Hillary's nightmare: An Elizabeth Warren primary challenge

But three developments suggest this time really could be different. The first is that, even at the elite level, the party has changed far more over the last few years than is widely understood. Chris Murphy, the Connecticut senator, estimates that not too long ago, congressional Democrats were split roughly evenly between Wall Street supporters and Wall Street skeptics. Today, he puts the skeptics’ strength at more like two-thirds. Warren told me she attributes this to the disillusionment surrounding Dodd-Frank, which ushered in a range of new regulations but left the details to regulators, who promptly caved.

There is also the fact that, unlike other liberal challenges, this one has broad national reach. The pollster Celinda Lake has found that support for “tougher rules” for Wall Street obliterates party lines, increasing in the last two years from more than 70 percent to more than 80. In South Dakota, a state Mitt Romney carried by 18 points, a recent poll showed Democrat Rick Weiland, an obscure ex-aide to Tom Daschle, a mere six points behind the state’s former Republican governor for a soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat. The animating principle of Weiland’s campaign is that government per se isn’t the problem; the problem is a government taken over by “big-money interests.” The same poll showed voters agreeing with this statement by a 68-to-26 margin.

And then there’s the way Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses so perfectly align with the passions of the moment. “There’s very much a wait-and-see approach to Hillary among progressives,” says Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “I think it’s mutually exclusive to be a real hero for reform and accountability and to have a [fund-raising] strategy that relies on Wall Street.” A financial reform activist is more blunt: “Unless there is some major public break by Hillary Clinton with this disreputable crowd, then everybody will have to think long and hard before they support her as president. We do not need yet another administration packed full of Wall Street–friendly politicians.”…

Warren would also benefit from the resentments of party elders. Because the Clintons have always placed a premium on loyalty, there is a generation of donors, fund-raisers, and activists who supported other candidates in 1992, or who were simply late to support the Clintons, and were largely frozen out as a result. “If you weren’t on the Clinton train after ’92, then from ’92 almost to 2004, you weren’t on the team,” recalls one prominent Democratic donor. “You never quite made it to the major leagues.” Many of these exiles banded together to support John Kerry in 2004. And the Kerry fund-raising team, in turn, formed the nucleus of Obama’s operation four years later. “People have enormous admiration for what Hillary did as secretary of state, enormous gratitude for the important role she played,” says the donor, who was a major Obama backer. “But in Obamaworld, there is not deep loyalty to Hillary Clinton.”