Sam Stein writes:

A 70-year-old, twice-elected Senator from Massachusetts might not sound like the biography of a transformative presidential candidate. But Elizabeth Warren is not your traditional White House aspirant, and her ascension in the Democratic primary represents, for better or worse, a tectonic shift within the Democratic Party.

Those who have run for the party’s nomination in the past have largely hailed from one of two perches: insurgents or establishment types. Warren’s candidacy is a synthesis of the two. She has spent decades operating in elite institutions from Harvard to the Obama administration to the halls of Congress. But she is also the first true candidate of the Netroots era of the Democratic Party, in which wonkiness and unapologetic progressivism are both regarded as unimpeachable political virtues.

That Warren is occupying this role makes eminent sense. She was, after all, once a member of the Netroots community herself, and behind the scenes she and her team have put in years of work working this community and courting its luminaries.

The extent of that work, and the ways in which it has boosted her rise, have gone largely unappreciated. Warren’s ascendance and the increasing likelihood that she will be her party’s nominee is, in no small way, the purest illustration to date of how the Democratic insurgents of the Bush era have come to occupy the positions of power in the days of Donald Trump. In Warren, they have found their pied piper.

“Warren uses this progressive, in-your-face language more naturally today than any Democrat has done,” said Peter Daou, who as a staffer on John Kerry’s 2004 campaign helped pioneer online political activism as a presidential prerogative. “She is literally the embodiment of what the Netroots was 15 years ago.” [Continue reading…]