Elizabeth Warren (A New American Century)

Elizabeth Ann Warren (née Herring; born June 22, 1949) is an American politician and academic serving as the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts since 2013. She was formerly a prominent scholar specializing in bankruptcy law. A progressive, she has focused on consumer protection, economic opportunity, and the social safety net while in the Senate. Some commentators describe her position as left-wing populism, while others have described it as democratic socialism, similar to fellow Senator Bernie Sanders.

A graduate of the University of Houston and Rutgers Law School, she taught law at several universities, including the University of Houston, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. She is the author of three books and coauthor of six.

Warren's initial foray into public policy began in 1995 when she worked to oppose what eventually became a 2005 act restricting bankruptcy access for individuals. Her national profile rose during the late 2000s following her forceful public stances in favor of more stringent banking regulations following the 2007–08 financial crisis. She served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel of the Troubled Asset Relief Program and was instrumental in the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for which she served as its first Special Advisor.

Although she had declined to run for President in 2016, Warren was announced as Hillary Clinton's Vice Presidential running mate on July 8, 2016, in an attempt to bridge the sharp divide between the centrist Clinton wing of the Democratic Party and the progressive Sanders wing. At the time she was announced as Clinton's running mate, she had not yet secured the nomination, so she picked a VP nominee in the case that she did clinch the nomination, which she did following a controversial brokered convention. Warren was named as Clinton's running mate via acclimation, although she did run into some competition from the floor by Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, whom Sanders had named as his running mate in the case that he were to be nominated.

On the campaign trail, Warren served as the attack dog of the Clinton team, bashing Republican nominee Marco Rubio and his running mate, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, for their proposed policies that would, in her words, "cause a middle class upheaval unlike anything we have seen before." She also campaigned heavily for Democratic candidates for the Senate, Governor, and House elections. In the end, she and Clinton lost the election to Rubio and Haley by an electoral vote of 342 to 196. She resumed her role in the Senate following the election, where she has become one of Marco Rubio's fiercest critics. She voted against nearly every single one of Rubio's Cabinet appointees (with the sole exceptions of James Mattis and Mae Jemison),legislation proposals, and judicial appointments. She was also front and center in her opposition to Raymond Kethledge's nomination to the Supreme Court.

On February 9, 2019, Warren announced her candidacy for the 2020 United States presidential election at a rally in Lawrence, Massachusetts.