‘Liz Was a Diehard Conservative’ - POLITICO Magazine

“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.”

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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.

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.”

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.

It wasn’t until Warren was recruited onto a federal commission to help reform the bankruptcy code in the mid-1990s—and then fought for those reforms and lost that battle in 2005—that she became the unapologetic partisan brawler she was in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, serving in the Senate and, now, stumping on the 2020 campaign trail. “I realize nonpartisan just isn’t working,” she recalls of that second conversion moment. “By then it’s clear: The only allies I have are in the Democratic Party, and it’s not even the majority of Democrats.”

Some friends and colleagues say Warren became radicalized, equating her change to a religious experience, to being born again. “She really did have a ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion when she saw the bankrupt consumers really were suffering—forced into bankruptcy by illness, firing or divorce—and not predators,” Johnson says. Other friends argue Warren’s shift has been more gradual, and that she is not the extremist her opponents have sought to portray her as. “It drives me crazy when she’s described as a radical left-winger. She moved from being moderately conservative to being moderately liberal,” says Warren’s co-author and longtime collaborator Jay Westbrook. “When you look at consumer debt and what happens to consumers in America, you begin to think the capitalist machine is out of line.”

After a childhood she describes as not very political, Warren attended George Washington University on a debate scholarship. Above, she is pictured second from left in the front row in the 1967 GWU yearbook as “Liz Herring” (her maiden name). | George Washington University Library

The fact that Warren likely has spent more of her voting years outside the Democratic Party than in it distinguishes her from her 2020 primary opponents. She and Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, share many policy objectives and an inclination to rail against the powerful. The Vermont senator, however, largely decided what he believed 50 years ago and has been remarkably consistent ever since. Warren is ever-evolving, questioning her own assumptions and hungry for new information—even today, as she sets the pace of the 2020 policy debate with detailed new proposals on childcare, taxes on the wealthy and large corporations, and a call for a new era of trust-busting in sectors from tech to agriculture.

“Her worldview is very informed by data,” says Angela Littwin, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who was Warren’s student in the late ’90s and became a mentee of both Warren and Westbrook. “What changed [Warren’s ideology] was the stories of ordinary people filing for bankruptcy. That speaks really well of her that she was presented with information contrary to her worldview and adopted it.”

Warren’s ideological and political transformations also occurred well before she entertained running for public office—lending them an authenticity often lacking in politicians who change their policy positions out of self-interest.

“If you had to pick a professor at Harvard to become a progressive icon in a decade,” says Littwin, “she wouldn’t have even been on the short list.”

***

Warren didn’t inherit the Republican Party from her parents or from her home state. Oklahoma was mostly a blue state while Warren was growing up there. Although partisan politics wasn’t much discussed at home, she speculated in a 2018 interview with the Intercept that her parents were New Deal Democrats. Yet Harry, one of Warren’s best friends in high school, distinctly remembers Warren being an “ice-cold Republican,” as she would sometimes tease her. (Warren joked back that Harry had “socialist” friends.)

It’s unclear exactly why Warren chose to become a Republican in the first place, given her family’s background. When I asked her, she said, “I voted—sometimes voted for Democrats, sometimes voted for Republicans—but never thought of myself, never had to frame myself, in political terms.”

In the late 1970s and ’80s, while Warren was in law school at Rutgers and then began her legal career, the right and Reaganomics were ascendant. In legal academia, this manifested itself in part through the “Law and Economics” movement, which sought to integrate the study of economics into law to emphasize efficiency and economic impact. In 1986, Columbia Law School professor Bruce Ackerman—now at Yale Law School—described the movement as “the most important thing in legal education since the birth of Harvard Law School.”

Colleagues from her early years as a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin recall Warren, second from left, as “surprisingly anti-consumer” and “believing much of what the corporate folks say about how the free markets work.” | Tarlton Law Library Digital Collections

The movement and its campus programs were fueled in part by funding from wealthy conservatives and corporations eager to inject some business-oriented thinking into the relatively liberal environs of elite American law schools. John Olin, a multimillionaire business tycoon who backed many conservative causes, began funding one of the movement’s intellectual founders, law professor Henry Manne, in the early ’70s and poured $68 million into Law and Economics programs at schools across the country in the late ’80s. “Economic analysis tends to have conservatizing effects,” James Pierson, the longtime director of Olin’s foundation, which distributed the funds, once explained to the New York Times.

A key component of the Law and Economics movement were frequent “summer camps” or “Manne camps”—conferences for law professors and judges hosted by Manne’s Law and Economics Center. The camps received funding from more than a hundred corporate donors, many of whom would later become favorite targets of Warren. In her first years as a self-described “baby law professor,” Warren attended a Manne camp, which she describes vaguely in A Fighting Chance as “an intensive course for law professors who wanted to learn more about economics.” It was there that Warren met her second husband, Bruce Mann, a fellow law professor.

“As we’ve always said, something good came from Law and Economics,” Warren says now. “I found my sweetie. That should be a good country-western song don’t you think? ‘I Found My Sweetie at Law and Economics Camp.’”

Warren joined the faculty at the University of Houston in 1978, and soon jumped to the University of Texas at Austin, where colleagues recall Law and Economics having a strong influence early on. “She did begin, as a student and as a young lawyer, sort of believing much of what the corporate folks say about how the free markets work, and they have to be left free to do what they want,” says Doug Laycock, who had the office next to Warren’s at UT-Austin and is married to Warren’s longtime co-author, Teresa Sullivan, a sociologist who later became president of the University of Virginia.

In a 1980 paper she wrote at the University of Houston, Warren argued that utility companies were over-regulated, and described the arguments of consumer advocates on the other side of the debate as “fallacious” and based on “unscrutinized, long-accepted conventional wisdom.” | Notre Dame Law Review via HeinOnline

In 1980, one of Warren’s first papers as a full-time professor at the University of Houston took on one of the most divisive political issues of the time: utilities. A decade of energy crises and nearly unprecedented price hikes had made government-sanctioned monopolies a popular target for populist politicians. As Arkansas state attorney general in the late ’70s and then again in his gubernatorial campaigns in the early ’80s, Bill Clinton made utility companies the poster boy for corporate greed and political corruption. In the 1982 gubernatorial race, Clinton attacked his Republican opponent as “soft on utilities, tough on the elderly.”

In her paper, however, Warren argued that utility companies were over-regulated and that automatic utility rate increases should be institutionalized to avoid “regulatory lag,” in spite of consumer advocate concerns. “Eliminating regulatory lag will end the need for frequent rate hearings, and will, thus, reduce the administrative costs of regulation,” she wrote. On the other side of the debate were consumer advocates, whose arguments she described then as “fallacious” and based on “unscrutinized, long-accepted conventional wisdom.”

Steve Mitnick, editor-in-chief of the trade publication Public Utilities Fortnightly, reviewed the paper at Politico Magazine ’s request and said he was shocked Warren had authored it. “That is such a pro-utility paper. It’s, like, awesome,” he told me. “She would never say this today. … If you’re a utility, you love that thing.” Barbara Alexander, a longtime consumer advocate in the utilities sector, also reviewed the paper, and blasted it: “What struck me was her lack of presentation of the consumer viewpoint and the underlying policies governing rate-making. She simplistically makes conclusions without any analysis of actual facts, just economic theory.”

In Warren’s prolific career, the article, originally published in the Notre Dame Law Review, has had a relatively long shelf life and has been cited in cases before the Ohio and Louisiana state Supreme Courts. The Texas Court of Appeals cited the paper approvingly in 2006.

In our interview, Warren dismissed the idea that the paper suggested she was a conservative. “I followed theory and tried my hand at what all academics did then in our field, and that was theory,” she said. “I pretty quickly discovered not only that the theory was wrong, but it was deeply misleading.”

“This was before Elizabeth formed her own notions about the justice aspect of contract law and the social utility of it,” Warren’s University of Houston colleague and mentor John Mixon told Warren biographer Antonia Felix for her recent book, Elizabeth Warren: Her Fight. Her Work. Her Life. In her early writing, Mixon said, Warren was “learning the technicalities of this essentially right-wing law.”

Warren’s academic career soon took a turn that made her far less comfortable with unfettered free markets. Prompted in part by a surge in personal bankruptcy filings following the passage of new bankruptcy laws in 1978, Warren, Sullivan and Westbrook in 1982 decided to study bankruptcy in a way that was then considered novel in academia: by digging into the anecdotal evidence of individual filings and traveling to bankruptcy courts across the country, often rolling a small copy machine through airports along the way.

By her own admission, Warren was the skeptic on the team. “I set out the prove [the people filing for bankruptcy] were all a bunch of cheaters,” she recounted in 2007 in an interview on University of California Television. “My take on this, my thrust, what I was going to do is I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest of us by hauling off to bankruptcy and just charging debts that they really could repay, or who’d been irresponsible in running up debts.”

But the team concluded the opposite: that abuse was rare and that bankruptcy filings were skyrocketing not because people were lazy but because the system was poorly designed—“rigged against” would come later. Warren, Westbrook and Sullivan published their work as a book in 1989, As We Forgive Our Debtors, which helped to make them stars in their fields.

A bankruptcy study that Warren and UT colleagues Jay Westbrook and Teresa Sullivan conducted in the 1980s—highlighted here in campus publications—helped to tip her in a more progressive, pro-consumer direction. | Tarlton Law Library Digital Collections

Warren says the first trip to a bankruptcy court in San Antonio upended her feelings about Law and Economics and the more theoretical, free-market approach she had espoused. “My thinking rotates on its axis,” she says now. Westbrook recalls Warren’s conversion similarly. “Law and Economics in 1981 and ’82 was perhaps at its peak, particularly in bankruptcy,” he says. “I don’t have any question that over time she developed a greater empathy with people in financial distress.”

“I was willing to run down the path with these guys until I discovered there’s nothing solid under our feet,” Warren says of the more conservative legal academics at the time. “Forever after, I become inductive instead of deductive.”

***

Warren may well have remained a Republican and merely academically famous, not nationally famous, if not for a 71-year-old former middle school principal from Drumright, Oklahoma.

In 1994, on a lark, Virgil Cooper decided to run in the Democratic primary against an Oklahoma congressional incumbent, Representative Mike Synar. Cooper raised almost no money and said his political idol was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. But Synar had become a top target for the National Rifle Association, which poured money into the primary. Cooper won. While he lost the general election to Tom Coburn, Synar’s ouster was an unlikely first domino to fall in the launch of Warren’s political career and helped to transform her from a policy-focused moderate Republican to one of the most potent forces in the Democratic Party.

President Clinton was the next domino in line. Clinton liked Synar—now out of a job—and appointed him in 1995 to chair a blue-ribbon commission to study the country’s bankruptcy laws. It was Synar who first brought Warren to Washington and kicked off what she later called her “long and painful baptism into national politics.” The two Oklahomans had been opponents in high school debate, and Synar asked Warren to be the adviser to the commission and to help write its report. “We hadn’t seen each other in the intervening decades, but 14-year-old boys seem to remember 15-year-old girls who once beat them in [debate] tournament play,” Warren recalls in A Fighting Chance, calling the moment “one of those little twists that makes me wonder about divine intervention.”

Even as her academic thinking had begun to shift left, Warren remained a registered Republican when she was a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, above, in the early 1990s. She changed her registration in 1996, shortly after moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to teach at Harvard. | Leif Skoogfors/Corbis via Getty Images

The commission met almost every month from April 1996 through August 1997, both in Washington and around the country. While there were debates among the commissioners, several members said they were policy-focused, not political. According to people on the commission, Warren—who was still a registered Republican when she started in the role and told other staffers so—came across as a policy-minded academic who worked hard at incorporating different viewpoints, even if she disagreed.

“Warren went above and beyond to ensure broad public inclusion,” says Melissa Jacoby, one of the staff attorneys on the commission who is now a law professor at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

The partisanship ramped up just as the commission was winding down. In October 1997, the commission submitted its report to Congress with more consumer-centric recommendations. But in September, a business-friendly proposal making it more difficult to file for bankruptcy had already been introduced in Congress, setting up an eight-year fight over the topic that had become the central focus of Warren’s academic career.

She lost. In April 2005, President George W. Bush signed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which made it harder to declare bankruptcy and erase past debts. “It’s a David versus Goliath story, but this time David gets his slingshot shoved down his throat—sideways,” Warren writes in A Fighting Chance.

Mentioning the 2005 bill still angers Warren. “It was worse than ‘ignore.’ They actually had to hold up a hand and say, ‘Don’t bother me with facts,’” she says of the Republicans and Democrats—among them, Senator Joe Biden—who pushed the bill. “I just saw that there was no pretense here of either adherence to theory, which is where we started this conversation, or to even a vague understanding of what was going on.”

She had officially changed parties in 1996, shortly after moving to Cambridge and in the months leading up to the presidential election that year. But it was after the 2005 bankruptcy reforms that friends and colleagues saw Warren take a real turn toward Democratic politics. The 2005 bill, Westbrook says, “got her even further into the political process, and she realized that people in the Republican Party didn’t share her views on policy.”

“Then it becomes really partisan after that, because I realize ‘nonpartisan’ just isn’t working,” Warren recalls. “‘Nonpartisan’ means that families who have already been kicked in the gut over and over just get kicked a few more times so that a handful of giant institutions can boost their profit margins.”

“This was raw politics.”

***

Warren’s anger soon met the moment.

In November 2008, as the economy collapsed, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Warren and asked her to be a part of a five-person congressional oversight panel on the bank bailout package (also known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program). When the Obama administration came in early the next year, Warren began pitching the administration on what would eventually become the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans ultimately blocked her from running the federal agency, so she decided to challenge Republican Senator Scott Brown in 2012.

The very concept of the CFPB demonstrates how Warren has changed since her early academic career—but also the limits of that conversion. Warren insists she is still a believer in the power and efficiency of markets, a capitalist to “my bones,” she has said—using a label some of her Democratic opponents shy away from or outright reject.

Warren, pictured at a 2010 congressional hearing, fully converted to partisan Democrat after her bankruptcy work—including as an adviser to a federal bankruptcy commission in the mid-1990s—was largely ignored in a 2005 bankruptcy bill signed into law by President George W. Bush.| Melissa Golden/Bloomberg via Getty Images

On the presidential campaign trail, she still pitches her reforms and proposals, even those with dramatic government intervention, as means of correcting the market, not replacing it. Warren named her signature campaign proposal—sweeping reforms aimed at corruption—the Accountable Capitalism Act. Her call to break up large technology companies, she says, is about how their size has created an unfair playing field, a failing market. Her proposal to create a government manufacturer of generic drugs comes from her belief that the market has broken down, with generic drugs either not being produced or rising in price; a public option for generic drugs could jump-start the marketplace, she hopes.

“That’s her fundamental framework—she’s a believer in economics,” says Johnson, her UT-Austin colleague. “It’s just that she now shifts to protect consumers.”

“Throughout the years we worked together, she’s always been focused on markets,” Westbrook adds. “Both of us believe very much in markets.”

What Warren’s Republican history means for her presidential prospects remains unclear. There’s a version of this story in which her politically mixed background makes her the ideal candidate to capture not just the the American left but also the center—a pugilistic populist vowing to take on corporations, a policy-savvy reformer who believes that markets are essential to the economy.

But that’s not the political landscape of 2019. Warren’s tough stance during the financial crisis got her tagged by Republicans and many Democrats as more Harvard liberal than an up-by-the-bootstraps working mom from Oklahoma. And her work on the CFPB alienated much of the financial services industry. Meanwhile, much of the left wing of the Democratic Party, for which she was the banner-carrier after the financial crisis, has found a new champion in the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. And members of the growing Democratic Socialists of America and the hosts of the popular leftist podcast Chapo Trap House have criticized Warren for her adherence to capitalism. As of this writing, she is generally polling fifth in the Democratic field, and her 2020 fundraising has fallen short of several other rivals’.

With some in the Democratic Party demanding purity, perhaps Warren thinks going back through her Republican history could hurt her. When I suggested near the end of our interview that she might consider talking more about that part of her biography, and her conversion, she was politely noncommittal.

“Sure, sure,” she said, before quickly pivoting back to another question.