After months of struggling to find a foothold in the presidential race, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has climbed into third place in national surveys that suggest her far-left, policy-heavy campaign is resonating with Democratic voters.
Ms. Warren gained traction from the rollout of her plan to erase $50,000 of student debt for most borrowers and her breakout performances at candidate forums.
She also was the first of the Democratic hopefuls to call for impeaching President Trump after the release last month of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
Her campaign now is scrambling to build on the gains and avoid fizzling like some of her rivals who had their day in the sun, such as former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas and Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California.
“There will be many candidates who have flash-in-the-pan moments, and they’ll rise and fall. Elizabeth Warren is building support and rising,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which is closely allied with Ms. Warren.
The polls also suggest Ms. Warren has overcome to some degree the scandal of erroneously claiming American Indian heritage early in her career as a Harvard law professor, an offense that prompted Mr. Trump to nickname her “Pocahontas.”
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Her jump from fifth to third place was recorded in three national surveys released this week. The biggest surge for Ms. Warren was in a Quinnipiac University poll in which she received 12% support, up 8 percentage points from the same poll a month earlier.
In all three polls, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden led the race, with Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont a distant second.
Ms. Warren’s rise was less dramatic in the other two polls. She advanced roughly 2 percentage points in the Morning Consult and the CNN polls, but it was enough to jump into third place with 9% and 8%, respectively.
Veteran pollster G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College, called the 2-point pickup “margin of error stuff.” But he didn’t doubt that Ms. Warren was on the rise, which he credited to her college debt relief plan.
“She’s got some media attention, and that is largely responsible for her rise. We can debate how significant the rise is,” Mr. Madonna said. “What is going on right now is what I refer to as the flavor of the month.”
He said the new flavor is Mr. Biden, who announced his long-awaited entrance into the race last week to great fanfare and an immediate double-digit bounce in the polls.
But when it comes to who has the best policy ideas, Democratic voters put Ms. Warren just behind Mr. Biden, with 23% and 19%, respectively, according to the Quinnipiac poll.
Ms. Warren, a liberal firebrand who was expected to vie with Mr. Sanders for the party’s young and far-left voters, has outshone most of her rivals at recent forums and on the stump.
Last week, she wowed crowds at a CNN forum in Manchester, New Hampshire, and then at the “She the People” forum in Houston.
Ms. Warren exudes energy and, when asked about a big problem facing the country, fires back by saying, “I’ve got a plan for that.”
She says it so frequently on the campaign trail that the line gets laughs and applause.
The plan almost always involves an ambitious redistribution of wealth stemming from her “ultra-millionaire tax.”
She proposes slapping a 2% annual tax on the 75,000 families with $50 million or more in wealth, raking in an estimated $2.75 trillion over the course of a decade.
That is enough, according to Ms. Warren’s estimates, to pay for her plan for college debt relief, tuition-free education at public colleges and universities, a universal child care program and a down payment on the “Green New Deal” to fight climate change and “Medicare for All” government-run health care.
The plans have populist appeal that crosses party lines.
A majority of Americans — 64% — said they would support her plan to wipe out a big chunk of college debt, according to a recent Hill-HarrisX survey, which described the plan but did not attach Ms. Warren’s name to the proposal.
“This isn’t just a time to pretend. This is a time to actually have a plan and then execute on that plan,” Ms. Warren recently told reporters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, according to the Des Moines Register. “Ultimately, it’s not just about winning in 2020. It’s about starting to make real change in 2021 so that we’re never in the position to elect another Donald Trump president of the United States.”
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
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