Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

Bored pundits, hungry progressives and mischievous conservatives are frantically looking for signs that Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s busy 2014 schedule points to a colossal 2016 primary clash pitting the scrappy Okie against the House of Clinton. She’s turning heads by campaigning for Democratic Senate candidates in the red states of Kentucky and West Virginia. She’s earning insider chits the way nascent presidential candidates do, raising $2.3 million for 28 Democratic candidates as of last month. Without lifting a finger, and over her public objections, she has inspired devotees to form Ready for Warren, which has launched a petition drive encouraging her to run.

But take her at her word: Warren 2016 is a fantasy. She has repeatedly given flat denials, including a pledge to serve out her six-year term, and most recently telling the Boston Globe “I am not running for president. Do you want to put an exclamation point at the end of that?” Even if Warren privately keeps the door open a crack in her mind, if she has a hard head she’ll leave the symbolic, quixotic primary challenge to the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Polling data and anecdotal reporting suggest Hillary Clinton’s base of support in the Democratic Party is broader and deeper than ever, with bitter opponents from 2008 turned into “Ready for Hillary” foot soldiers. Any 2016 drama will likely be over faster than you can say “Wesley Clark.”


Yet Warren’s 2014 road show is important in its own right. By stumping for long-shot Democrats in red states, raising and spreading around campaign cash, devising innovative legislation for candidates to borrow and, most importantly, sharpening the left’s rhetorical attack on Wall Street, Warren could have a major impact on the future of the Democratic Party, regardless of what she does in 2016.

Her traveling road show powerfully demonstrates why. Warren blows past any Beltway skittishness over “class warfare.” In her recent appearances alongside Kentucky’s Alison Lundergan Grimes and West Virginia’s Natalie Tennant, she portrayed the options before voters as “a choice between billionaires and students” or between someone who will “stand up for Wall Street” or “stand up for the families.” She name-checked Citibank and Goldman Sachs as among the Wall Streeters who already have “plenty of folks in the United State Senate who are willing to work on their side,” suggesting they don’t need to hold on to eager recipients of financial industry campaign cash like Sen. Mitch McConnell or Rep. Shelley Capito. And she used her signature student loan bill that would pay for refinancing by closing tax loopholes, filibustered by Republicans but embraced by the two Appalachian Democrats, as a case study of whose side each candidate is on.

Warren’s Wall Street bashing has a good chance of boosting Tennant and Grimes because no matter what shade the state, people hate Wall Street. Already this year, Rep. Eric Cantor lost his job in part because Tea Party conservatives felt he was too close to big banks. After that Virginia primary, pollster Greenberg Quinlain Rosner conducted a national survey showing that 64 percent believe “the stock market is rigged for insiders” and 60 percent support “stricter regulation” on financial institutions, reflecting support that spans across the partisan spectrum.

Contrast, too, Warren’s blunt binaries with the example President Barack Obama sought to set during his recent heartland swing. The difference is subtle, as the two are not polar opposites. Obama tossed out plenty of red meat (or, green kale) to the progressive crowds. In Minnesota, he slammed Republican “obstruction” that “is keeping a system that is rigged against [middle-class] families.” In Texas, he defended the liberal principle of active government for the common good, chastising Republicans who believe “if we just take care of folks at the top, or at least if we don’t empower our government to be able to help anybody, that somehow jobs and prosperity will trickle down and we’ll all be better off. And that may work just fine for folks at the top … But it doesn’t help you [or] your communities.”

Not exactly the kind of speech Lloyd Blankfein would give at Davos. As you can see, Obama doesn’t neglect the populist critique of a system skewed toward the top one percent. But he stops short of embracing Warren’s us-versus-them framework. “Wall Street,” or its unpopular representatives, are never mentioned by name. Obama prefers the word “everybody,” as when he declared in Colorado, “we’re fighting for the idea that everybody gets opportunity” with robust investments in infrastructure, energy and education, along with a higher minimum wage and increased workplace flexibility. Clinton is singing from the same hymnal, reportedly using the line “we’re all in this mess together” when discussing her thinking on economic issues in recent speeches.

These two approaches—Warren’s “us versus them” and Obama/Clinton’s “we’re all in it together”—represent two distinct schools of thought within the Democratic family. Earlier this year, the Center for American Progress’ Ruy Teixeira urged progressives to refrain from the “specific language” of inequality in favor of an “inclusive populism” of “everyone economics.” Teixeira argued, “What worries [Americans] is less the size of statistical gaps in income or wealth, and more their sense that the system is rigged in favor of the powerful to prevent average people from having opportunities to move up the ladder.” In turn, “The most effective way to sell the progressive vision for the economy is everyone economics language focusing on providing opportunity for those who lack it today, not simply taking from some and giving to others.”

My boss, Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future calls this “passive voice populism,” because it doesn’t name the “culprits that must challenged.” In Borosage’s view, fingering the bad guys is crucial. It leads directly to fundamental policy changes that populist progressives crave—tougher trade agreements, stiffer wealth taxes and stricter bank limits. But admittedly, it could ignite intra-party rifts that “big tent”-oriented Democrats have avoided in the Obama era. So a seemingly minor rhetorical and tactical difference today could lead to major substantive fights tomorrow. There’s even the possibility that Warren could emerge with the stronger hand in determining how the party will position itself in 2016 and beyond, forcing Hillary Clinton to move in Warren’s direction or risk vulnerability on her left flank.

But a lot of that depends on whether Warren’s road trips are successful. The West Virginia Senate race is particularly important to follow. Tennant is both a 10-point underdog against the bank-friendly Capito, and the most willing to employ Warren’s rhetorical strategy. Tennant sums up her campaign as “saying ‘no’ to Wall Street and ‘yes’ to West Virginia.” She weaves in Wall Street digs whether she is talking about wages, Social Security or gun rights. If Tennant could turn her race competitive, even if she came up short, it would bolster Warren’s standing as a populist message maven. However, if Tennant or others following Warren’s lead fail to move the needle, Warren may find herself marginalized as strictly a blue state phenomenon.

Beyond what happens at the ballot box, Warren’s influence on the party in 2016 could be diminished if the economy truly turns the corner after seven years of sluggish nominal recovery. Unexpected relief would cool the long-simmering anger at Wall Street, allow other issues to dominate the national discourse and give Hillary Clinton a freer hand to dictate Democratic positioning.

Nor is it clear Warren is spoiling for a bloody battle over the soul of the Democratic Party. She did not use her book or book tour to challenge Clinton’s populist bona fides. She has not played favorites in her fundraising, giving to progressives as well as business-friendly Democrats such as Sens. Mark Pryor (Ark.), Mary Landrieu (La.) and Kay Hagan (N.C.). The help for Hagan is notable, since Warren and Hagan are on opposite sides of a fight over implementing derivatives rules under the Dodd-Frank law. Warren appears to be following the old adage that today’s enemy can be tomorrow’s friend, and not burning bridges unnecessarily.

Indeed, while everybody’s focused on her supposed presidential ambitions, Warren might be playing a different game altogether. As a New Republic profile of her put it, “she is relentlessly, perhaps ruthlessly, maybe even a bit messianically, focused on advancing her policy agenda.”If her rhetorical approach proves fruitful in November, she will gain additional influence within the party. She won’t need a presidential bid to flex her muscles and pressure Democrats on bills of importance to her, such as her legislation to restore the firewall between commercial and investment banking in the old Glass-Steagall law. That could put Hillary Clinton in a tricky spot, since her husband repealed it. Even without a presidential campaign of her own, Warren may have the power to put her stamp on 2016. But Warren 2014 will have to triumph first.