On April 10, Elizabeth Warren joined Jon Stewart on the Daily Show and declared, “Powerful corporations [and] rich people have figured out that if you can bend the government to help you just a little bit, it’s a tremendous payoff, and if you can bend it to help you just a little bit more and a little bit more, the playing field just gets more and more tilted, and the rich and the powerful just do better and better.” A week later, Martin O’Malley stood before a packed crowd at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and proclaimed, “Concentrated wealth has accumulated concentrated political power in the halls of our Congress, and also in many, many, many of our state houses, making it harder than ever to get things done.”
Both of these quotes are emblematic of a nascent populist movement in the Democratic Party. Both reflect a deep concern that all Americans don’t have an equal shot at prosperity. Both demonstrate a growing opposition to the centrist Democratic policies of the Clinton era—the trade policies and the welfare reform—that seemed to mostly benefit the wealthiest Americans.
Yet it is Martin O’Malley, not Elizabeth Warren, who has a proven record of accomplishing real progress on these issues on a state level. It is Martin O’Malley, not Elizabeth Warren, who became the first major Democratic politician to endorse a national $15 minimum wage at the Institute of Politics on Thursday. And it is Martin O’Malley, not Elizabeth Warren, who is seriously considering challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016.
So why have political pundits come to the consensus that Elizabeth Warren is the only one who could give Hillary a run for her money in the Democratic primary? Perhaps it is O’Malley’s lack of name recognition. He is currently polling at around 0.3 percent in the Iowa Democratic Caucus, compared to Clinton’s 58 percent, and Warren’s 17 percent. But that number is increasing, and O’Malley received a warm reception in recent trips to New Hampshire and Iowa.
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