Elizabeth Warren is surging, which was not at all a certainty when her 2020 campaign got underway. But she's now drawing big crowds and attention for her detailed policy positions, all while establishing herself in the upper tier of candidates with Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. The flip side of all that is that she is now expected to become a bigger target of her Democratic rivals. Here's a look at coverage:
- Those crowds: The Hill notes that she drew 15,000 in Seattle on Aug. 25 and 12,000 in Minnesota the previous week. The story quotes a former aide to President Obama, who drew huge crowds himself as a 2008 candidate, though not at this stage. “What Warren is doing this early on is pretty unprecedented,” the aide says. “If we would have attracted crowd sizes that large early on, Hillary would have run for the hills." (The Sanders campaign counters that he has drawn comparably sized crowds.)
- A skeptic: Count President Trump unimpressed about this. "They do stories so big on Elizabeth 'Pocahontas' Warren’s crowd sizes, adding many more people than are actually there, and yet my crowds, which are far bigger, get no coverage at all," he tweeted. "Fake News!" He made a similar point on the Brian Kilmeade radio show, per Fox News, asserting that news reports appear to be inflating Warren's crowd sizes. "Nobody even talks about my crowds," he adds.