Commentary: Who do Democrats really want? Elizabeth Warren?
7:37 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 8, 2015

Fast forward. It’s the last night of the 2016 Democratic Party nominating convention. The first woman presidential nominee takes the stage to claim her hard fought prize. Balloons drop and confetti fills the air as the crowd begins to chant — wait for it – “Win, Liz, Win.”

Since she says she is not running, some might call that scenario improbable or even a pipedream. The reality is Elizabeth Warren is not a candidate only until she is. History is filled with publicly reluctant politicians who determine, after much soul searching and the urging of passionate supporters, that they have no choice but to launch their candidacy because no one is offering their solutions to the challenges facing America.

Conventional wisdom has Hillary Clinton as the odds-on favorite for the nomination for reasons ranging from her years of experience to the vaunted Clinton machine to the simple assumption that it’s her turn. But to paraphrase what one former staffer of President Barack Obama-turned-Warren activist wrote, improbable isn’t the same as impossible.

Ask Obama, who defied the polls of 2007 and defeated Clinton for the nomination. Like now, Clinton then was the clear front-runner, beating Obama 41 percent to 17 percent in a January, 2007 ABC News/The Washington Post poll. In Gallup’s late October Election Review that year, the research company wrote its “national presidential polling strongly points to Clinton winning the 2008 Democratic nomination.” Oops.

Early polling has meaning but it’s not necessarily a reliable predictor of the future. The more important polls may be those that paint a more macro picture of what voters want from their next president, and 71 percent of voters in a December 2014 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll said they wanted “a different approach from Obama.”...

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