NORFOLK, VIRGINIA—“I have to tell you all: running for president, it’s just an extraordinary experience,” Elizabeth Warren said on stage Friday night under the Old Dominion scoreboard at Chartwell Arena in southern Virginia. This was after she’d been speaking for about an hour to the crowd of about 4,000 who’d turned out waving banners reading “Dream Big, Fight Hard” and wearing shirts with the scolding phrase once directed at her that has become a feminist rallying cry, “Nevertheless, she persisted.”

Just then, a man toward the back of the floor shouted out: “We love you Elizabeth Warren!” and the cheering in the crowd swelled up. “I am just gonna say, it’s extraordinary. It’s extraordinary because this is the moment. This is our moment...”

“So many of my friends are diehard Trump supporters,” says Virginia Trager, who lives in Westmoreland County, about two hours’ drive north, standing with her daughter and her grandson. “I just don’t understand how they can support somebody that is flaunting illegal behaviour. Throwing the emoluments business down the tubes. I just don’t understand. These are people that say they support our troops. And when you have the Kurds being abandoned,” she said, “I don’t know what’s happening. So we’ve got to make a change.” In pursuit of that change, Trager says next year she’s voting “blue no matter who” (in reference to the Democratic party’s traditional colour) but has been impressed by Warren. “I love her. She’s great. She’s got a lot of plans. She knows your business. She’s done her homework.” She said of being in this arena hearing Warren and seeing the crowds, “Feels like democracy is still working. I’m not sure how long, but it feels like it’s working.”

...“Fairly progressive-minded Liberal” Tim Roth, a local man in his 60s who remains undecided in the primary race, decried the level of nasty polarization in the rhetoric. “I’m kind of as disgusted as at any time in my adult life. America, obviously, we’re polarized. I think it’s going to be challenging. Let’s put it this way. If one of the most progressive and open-minded candidates in my opinion was president for eight years, Barack Obama, and he couldn’t really move the needle much in terms of polarization, like, good luck. That said, I think Warren has the strongest chance so far of breaking through that lockdown because she’s proposing some ideas that are truly on paper bipartisan,” he said. “I think that’s kind of out-of-the-box thinking we’re going to have to have.”

...Cara, a 17-year-old from Virginia Beach and a Warren supporter from the beginning of the campaign who cited struggles with health insurance for her ailing mother as one of the motivating factors in her political viewpoint, summed up the emotion of being in this arena with a crowd cheering a surging Warren campaign. “I feel very at peace. I think that I feel very calm right now being in the presence with all these people that I feel similar to how I do.”

After the speech, after questions from the audience, when the arena lights came up, the night wasn’t over for the candidate or for many of those who’d come to see her. As is her campaign tradition, Warren vowed to stay and take selfies (“the core part of democracy,” she joked) with as many people as wanted them. The line contained hundreds waiting, at this moment that the candidate spoke of, for their moment beside her.

More at https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2019/10/19/elizabeth-warren-is-finding-her-moment.html