...I took out an oversize I’M A WARREN DEMOCRAT button that her campaign has been handing out at events and put it on the table. What does she think that phrase means? “Oh, it means you’re somebody who is willing to get in the fight for an America that doesn’t just work for the rich and the powerful but works for everybody else. And it’s both halves of that. It’s both what you’re fighting for, and it’s about a fight,” Warren told me, sounding about as off the cuff as she gets.

At least for now, no other campaign is trying this message. There’s no Kamala Harris Democrat. No Cory Booker Democrat. No Pete Buttigieg Democrat, Jay Inslee Democrat, Beto O’Rourke Democrat, Amy Klobuchar Democrat. From the moment he entered the race, former Vice President Joe Biden has stressed, and does so every time he finds the slightest opening to squeeze it in, that he is “an Obama-Biden Democrat.” When I brought that last one up to Warren, she rolled her eyes twice and slightly tilted her head to catch up with them, a sort of silent Uh-huh and What else ya got?

Warren said she’s not here to criticize other Democrats, but she made a point that many have made about Biden: It’s hard to move people’s hearts, or their feet to the polls, with lines like “I think I have the most far-reaching plan that’s in reach,” as he described his climate-change plan in New Hampshire last week. “Some people think small change, incremental change, is how we will move America in a better direction; I think big change is easier,” Warren told me, ticking through some of her biggest proposals, from universal child care to canceling student debt. If put into place, they would make for the biggest active restructuring of the American economy in history. “It’s easier to get more people into the fight, and it’s easier to get more people to pay attention to how it would touch their lives. And that’s our path to winning. So this is the ‘Ask for big or ask for little.’ Ask for big!”

...Elizabeth Lindquist, a 51-year-old oncology pharmacist, poured her heart out to Warren on the photo line about a friend who wishes Warren would stop using the term special needs. The senator didn’t quite give the answer Lindquist wanted, but she was still swooning. I asked her about her i’m a warren democrat tank top. “It means I’m not a conservative Democrat, I’m not a corporate Democrat,” she told me, deciding she was going to say the next part too. “And it also means that I’m a Democrat—as opposed to the candidate I organized for in four states in 2016 … and … I wish hadn’t run this time.”

...Warren is tapping into something distinctly 2020 in the Democratic electorate: frustration with the system, deepened by Trump, yet also an exhaustion with big talk, and suspicion of more chaos that could follow from another revolution, like the one Sanders is demanding. People may want to burn down the building, but they want to see the blueprints for what comes next. “It’s the planning and the ability to explain it and get things across,” Ben Silver, a 29-year-old, told me after Warren’s town hall in Peterborough. “It’s about telling people exactly what I believe is broken and what we can do to fix it,” Warren explained to reporters a few minutes later. “The No. 1 thing I hear afterwards when people come through to do selfies is, ‘This gives me hope.’ Hope because it really is a path forward. It’s not pretend; it’s not hand-waving.”

...Warren knows she’s an odd fit for a movement leader. “The difference now is, I see the path,” she told me. “I am an unexpected person to lead this movement. But I know that it’s right.”

More at https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/warren-democrat-2020/594430/