as “American Indian” on a State Bar of Texas registration card 33 years ago, The Washington Post commented that the “matter now threatens to overshadow the image Warren has sought to foster of a truth-telling consumer advocate who would campaign for the White House as a champion for the working class. Instead, she is now seeking to combat the portrait of someone who for years was insufficiently sensitive to a long-oppressed minority.” The New York Times’s Peter Baker seemed to concur on Twitter, and MSNBC’s Brian Williams devoted nearly ten minutes of his show to the controversy, declaring that it “follows and looms over her candidacy.”



Warren’s handling of the controversy—particularly her decision to take a DNA test to prove distant Native American ancestry—has been seriously flawed, and is worthy of coverage. But that’s not what’s looming over her presidential campaign. Instead, many in the media are giving the same credence to Republican attacks that they did in 2016, when Hillary Clinton faced “lock her up” chants for her use of a private email server, and 2008, when Barack Obama was forced time and again to prove he was born in Hawaii, not Kenya. (It is no coincidence that Donald Trump has been the leading instigator in all three cases.)

Questions about Warren’s Native American heritage—and whether or not she used those claims to advance her career—have dogged her since 2012. That year, Republican investigators found stories in the Harvard Crimson touting diversity among Harvard Law School faculty that referred to Warren as a Native American. Her ethnicity was also listed as “Native American” at the University of Pennsylvania, where Warren taught before joining Harvard. Trump has ridiculed her for years by referring to her as “Pocahontas.”



Conservatives have obsessed over Warren’s Native American claim because it allows them to attack two foes at once. They’re using it not only to discredit Warren herself—an accomplished intellectual with an impressive academic and political career—but also the very legitimacy of affirmative action. The idea is that Warren only got ahead in the professional world by fraudulently taking advantage of a liberal policy.

