Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Elizabeth Warren Positions Herself as the Front-Runner

The Democratic senator’s DNA test wasn’t a mere rebuttal of Trump. It also shows she’s a presidential contender.

October 15, 2018 at 8:30 PM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

She’s also running for re-election in the Senate
Photographer: Hadley Green/The Washington Post/Getty Images

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If anyone held the belief that the fight for the 2020 presidential nomination isn’t fully engaged, Senator Elizabeth Warren just proved them wrong.

On Monday, the Massachusetts Democrat used a campaign-style video to disclose a DNA test proving a very distant Native American ancestry. On the surface, Warren was fighting back against accusations that she improperly claimed that ethnic background. But this wasn’t principally a rebuttal of slurs that President Donald Trump and other Republicans are sure to keep making. What’s really going on is invisible-primary positioning, even though she made no mention of the 2020 race. Warren’s video does three things: