ATHENS, Ohio—Elizabeth Warren popped in here Thursday to call her old protégé and gubernatorial candidate Rich Cordray “the nerd we need.” Cordray responded by saying that he didn’t think the trip would be “the last stop on her whistle tour—but we’ll leave that today.”
No one said anything about Cherokees.
Making her first appearance outside Massachusetts since her attempt to demonstrate the strength of her presidential campaign with a DNA-test release that fell flat, Warren would not talk about Donald Trump or the campaign she’s still looking at launching not long after Tuesday, when she’s expected to be easily reelected to a second term in the Senate. But she did make a case against the president and his party that she said applies here in this tight election and across the country.
The choice for voters, Warren said, is about protecting health care, deciding if CEOs who break the law should go to jail, dealing with student loan debt, tackling climate change and criminal justice reform, and ending the expanded flow of money into politics made possible by Citizens United.
“Change is coming,” she said to cheers.
Warren drew a crowd of more than 300 on campus at Ohio University, which Cordray joked was impressive for the afternoon after Halloween, and which was big enough for campus security to insist that they had to turn people away or risk being over fire-marshal capacity. That is not, however, at the level that Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, largely seen as her fellow front-runners, have been drawing on college campuses in recent weeks, nor as many as Kamala Harris drew when she was on campus in Iowa City last week.