(CNN)The headlines coming off a new poll in Iowa -- sponsored by CNN and the Des Moines Register -- largely focus on the fact that Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is now at the top tier of the 2020 field in the crucial Iowa caucuses. That notion drastically undersells how strong a position Warren is actually in.

Yes, Warren tops the field in the CNN-DMR poll with 22% support, followed by former Vice President Joe Biden at 20% (the poll has a four-point margin of error, putting the two essentially in a tie). Warren and Biden are followed distantly by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders at 11%.
But that doesn't tell the whole story: The topline numbers are actually the least good thing for Warren in the poll.

Consider this:
* Warren gained 7 points from the June DMR/CNN poll and has almost tripled her support in the state from a December 2018 poll. Biden, meanwhile, has lost support in each of the four DMR/CNN polls between December 2018 and now. And Sanders dropped 5 points from just June until now.
* Her favorable numbers in the poll also make clear how much energy and passion is behind her candidacy presently. Three-quarters of those polled had a favorable view of her, including a whopping 44% who had a "very favorable" opinion. That compares very favorably to the 29% who view Biden very favorably and the 26% who feel that same way about Sanders.
* Warren is the first or second choice of 42% of those polled. That's well in front of Biden (30% first/second combined), Sanders (21%), South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg (18%) and California Sen. Kamala Harris (16%).

Any one of those three data points would suggest that this poll may have only caught the start of Warren's rise in Iowa. All three together suggest she is well positioned to take off like a rocket ship in the state. Not only does she already have a broad-base of support in the state (as evidence by the topline numbers) but she also has significant passion among those who are for her and remains well-liked -- and a possible voting option -- for those who say she is their second choice at the moment.

More at https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/23/politics/elizabeth-warren-iowa-joe-biden-2020/index.html

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — One by one, each candidate who took the stage at an LGBTQ presidential candidate forum here got the same question and gave a nearly identical answer.
What would they do from Day 1 of their presidencies to address concerns of gay, lesbian and transgender communities, the moderators asked. Each of the first eight candidates responded with a list of positions that command widespread support among Democrats: lifting the Trump administration’s ban on transgender military service, backing passage of the Equality Act, appointing Justice Department officials committed to civil rights enforcement.

Then came Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s turn.

“I’m not going to tell you, I’m going to show you,” she said, as she pulled out a notecard and began to read: “Dana Martin, Jazzeline Ware, Ashanti Carmon …”

The auditorium fell silent as the litany of names continued. “... Bee Love Slater, Ja’Leyah-Jamar: Eighteen trans women of color who have been killed so far this year,” she said. “It is time for a president of the United States of America to say their names.”

The room broke into loud applause. Within moments, Warren’s hyper-efficient social media team had tweeted out the list to her followers. A short time later, when her time onstage ended after several more questions, the crowd — many of whom wore T-shirts and carried placards identifying themselves as supporters of Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay mayor of South Bend, Ind. — stood and cheered.

Afterward, it was clear the Massachusetts senator had added more converts to her growing list.

“Pete was fine,” one Buttigieg supporter was overheard saying to a friend. “But you can’t let yourself be out-energized by the grandma in the race.”

Warren has out-energized a lot of rivals over the last few months.

More at https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-09-22/elizabeth-warren-democratic-president-iowa-frontrunner

In late March, Jocelyn Roof, a sophomore at the University of Iowa, picked up a call from an unknown number and heard Senator Elizabeth Warren’s voice on the other end of the line. Warren asked her what got her “in this fight”—Roof said she was very concerned about income inequality—and thanked Roof for her $25 donation.

As soon as she got off the phone, Roof took a selfie of her shocked face. She posted it to Snapchat with the caption “MY WHOLE LIFE WAS MADE,” then screenshotted it and posted it to Twitter. Warren retweeted the selfie, with the comment “I’m so glad we got to talk!”

Before the call, Roof said she was undecided about who she would support in the Iowa caucuses. Afterwards, her enthusiasm for Warren “skyrocketed,” she says. “I couldn’t imagine voting for anyone else.” She started donating $5 to the campaign every month and buying snacks for volunteers at field offices. In the first three weeks of September, she registered more than 1,000 new voters on her University of Iowa campus, independent of the Warren campaign.

...Candidates snapping selfies with voters is not new. But Warren has elevated an old shtick into the centerpiece of her digital strategy. The Warren selfies are designed to be widely shared, and are particularly popular among younger voters who live most of their lives on social media. In interviews with supporters who waited in line to take selfies with Warren in Iowa on Thursday and Friday, most said they planned to post it on Instagram or Facebook, and a TIME review of their social media accounts suggests that they usually posted the photo almost immediately, where it quickly gained likes and comments.

...The selfie line also allows Warren a simple vehicle for hearing from voters. Each selfie takes roughly thirty seconds, just enough time for each supporter to deliver the Senator a quick message, but not enough time to get into a conversation. “The selfie line creates the space for listening to people’s stories,” says Senator Zach Wahl, a 28-year old Iowa State Senator who introduced Warren at her speech on Friday. “Iowa’s a relational state. It might go a little farther here than elsewhere.”

More at https://time.com/5683099/elizabeth-warren-selfies/

WASHINGTON — When Elizabeth Warren first ran for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts in 2012, her opponent mocked her as a Harvard elitist, addressing her in debates as “Professor,” dripping out the syllables so it sounded more like an epithet than an honorific. Warren won anyway, swamping the Republican incumbent, Scott Brown,who had campaigned in a pickup truck. Now, as she runs for president, Warren faces the same arduous political challenge — rushing to portray herself as a prairie populist from homespun roots in Oklahoma before opponents can paint her as an out-of-touch Ivy League academic.

On the campaign trail, Warren, 70, rarely mentions her two decades at Harvard Law School, where she was once one of the highest-paid professors. She instead highlights her upbringing in a state known for wide expanses and oil pump jacks, saying she dreamed of becoming a schoolteacher when she lined up her “dollies” and learned the lessons “my momma told me.”

...Warren’s past is more complex. She kept her Oklahoma ties through the decades, supporting family members there. Long before she ran for political office, she described her family’s struggles as the motivating force behind her extensive academic research into the causes and effects of bankruptcy.

...In high school she joined the Cygnets pep squad and drove a used MG roadster. She read morning announcements, beginning with a prayer, over the intercom. But she made her mark on the school debate team, winning a state championship. “Quietly, she could pretty well pull you apart,” said Joe Pryor, a member of the team.

But Warren felt constrained, both by her family’s economic insecurity and by low expectations of what she could achieve. “Boys were in sports and girls were in home economics learning how to cook for their future husbands,” Pryor said. “She certainly, at that time in her life, at 16 years old, was not comfortable with that world.”

...It was at Harvard where Warren, previously a Republican, became a Democrat and later an advisor to President Obama. She wrote bestselling books on personal finance, and consulted for corporate clients, earning millions of dollars. She also developed a certitude that is common among Harvard faculty, who often sit atop their fields and are quick to say so.

“You can’t be diffident and be at Harvard Law School,” said Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor. “You have to come out swinging.”

...Like many Harvard law professors, Warren saw her path to influence through an appointed job in Washington. But her efforts to run a federal consumer agency that she had helped create for the Obama administration were thwarted in 2011 when Obama, facing industry opposition, declined to nominate her. She ran for Senate instead.

“It’s really very funny because the banks and Wall Street couldn’t stand the idea that she’d be there for a couple of years,” Fried said. “Now they’ve got her until the end of time.”

More at https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-09-21/from-oklahoma-to-harvard-elizabeth-warren-trod-a-tricky-path

Elizabeth Warren did not want a goodbye party. She told her aides there would be no grand send-off, no celebration of a mission accomplished.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been her idea from the start: a new arm of the government, uniquely empowered to police the kinds of loans and financial schemes that led to the Great Recession. Ms. Warren had detailed the idea in a journal article, then cajoled and pressured Congress to make it law. She was tasked by President Barack Obama in 2010 with setting up the bureau, and spent a year recruiting investigators and enforcers for an office they saw as an exhilarating cause.

But as spring turned to summer in 2011, Ms. Warren faced a wrenching separation. The White House had decided not to nominate her to lead the bureau permanently. So she gathered the staff for an “all hands” meeting and told them her work there was over. “She told us that we were ready to sail the ship, that we did not need her there, and that we would be able to do it on our own,” said Patricia McCoy, a Boston College law professor who was a senior official at the bureau.

Ms. Warren was right. Under her successor, Richard A. Cordray, the bureau would recover $12 billion for consumers from financial institutions by 2017. It would become, to supporters, a prized example of the government taking on big banks after the 2008 financial crisis. To opponents — Republican lawmakers, business associations and a few conservative Democrats — it would become an example of “runaway government,” an agency to be curbed at the first opportunity.

To Ms. Warren, the bureau is something else as well: a formative lesson in how an idea — a plan — can become reality. For it was through creating a new financial regulator that Ms. Warren developed the approach to government that now guides her presidential campaign. And it was in losing the chance to lead her bureau that Ms. Warren came to see the value of asking voters, rather than a president, to give her power.

A review of Ms. Warren’s role in creating the consumer bureau, including interviews with more than 30 people involved in the process, revealed an approach to politics that joins imaginative policy ideas with a keen instinct for mass communication and a willingness to negotiate. On one hand, she marshaled support from progressive activists and helped build public demand for her idea; on the other, she haggled with members of Congress to earn their backing.

David Axelrod, who was Mr. Obama’s top political adviser during the battle to create the C.F.P.B., called Ms. Warren’s role a “bona fide credential” for the presidency.

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/21/us/politics/elizabeth-warren.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

HOUSTON — A groan erupted at a debate watch party at Texas Southern University last week as former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. got a question about slavery and racism and gave an answer about Venezuela and record players.

But amid that exasperation, some students channeled their inner Beltway operatives and began a targeted rapid-response campaign. Tyler Smith, 19, texted his grandmother after the debate, hopeful that Mr. Biden's meandering answer may have swayed her from supporting him. Amaya St. Romain, 19, mounted a three-day lobbying blitz on her mother and her great-grandmother, making sure they had seen the former housing secretary Julián Castro’s criticisms of Mr. Biden onstage.

In meme-speak, the efforts amounted to Killmonger, the villain in the Black Panther movie, challenging the people of Wakanda: “Is this your king?”

...At Texas Southern University, a historically black university founded in 1927 and the site of last week’s Democratic debate, dozens of students, ages 19 to 23, differed on their top candidate. Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Kamala Harris of California were among the favorites, as was one of the two Texans in the race, former Representative Beto O’Rourke.

For Mr. Biden, though, students carried mixed feelings. They respected his tenure as Barack Obama’s vice president, but implicitly rejected his campaign’s central premise, that the primary goal of Democrats in the 2020 election should be defeating President Trump. They pointed to systemic problems they said the country must address, such as inequality, climate change and gun violence. The Democratic nominee, they said, should embrace progressive proposals like canceling student loan debt, the Green New Deal and gun buyback programs.

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/us/politics/joe-biden-black-voters.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

NEW YORK — Hedge fund titan Leon Cooperman said he’s concerned about a shift to the left in the political landscape, which could harm the economy and the stock market.

“There’s unquestionably a shift to the left in this country,” Cooperman said at the Delivering Alpha conference presented by CNBC and Institutional Investor. “They won’t open the stock market if Elizabeth Warren is the next president.”

“You don’t make the poor people rich by making rich people poor,” Cooperman said. “The Democratic party seems to be leaning towards the left to the policy, which is very harmful for the economy. I don’t like the shift to the left.”

Senator Warren has been moving up in the crowded Democratic presidential field, polling only second to former Vice President Joe Biden in a new NBC/WSJ poll. She is a champion for the left wing for her bank-bashing and wealth-taxing proposals.

Warren has made an aggressive economic populism the signature of her White House bid. She has proposed a new wealth tax on assets above $50 million, and a new minimum tax on the profits of the largest corporations, to help finance new government benefits for child care, health care, housing and education.

In an interview with CNBC in January, Warren said “I want these billionaires to stop being freeloaders.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/leon-cooperman-fears-a-shift-to-left-they-wont-open-the-stock-market-if-elizabeth-warren-wins.html

Officials at troubled drugmaker Purdue Pharma say “certain employees” should be paid more than $34 million in bonuses for meeting and exceeding goals over the last three years, even though the company is facing thousands of lawsuits over its role in the nation’s opioid crisis and earlier this week filed for bankruptcy.

In a legal filing, attorneys for Purdue Pharma asked a judge to authorize millions in payments to employees who have met “target performance goals.”

It is not clear from the company filings why employees would be eligible for bonuses because, while the bonuses are supposed to be partly contingent on the company’s financial performance, the company has filed for bankruptcy.

At a bankruptcy court hearing in White Plains, NY on Tuesday, Paul K. Schwartzberg, an attorney for the U.S. Trustee, raised objections to some of the bonuses. While it is typical for companies in bankruptcy to try to pay employees as a firm seeks to regain its financial footing, the Purdue Pharma bonuses go “way beyond” what is typical, he said.

...The attorneys for Purdue did not specify which of its 700 employees would be eligible for the bonuses, except that the incentives would not be available to “insiders” or any top executives involved in the company’s “strategic decision-making.” But other senior managers, who are often offered such incentive plans, could be eligible for the bonuses. The number of employees eligible for the bonuses and the amounts of their rewards are unknown. But if the $34 million in bonuses were distributed equally to each of the 700 employees, each would receive about $50,000.

More at https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/09/19/purdue-pharma-facing-thousands-lawsuits-bankruptcy-wants-pay-certain-employees-million-bonuses/