That’s because this country, she says, was built on the notion expressed on that Sunday school plaque, that we all have God-given potential and the right to maximize it. What people fear most these days, Fiorina says, is that “we’re losing that sense of limitless potential.”

Why? Liberals and their bad ideas, mostly: “I remember being shocked” when Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said during a 2012 strike teachers “can’t be held accountable because so many students come from poor and broken homes.” Lewis was arguing that what’s expected of teachers in the lowest-income areas isn’t either fair or realistic, given all that they are up against. But Fiorina heard it this way: “What she meant is, if you are poor, you don’t have potential and you can’t learn. And that, ladies and gentlemen,” she says to great applause, “is not what America’s about.” …

Fiorina often mentions her anti-abortion views, which were anything but politically expedient in the California Senate race. When Fiorina served as emcee at a gala for the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List organization in Washington earlier this month, the group’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, told the crowd that in 2010, while Fiorina was seeking their endorsement, she gave the best interview they’d ever had with any candidate.

“She’s actually that conservative,” says Davis, her former adviser. “I have a lot of clients, and some of them read polls and then tell you what they think. But Carly wouldn’t consider changing her opposition [to abortion]. That’s just not her.”

On that issue, her views were formed before she knew she had them. “I was sort of raised that way without thinking about it,” says Fiorina. “Then I met my husband, whose mother was told to abort him and she chose not to, and her life was utterly different because she had a son, and my life was utterly different because I have a husband, so I think about that a lot. And also when I was a young woman I accompanied a very good friend when she went to have an abortion, at her request, and I saw what that did to her—physically, emotionally, spiritually. I don’t think she ever got over it, honestly.”