Senator Elizabeth Warren announced on Monday that she is running for president, becoming the first major Democratic candidate to formally challenge Donald Trump for control of the White House, in what is likely to be a crowded and contentious primary campaign.

Warren, a former law professor who made her name in Democratic politics as an unrelenting critic of big banks and corporate power, declared her intention to form an exploratory committee in a stirring, slickly-produced video that highlights her central concerns: economic inequality, racial injustice, deregulation, and health insurance coverage. “Politicians look the other way while big insurance companies deny patients life-saving coverage, while big banks rip off consumers and while big oil companies destroy this planet,” she says in the four-and-a-half minute spot.

Though several high-profile Democrats including Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Beto O’Rourke, and Michael Bloomberg have all made public overtures towards a presidential run, including notable appearances in early voting states like Iowa, Warren’s moves were far more overt. While she too made appearances across the country during the midterms, she spent much of 2018 building her own parallel network of activists and curried favor among progressive and female candidates, essentially laying the groundwork for a nationwide field organization for when she entered the race.

Not all of her pre-emptive moves were deemed successful: Warren’s decision to take a DNA test to head off Trump’s questions about her claim to Native American ancestry, which she used to bolster her application to teach at Harvard University, mostly backfired when she was criticized by the Cherokee Nation.

Still, Warren’s biography is compelling. A blue-collar girl from Oklahoma, Warren overcame the odds to become a professor, then channeled her populist outrage at big banks at the height of the Great Recession to become a senator fighting for consumers. That message could prove winning, once again, especially if the economy sinks in 2019. “I’ve spent my career getting to the bottom of why America’s promise works for some families, but others, who work just as hard, slip through the cracks into disaster,” Warren says in the video. “And what I’ve found is terrifying: these aren’t cracks families are falling into, they’re traps. America’s middle class is under attack.”

Whether her early entrance is enough to give her an advantage over more popular, better-funded candidates remains to be seen. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 37 percent of voters viewed her negatively while only 30 percent viewed her favorably; Biden, in contrast, received a 53 percent favorability rating, while progressive rival Sanders had a 44 percent favorability rating. Warren faces a similar challenge among Democrats: in Iowa, the latest Des Moines Register survey found that Warren placed fourth among voters when asked which potential candidate would be their first choice in the primary—behind Biden, Sanders, and O’Rourke. That puts Warren in the top-tier of Democratic contenders, but close enough to the second tier (just ahead of Harris) to be in danger of slipping into the middle of the pack. In a crowded primary cycle where media attention and momentum will be priceless—and where the ability to dominate headlines will be considered a test of viability versus Trump—that could ultimately count for more than Warren’s impressive campaign infrastructure and her strong résumé.

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