Liz Was a Diehard Conservative’
Elizabeth Warren doesn’t like to talk about it, but for years she was a registered Republican. Why she left the GOP—and what it means for her campaign.
By ALEX THOMPSON
04/12/2019 05:03 AM EDT
Alex Thompson is a national political reporter at Politico.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/magazine/amp/story/2019/04/12/elizabeth-warren-profile-young-republican-2020-president-226613
“Fight.” It’s the signature word of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s short but consequential political career.
It’s in the title of both of the books she has published as a senator: A Fighting Chance and This Fight Is Our Fight. In her speech declaring her presidential candidacy in February, Warren told the crowd, “This is the fight of our lives” and, “I’ve been in this fight for a long time.” Her 2020 campaign asks voters to “Join the Fight.” Kate McKinnon-as-Warren on “Saturday Night Live” explained, “That’s the only f-word I know.”
But Warren used to be on the other side of the fight she is now waging. For many years before she entered politics, the woman now at the forefront of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party was a Republican.
County governments in New Jersey and Texas, where Warren lived in the 1970s and ’80s, could not locate Warren’s voter registration records, and the senator herself is circumspect about her political past. But records from the time Warren spent living in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts make clear that she was a registered Republican for at least several years of her midcareer adult life. It was not until 1996—when Warren was 47 years old and a newly minted Harvard law professor—that she changed her registration from Republican to Democrat.
Warren has acknowledged her Republican past before, but she does not often discuss it, or else downplays it. In a recent interview over tea at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she said she assumes the first time she registered as a Democrat was 1996, but added, “I’m not even 100 percent sure what I was registered as.” According to Warren, in the six presidential elections she voted in before 1996, she cast her ballot for just one GOP nominee, Gerald Ford in 1976. She does not talk about her Republican past in either of her books or as part of the biography she recounts in her stump speech; the information often comes as a surprise even to Beltway politicos and longtime Warren allies.
“I was just never very political,” is how Warren explains her Republican years. “I just never thought much about the political end.”
Friends and colleagues agree that Warren wasn’t much of a political activist in her youth or the early part of her career. But Warren’s intellectual journey is more complicated than the apathy-to-activism route she often presents.
Some on the left have already pointed out the less-than-progressive stances in her 2003 book, The Two Income Trap, including the rejection of a “quasi-socialist safety net to rival the European model.” But a review of Warren’s early scholarship and interviews with more than 20 friends and colleagues from her high school years through her academic career reveal a longer conservative track record that has not been fully explored. Warren’s conservatism centered not on social issues like abortion or gay rights, friends say, but on economic policy, the dominant focus of her academic work and now her presidential candidacy.
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Katrina Harry, one of Warren’s best friends in high school in Oklahoma, remembers that she and Warren “talked politics a lot, taxes and welfare and such, and I was just a flaming liberal back then.” Harry adds, “Liz was a diehard conservative in those days. … Now we’ve swapped—a 180-degree turn and an about-face.”
“Liz was sometimes surprisingly anti-consumer in her attitude,” says law professor Calvin Johnson, a colleague of Warren’s at the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1980s, who was also her neighbor and carpooled with Warren and her husband, Bruce Mann.
“I remember the first time I became aware of her as a political person and heard her speak, I almost fell off my chair,” says Rutgers law professor Gary Francione, who was a colleague of Warren’s at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1980s. “She’s definitely changed. It’s absolutely clear that something happened.”
(Voting records from the time Warren spent living in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts are pictured.)
Voter records from the time Warren spent living in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts make clear that she was a registered Republican for at least several years of her adult life. It was not until 1996, when she was 47, that she changed her registration to Democrat.
The story of Warren’s awakening—from a true believer in free markets to a business-bashing enforcer of fair markets; from a moderate Republican who occasionally missed an election to one of the most liberal senators in America vying to lead the Democratic Party—breaks the mold of the traditional White House contender and is key to understanding how she sees the world: with a willingness to change when presented with new data, and the anger of someone who trusted the system and felt betrayed.
Warren herself says that in her early academic work she was merely following the dominant theory of the time, which emphasized the efficiency of free markets and unrestrained businesses, rather than holding strong conservative beliefs herself. Still, she acknowledged in our interview that she underwent a profound change in how she viewed public policy early in her academic career, describing the experience as “worse than disillusionment” and “like being shocked at a deep-down level.”
Her conversion was ideological before it turned partisan. The first shift came in the mid-’80s, as she traveled to bankruptcy courts across the country to review thousands of individual cases—a departure from the more theoretical academic approach—and saw that Americans filing for bankruptcy more closely resembled her own family, who struggled financially, rather than the irresponsible deadbeats she had expected.
