Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren kicks off a small tour this week to promote her new book, set to come out Tuesday. Because people love to speculate about the next presidential candidates the minute one election ends, some believe Warren's book tour signals a 2020 presidential run for the White House. Let's not jump to conclusions, though.
The popular senator is scheduled to stop in her home state of Massachusetts as well as New York this week, and a conservative PAC reportedly plans to disrupt her tour. “We view [her] book launch as the soft launch of her presidential campaign. We’ll do the same to her as we did with Hillary Clinton in 2014,” America Rising executive director Colin Reed told Politico, referring to the "war room" the group created to follow Clinton's 2014 Hard Choices book tour.
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Warren is up for re-election in 2018, and the America Rising PAC wants to make her life "difficult" while she fights to keep her seat in the Senate, according to Politico. Similarly to how the group targeted Clinton when it became likely she would run for president, it plans to build opposition research "to damage [Warren's] 2020 prospects."
Is this conservative PAC right? Will Warren really run for president? The simple answer: No one knows yet.
The Massachusetts native opted out of running in 2016, instead making way for Clinton to take a shot at becoming the first female president. Back in 2015 (when the nation was blissfully unaware of the utter chaos 2016 would bring), Warren said on the Today show, "I’m not running, and I’m not going to run. I’m in Washington. I’ve got this really great job and a chance to make a difference on things that really matter."
Of course, things are pretty different now.
Warren hasn't hinted at a 2020 run, but it's pretty early for anyone to announce. After all, she has a 2018 re-election campaign to worry about first.
Aside from the fact that Warren isn't a big fan of media attention, it wouldn't be all that surprising if she did run for president — her book title, This Fight is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class even has a presidential ring to it. Still, this is Warren's 11th book, so it's not like she's publishing it just to launch a presidential run.
Basically, we'll have to wait and see what the next year brings.