Elizabeth Warren

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a fearless consumer advocate who has made her life’s work the fight for middle class families, is serving her second term in the U.S. Senate. Warren’s life “hasn’t followed a straight line,” she has said. She grew up in Oklahoma on what she describes as “the ragged edge of the middle class” in a family that nearly lost their house after her father suffered a heart attack. She left college to marry at 19, but had a second chance to earn her degree from a public college that cost $50 a semester. She achieved her dream of becoming a public school special education teacher, but lost her job while pregnant with her daughter. Warren enrolled in Rutgers Law School and graduated pregnant with her son, and soon returned to teaching. She met Bruce Mann, a fellow law professor, and they have been married since 1980. Warren taught law at schools across the country for the next 30 years, and focused her research on why working families are going broke. She discovered that working families weren’t falling through the cracks — they were falling into traps. After Wall Street crashed our economy in 2008, she fought to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to protect people from getting tricked and scammed by big banks and corporations. After Senate Republicans vowed to block her nomination to serve as the CFPB’s first director, Warren went back home to Massachusetts and ran against one of them — and won. Her journey laid the foundation for the plans she has proposed as a presidential candidate and a senator, fighting to make sure everyone gets the same chances she got to succeed.