LIVE from Seattle Center: Elizabeth Warren encourages persistence at energetic rally

Good evening from the Emer­ald City!

Wel­come back to our con­tin­u­ing live cov­er­age of Eliz­a­beth Warren’s first Wash­ing­ton cam­paign ral­ly of the 2020 cal­en­dar year. Our team is in place at the Seat­tle Cen­ter Armory, which has now filled to capacity.

Sen­a­tor War­ren has arrived, but because not all of her sup­port­ers could join her in the Armory hall, she first addressed the mas­sive over­flow of atten­dees in Fish­er Pavil­ion, across the road from the Armory.

To chants of “dream big, fight hard,” she jogged to a cor­doned off area of the Pavil­ion where a large Amer­i­can flag had been assem­bled to serve as a backdrop.

She explained she had good news and bad news, both of which were that the main Armory ral­ly loca­tion was at com­plete capacity.

Deaf­en­ing cheers erupt­ed from the large crowd after this declaration.

War­ren then offered a short and encour­ag­ing speech, say­ing that it was evi­dent that Wash­ing­ton was “ready for big struc­tur­al change.” With one final round of “dream big, fight hard,” War­ren depart­ed to pre­pare for her main speech.

Mean­while, Seat­tle-based cam­paign orga­niz­er Jes­si­ca Gon­za­lez addressed the crowd in the Armory’s main hall. She encour­aged atten­dees to have the hard con­ver­sa­tions with unde­cid­ed voters.

A War­ren vol­un­teer and com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er then took the stage, pro­claim­ing: “I’m up here because me and my son have been run­ning events in loca­tions [all over Wash­ing­ton] and we will con­tin­ue” because of War­ren’s poli­cies sup­port­ing vet­er­ans. He went on to explain he is a vet­er­an, but that “war should not be the way to a high­er education.”

He end­ed by say­ing that “our time is now” to elect a Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dent and remind­ed the crowd to return their pri­ma­ry ballots.

Toshiko Hasegawa, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Wash­ing­ton State’s Com­mis­sion on Asian Pacif­ic Amer­i­can Affairs, came on stage next to first remind every­one that Feb­ru­ary is Black His­to­ry Month.

She argued that a vote for War­ren is a vote for some­one who agrees that Wash­ing­ton’s diver­si­ty, just like Amer­i­ca’s, is what ulti­mate­ly makes us stronger.

“Eliz­a­beth is the can­di­date with the plan to put into action, so that all of us might form a per­fect union. And we the peo­ple, we are the ris­ing tide of justice.”

She fin­ished by say­ing that we need to be “Dream big and fight hard.”

“And win!” she added.

She then intro­duced Sen­a­tor War­ren to the stage to thun­der­ous applause.

After exclaim­ing how won­der­ful it was to be back in Seat­tle, War­ren con­grat­u­lat­ed Bernie on his win in the Neva­da Demo­c­ra­t­ic cau­cus­es.

She then went on to warn against “the biggest threat in this Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry,” name check­ing Michael Bloomberg, whom she sparred with in the debate last Wednes­day that attract­ed an unprece­dent­ed nation­al audience.

“This elec­tion is not for sale,” she said.

“We are going to make this elec­tion about democ­ra­cy. About you.”

She then brought up the Great Recession.

“Remem­ber the finan­cial crash?” She asked. “The one Bloomberg blamed on African Amer­i­cans and Lati­nos.” To which the crowd booed.

“I watched fam­i­lies who thought they did every­thing right […] lose all their sav­ings. Watched peo­ple who thought they were solid­ly mid­dle class real­ize they were deep in debt. And I watched the gov­ern­ment turn their backs on them.”

She declared that after that expe­ri­ence, she saw how wrong it was and said “I will get in this fight and I don’t care who I have to fight to get there.”

She then went on to detail how she cre­at­ed the Con­sumer Finan­cial Pro­tec­tion Bureau that Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma signed into law in 2010.

“We built a coali­tion. We pushed. We pulled. We were noisy,” she said.

(We cer­tain­ly were… NPI was part of that coalition!)

“And we beat the banks and we won.” That agency has since forced banks to return $12 bil­lion to con­sumers, she explained.

She said that this expe­ri­ence taught her two things: You don’t get what you don’t fight for and we can, in fact, make gov­ern­ment work for the people.

“These are fun­da­men­tal val­ues that all pro­gres­sives sup­port. But the ques­tion has to do not just with what we fight for, but what is our plan to get it done.”

She pro­ceed­ed to acknowl­edge that many peo­ple ask her on the cam­paign trail how she dif­fers from cur­rent fron­trun­ner Bernie Sanders… and took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to high­light some of the dif­fer­ences between her and Sanders.

“Bernie says he won’t end the fil­i­buster. I say Mitch McConnell is not going to get a veto any longer. If we keep the fil­i­buster, every­thing we need to get done has to pass a six­ty vote thresh­old, which gives the veto pow­er to McConnell, to the gun indus­try, to the oil indus­try, and to billionaires.”

She con­tin­ued: “If Mitch McConnell gets in the way, get rid of the fil­i­buster and let’s go! Because under­stand this, I’m not in this fight to talk about change. I am in this fight to make change.”

War­ren then took sev­er­al ques­tions from ral­ly­go­ers, which ranged from fight­ing sex­ism, to immi­gra­tion, to cli­mate jus­tice and ener­gy efficiency.

Her answers all empha­sized a com­mon theme: that her first order of busi­ness would be to push an anti-cor­rup­tion plan to under­cut the influ­ence of big mon­ey and the influ­ence it buys in our government.

She said it would include end­ing lob­by­ing as we know it, lock the revolv­ing the door between Wash­ing­ton and Wall Street, and final­ly, make all can­di­dates for fed­er­al office release their tax returns.

She argued that anti-cor­rup­tion poli­cies would actu­al­ly pull peo­ple from both sides of the aisle togeth­er and unite our gov­ern­ment around com­mon goal.

“How do we pull peo­ple togeth­er? We fight for a gov­ern­ment that isn’t just Demo­c­rat or Repub­li­can. We fight for a gov­ern­ment that works for us.”

War­ren end­ed her remarks by implor­ing all lis­ten­ing to take to heart that now is the time to get involved and to fight for a more just America.

After con­clud­ing her speech, she began tak­ing pho­tos with supporters.

This con­cludes our live cov­er­age of tonight’s event in Seat­tle with Eliz­a­beth War­ren. Thank you for fol­low­ing along with us!

Note that we’ll be pub­lish­ing a final recap of the event tomor­row with addi­tion­al obser­va­tions and pho­tos, so if you’re inter­est­ed in hear­ing more about War­ren’s lat­est vis­it to the Emer­ald City, we’ve got you covered.