Warren 2016

Warren on skipping 2016: ‘You think I’m not forcing a debate?’

By David McCabe

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has a message for people skeptical of her decision not to run for the White House in 2016: It won’t stop her from pursuing her message of economic populism.

“You think I’m not forcing a debate?” she responded to The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, when he challenged her decision not to seek the Democratic nomination for president.

“Call me back in a year and ask me what type of debate we’re having,” she added.

“I’m doing the work I should be doing,” she told him later.

The comments appeared at the end of a lengthy profile of Warren, focusing on her effort to influence former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House.

Progressive groups have been pushing Warren to run for months, but she has been insistent that she has no plan to seek the nomination. At the same time, she has been building her profile by battling Democrats and the White House on a number of policy debates.

She is one of the leading critics of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal supported by the Obama administration and was one of the forces behind the successful opposition of banker Antonio Weiss’s nomination to be a Treasury Department official.

She secured a place in Democratic leadership last year, acting as a liaison between progressive groups and the rest of the conference.