Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, considered one of the most progressive members of the US upper house, officially launched her campaign for the US presidential election of 2020.

"This is the fight of our lives. The fight to build an America where dreams are possible, an America that works for everyone...and that is why I stand here today: to declare that I am a candidate for President of the United States of America," Warren, one of the country's leading Democrats, announced to a crowd in Lawrence, Massachusetts. </s> New York: Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand took a major step toward announcing a 2020 presidential bid on Tuesday, saying she is launching an exploratory committee for a White House run.

"It's an important first step, and it's one I am taking because I am going to run," the New York senator said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. She listed a series of issues she'd tackle as president, including better health care for families, stronger public schools and more accessible job training.

Gillibrand, 52, has already made plans to campaign in Iowa over the weekend, more than a year before the leadoff caucus state votes.

She joins what is expected to be a crowded primary field for the Democratic nomination that could feature more than a dozen candidates. Already, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren has announced her own exploratory efforts, and decisions by a number of other senators are expected in the coming weeks. </s> BOSTON (CBS/CNN) – Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced Monday she is launching an exploratory committee for president in 2020.

Warren released a statement and a campaign-style video in an email to supporters formally declaring her intentions.

The senior Democratic senator for Massachusetts has been considered a potential front-runner in the 2020 race for the White House. In September, Warren said publicly for the first time that she would “take a hard look at running for president.”

“I’ll announce a plan early in the new year. But there’s one thing I do know: I can’t do this alone,” she said in the statement Monday. “I’ve spent my career standing up to big banks and powerful corporations, and I didn’t stop when I got to the United States Senate. I don’t have binders full of bankers and CEOs to call for ginormous checks to launch this committee – in fact, most of them aren’t going to like what I’m doing and will probably spend their money somewhere else. That’s ok by me.”

Warren, 69, is the first U.S. Senator to take official steps to begin a 2020 presidential campaign. Her announcement signals she’s serious about running. Warren already has dozens of staffers on her team and about $12 million that she can transfer from her Senate campaign account.

“It allows her now to essentially start raising money to pay for the dozens of staffers, to pay for travel to Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, places we expect her to go in the coming days,” said CBS News political correspondent Ed O’Keefe.

An Oklahoma native, Warren went on to become a Harvard Law professor and former President Barack Obama nominated her to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau she helped create in 2010. But Obama later withdrew his nomination of Warren, a fierce critic of Wall Street financial institutions, when it appeared she would not be able to win Senate confirmation to the post.

In 2011, Warren decided to run for Senate in Massachusetts. She easily won the Democratic nomination and defeated Sen. Scott Brown in November 2012. She won re-election in 2018 with over 60 percent of the vote.

Warren has traded insults with President Donald Trump since he was a candidate in the 2016 election. She has called the president sexist and a “thin-skinned, racist bully” while he has frequently labeled her “Pocahontas.”

The derisive nickname references the controversy over Warren’s claims of Native American heritage. Warren has said that a great-great-great-grandmother was at least partially Native American. Critics have accused Warren of using claims about her ancestry to get ahead, but Harvard has denied that race was a factor in her hiring.

In October, Warren released a DNA test reportedly showing that a Native American relative appears in her family tree 6 to 10 generations ago. So far, the test has not silenced critics and the Cherokee Nation has called using DNA tests to lay claim to Native American heritage “inappropriate and wrong.”

In the Senate, Warren serves on the committees on banking, health, aging and the armed services.

Below are more facts about Warren and a timeline of her life via CNN:

Other Facts:

 She was a state high school champion in debate.

Before the mid-1990s, Warren was a registered Republican.

Warren is an expert on bankruptcy law and was an adviser to the National Bankruptcy Review Commission in the 1990s.

Warren has co-authored two books with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke” and “All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan.”

During Warren’s 2012 Senate race, a controversy erupted over Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry. Warren listed herself as a minority in a directory of law teachers from 1986-1995, based on, she says, stories of her family’s Cherokee heritage. Opponent Scott Brown claimed she did this to advance her career.

According to Congressional disclosure reports, Warren’s net worth is between $3.7 million and $10 million.

1966-1968 – Warren attends George Washington University on a debate scholarship. She drops out after two years to get married.

Early 1970s – After graduating from college, Warren works as a speech pathologist at a New Jersey elementary school.

1978-1983 – Assistant, and later associate professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

1983-1987 – Professor of law at the University of Texas Law School in Austin.

1987-1995 – Law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

1989 – Warren, along with co-authors Teresa Sullivan and Jay Westbrook, publishes her first book, “As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America.”

2007 – Warren writes an article outlining her idea for a federal agency designed to protect consumers from fraudulent or misleading financial products, like mortgages and credit cards.

November 14, 2008 – U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid appoints Warren to a Congressional oversight panel overseeing the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program.

September 17, 2010 – U.S. President Barack Obama appoints Warren as assistant to the president and special adviser to the Treasury secretary in order to launch the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

July 2011 – Due to opposition from Republicans and some Democrats, Obama declines to nominate Warren as permanent director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

August 1, 2011 – Warren steps down as a special adviser to Obama.

November 6, 2012 – Wins the race for Senate in Massachusetts, defeating incumbent Scott Brown.

December 15, 2014 – In an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, Warren repeats four times that she is not running for president in 2016.

June 2, 2015 – Warren writes a scathing letter to Mary Jo White, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), saying “I am disappointed by the significant gap between the promises you made during and shortly after your confirmation and your performance as SEC Chair.” In a statement released in 2013, Warren said that “the SEC needs to be a tough watchdog for the American people.”

February 7, 2017 – During a debate on the nomination of Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General. Senate Republicans vote to rebuke Warren as she reads a letter that Coretta Scott King wrote in 1986 criticizing Sessions.

April 18, 2017 – Her book “This Fight Is Our Fight” is published.

June 5, 2017 – FCTRY, a Brooklyn-based product design company, starts a Kickstarter campaign to fund the production of Elizabeth Warren action figures, and surpasses its goal within hours. FCTRY says it wants to partner with Emily’s List, a non-profit that promotes getting pro-choice, Democratic women elected to office.

November 27, 2017 – At an event honoring Navajo code talkers, US President Donald Trump references Warren by the nickname he gave her, Pocahontas. In an interview with MSNBC Warren remarks, “It is deeply unfortunate that the President of the United States cannot even make it through a ceremony honoring these heroes without having to throw out a racial slur. Donald Trump does this over and over thinking somehow he is going to shut me up with it. It hasn’t worked in the past, it isn’t going to work out in the future.”

October 15, 2018 – Warren releases results of a DNA test showing she has distant Native American ancestry, with analysis performed by Carlos Bustamante, a professor of genetics at Stanford University and adviser to Ancestry and 23 and Me.

November 6, 2018 – Is re-elected for a second term in the U.S. Senate. </s> WASHINGTON — Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced the formation of an exploratory committee for a presidential run, making her the highest profile Democrat to formally move toward a bid for the White House in 2020.

"If we organize together, if we fight together, if we persist together, we can win. We can and we will" Warren told supporters in a video posted online Monday morning.

Warren has long been viewed as a potential 2020 candidate. The former law professor is expected to be part of a large field of Democratic contenders that could include former Vice President Joe Biden, Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke and Sen. Bernie Sanders, the runner-up in the 2016 Democratic primary. </s> Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren formally kicked off her 2020 presidential campaign on Feb. 9 . Here's a look at Warren's background:Warren was born in Oklahoma and attended the University of Houston and Rutgers School of Law. She initially had a career in academia, teaching at Rutgers, the University of Texas, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard.She emerged as a national political figure in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, chairing the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. She quickly became one of the party's more prominent liberals even as she sometimes fought with Obama administration officials over their response to the market turmoil.Warren then worked with the Obama administration to establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.Warren won a Senate seat in 2012, becoming Massachusetts' first female senator. She was re-elected in 2018 before launching her exploratory committee.Should she launch a campaign, Warren must move past a widely panned October release of a DNA test meant to bolster her claim to Native American heritage. The move was intended to rebut Trump's taunts of Warren as "Pocahontas." Instead, her use of a genetic test to prove ethnicity spurred controversy that seemed to blunt any argument she sought to make.Warren's campaign is likely to revolve around the same theme she's woven into speeches and policy proposals in recent years: battling special interests, paying mind to the nexus between racial and economic inequities. She has $11 million left over from her commanding 2018 Senate re-election victory that can be used on her presidential run.One of her most significant competitors could be Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who is eyeing another presidential run harnessing the same populist rhetoric. </s> On the last day of 2018, Trump responded to Elizabeth Warren's 2020 exploratory committee announcement by saying he'd like for her to run — but that doesn't mean his message was friendly. The president's words came shortly after the Massachusetts senator announced she'd be taking the necessary legal first step for any presidential candidate.

The New York Times' Maggie Haberman tweeted a partial transcript of Trump's conversation with Fox News host Pete Hegseth, adding a caption that read, "If more evidence was needed that branding Jeb 'low-energy' is going to look quaint once 2020 gets started, here ya go"

In the Fox interview, Trump said of Warren's exploratory committee announcement,

Then, when asked whether he believed Warren could win if she ran for president, Trump replied, "Well, that I don't know, you'd have to ask her psychiatrist."

To be clear, Elizabeth Warren has not confirmed that she's running for president yet. Rather, it's a first-step indication that she's very likely to run. As CBS News reports, Warren will now begin traveling to the early-voting primary and early caucus states, and her exploratory committee will allow her to raise money to travel to these states and hire staff around these efforts.

In her video released on Monday, Warren said in part, "In our country if you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to be able to take care of yourself and the people you love. That's a fundamental promise of America."

If Warren does become the Democratic candidate for president, she and Trump will certainly have a long history leading up to their direct contention. POTUS has long challenged Warren's claims of Native American ancestry, repeatedly calling her "Pocahontas." In October, Trump tweeted,

In contrast, Warren has called Trump an "insecure money grubber" running on a platform of "racism, sexism and xenophobia" in the past, per ABC.

Later on Monday evening, Warren launched an Instagram livestream where she cracked a beer open and took questions from followers, per Fox News. Per the publication, Warren said, "I'm here in my kitchen, uh, and um, I thought maybe we'd just take some questions and I'd see what I can do."

Warren then described her plans for the evening. She said, "For New Year's Eve we watch Casablanca, we get some good food ... and, um, we sit there upstairs and we watch Casablanca."

Warren has not acknowledged Trump's referenced to her alleged psychiatry. </s> Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar has announced she is running for president in the 2020 election.

Her announcement was made at an outdoor rally by the Mississippi River near Minneapolis.

The 58-year-old enters an increasingly crowded field of Democrats competing to challenge President Donald Trump. </s> Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand held her first press conference this morning as a 2020 presidential candidate in her home state of New York. She announced Tuesday night that she is forming an exploratory committee to run for president, throwing her hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination in an appearance on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert."

"I have the passion and courage and fearless determination to get this done," she said during her announcement Wednesday morning. "I'm going to run for president of the United States because as a young mom, I will fight for your children, as my own health care should be right not a privilege."

Gillibrand is the second U.S. senator — and second female senator — to announce plans to begin the legal process of running for the Democratic presidential nomination. The 52-year-old is one of the most active and outspoken critics of President Trump and she earned acclaim from party activists when she began voting against all of the president's Cabinet and senior government nominees in early 2017.

She joins a Democratic presidential field that is beginning to take shape. Over the weekend, former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary Julián Castro formally launched his presidential bid, while Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren launched an exploratory committee on New Year's Eve. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii said over the weekend she plans to form an exploratory committee in the coming days. Several other senators, current and former governors and mayors, and former Vice President Joe Biden are still mulling potential campaigns. </s> Although U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has yet to officially enter the White House race, Massachusetts political observers cast the Democrat’s formation of an exploratory committee as the latest telltale sign that she’s running in 2020.

Warren announced Monday that she will formally explore a presidential run -- a legal mechanism which will allow the 2020 contender to fundraise and secure support for a possible campaign before formally throwing her hat into the ring.

Candy Glazer, the outgoing Longmeadow Democratic Town Committee chairwoman, said she was not surprised to see Warren announce the formation of an exploratory committee, arguing that it’s become standard protocol for many presidential contenders in recent election cycles.

“I think the message is out. I think today is the informal drop. ... I think this is just symbolic: It’s turning to a new year, 2019. I think the timing is great," she said in an interview. “New Year’s Eve, it’s a new beginning, it’s a new candidacy. I actually think this is perfect. And why not be the first? Don’t be coy.”

Contending that many people -- especially Massachusetts Democrats -- are “very happy today,” Glazer said she’s personally excited to see Warren focus on the White House.

The Longmeadow Democrat, who stressed that she’s “on Team Warren 2020," argued that the senator has a special bond with Western Massachusetts -- the home of her 2012 state party convention nomination and a famous debate with Republican incumbent Scott Brown.

“I think people are excited, she’s got a tremendous, tremendous base here -- that goes for the entire state, not just here in Western Massachusetts,” she said. “Although, I think here in Western Massachusetts we do have a very special bond with Elizabeth Warren -- she is here all the time. She’s had a very active district office here. She’s part of the community. ... I think a think a lot of people are very happy today.”

Candy Glazer steps back from Longmeadow Democratic Town Committee, but not away from Western Massachusetts politics (photos)

Glazer said she expects a formal campaign announcement to come “pretty soon.”

Warren tweeted Monday that she’ll announce “a decision early in the new year.”

Springfield-based political strategist Tony Cignoli agreed that rumored presidential candidates, like Warren, don’t go through the trouble of setting up exploratory committees and sending former staffers out to key primary states unless they’re serious about the White House.

“This is more than an exploratory committee, she’s in and she’s running,” he said in an interview. “That’s why you do this early, you try to make it clear to the other candidates that you’re a significant player -- You’re in this to run and win.”

Warren, who ended 2018 with more than $12 million in the bank, is expected to use the exploratory committee to ramp up her high-dollar fundraising as she mulls a possible presidential bid.

The growing use of exploratory committees in recent cycles has allowed contenders to hire operatives and court donors outside the gaze of the Federal Election Commission and other potential challengers.

Cignoli offered that while federal law bars candidates actively running for two different federal offices from transferring money between their separate campaign accounts, “there is so much that you can do with your exploratory (committee) that will benefit the campaign itself.”

“Certainly it’s separate accounts, but the money, the time, the energy that you put into the exploratory it’s very much like being in the early stages of an actual, full-blown campaign,” he said. “Because what you’re doing already is hiring operatives; you’re putting people on the ground who are making phone calls to get you commitments from potential delegates, superdelegates from the activists who are out there in the key states. It allows you to do an awful lot of work that would just be early regular presidential work anyway. You differentiate the money, but it’s hard to differentiate the activity.”

Cignoli further argued that exploratory committees offer potential candidates “a little bit more wiggle room as to where (their) money’s coming from, who it’s coming from.”

“It allows you to keep a little bit close to the vest -- or secret -- who some of your support team is going to be,” he said. “The other thing that it does is it allows potential supporters to be with you who may not want other campaigns to know that they’re there.”

Warren, whose campaign officials are expected to meet in Cambridge Tuesday, reported a cash balance of $12.5 million in wake of her 2018 U.S. Senate re-election -- a cycle in which the senator repeatedly raised an average of about $1 million per month.

The senator’s ability to draw down large fundraising amounts could give her an edge over other Democrats who are reportedly eyeing 2020 runs.

Such fundraising prowess will be needed to compete against President Donald Trump, who announced his re-election bid shortly after being sworn in to office.

The Republican incumbent reported a $35 million cash balance for his 2020 re-election bid as of Sept. 30.

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel argued that if Warren officially enters the 2020 fray, “Americans will see her for what she is: another extreme far-left obstructionist and a total fraud."

“Voters know President Trump’s agenda gets results and they will make their voices heard at the ballot box in 2020,” she said in a statement.
United States Senator Elizabeth Warren announces her intention to run for President of the United States in the 2020 United States presidential election.