Senator Elizabeth Warren, the progressive icon who has been repeatedly named as a potential 2016 Democratic vice presidential pick, and Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, have been engaged in a war of words that has grown increasingly personal and racially charged.
After a recent barrage of criticisms from the Massachusetts lawmaker, Trump, who has taken to derisively calling Warren “goofy,” resurrected a line of attack that may only be familiar to people who closely followed her bitter 2012 U.S. Senate race against then-incumbent and current Trump supporter, Republican Scott Brown. When asked about Warren’s description of him as a “bully,” Trump told the New York Times, “You mean Pocahontas?”
“I think it’s wonderful because the Indians can now partake in the future of the country. She’s got about as much Indian blood as I have. Her whole life was based on a fraud. She got into Harvard and all that because she said she was a minority,” he added.
These remarks — which comes on the heels of several recent, mocking tweets from the Republican presidential candidate — allude to a controversy that emerged during Warren’s contentious 2012 Senate run. During that campaign it was revealed that Warren had listed herself as a minority while working as a faculty member at both the University of Pennsylvania Law School and at Harvard Law School in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Warren has long insisted that she believed she had Cherokee Indian ancestors, while critics have alleged that the Massachusetts lawmaker sought an unfair advantage by exploiting unsubstantiated ethnic roots. Both schools have denied that race was a factor in her hiring.
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“Everyone on our mother’s side — aunts, uncles, and grandparents — talked openly about their Native American ancestry,” Warren wrote in her 2014 memoir “A Fighting Chance.” “My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents’ courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory.”
In that same book Warren acknowledged being somewhat blindsided by the personal nature of the Brown campaign’s attacks. “He attacked my dead parents,” she wrote. “I was hurt, and I was angry.”
Fairly exhaustive research on Warren’s background by several publications in 2012 determined that, at most, the woman behind the Consumer Protection Bureau was 1/32 Cherokee, which would be “sufficient for tribal citizenship” according to the New York Times, but not “eligible to become a member of any of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes,” according to The Atlantic.
And although Warren has never backed down from her assertion that she believes she has Cherokee ancestry, investigations have yet to turn up any definitive proof that she does, which has led to her claims becoming a consistent talking point for her conservative foes, even inspiring a Wiki page to track the controversy. Some experts have suggested that, like significant portions of the African-American community, Warren simply incorrectly believed she was a descendant of Cherokee Indians, but her critics have pointed out that she identified as white for most of her life in academia and could have done proper research into her genealogy before aligning herself with native culture.
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However, Trump may want to tread lightly. While spreading conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s ancestry helped make him a popular figure in conservative circles (2012 nominee Mitt Romney aggressively sought his endorsement in the aftermath of Trump’s “birther” crusade) and questioning Sen. Ted Cruz’s heritage successfully put the Texas lawmaker on the defensive for days, Trump’s current line of attack on Warren has been tried before, and it failed to gain traction.
“We saw when Scott Brown attacked my family & his staff made tomahawk chops & war whoops. They lost big. MA voters knew better,” Warren tweeted earlier this month, referring to the culturally insensitive behavior of some Brown supporters on the campaign trial which was caught on tape and wound up backfiring.
Indeed, despite the fact that Brown repeatedly hammered Warren on her supposed lack of Native American heritage and even fundraised over the issue, a Boston Globe poll leading up to Election Day in 2012 showed that an overwhelming majority of the states voters (72 percent) said the scandal did not affect their vote. Ultimately, what ended up the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history resulted in a solid 7-point victory for the Democrat.
“It didn’t move the numbers much,” Steve Koczela, president of The MassINC Polling Group told MSNBC on Monday. “It was an uncomfortable issue throughout the campaign, but it was a lot of noise that ultimately had very little impact.”
According to Koczela, both Warren and Brown enjoyed favorable ratings from the state’s voters leading up to Election Day (Brown’s ratings were actually slightly higher, despite his eventual defeat). Koczela believes that it was where the candidates stood on economic issues that was the driving force behind Massachusetts voters’ choice that November. He said that since her victory, Warren’s ratings haven’t fluctuated and the ancestry issue has “fallen off the radar for a lot of people around here.”
Still, that doesn’t mean the issue couldn’t get more of a spotlight should Warren start to play a larger role in the 2016 race. Thus far, Warren has vowed to help keep the presumptive Republican nominee out of the White House, prompting Trump to surface Brown’s line of attack.
“Definitely Donald Trump raising it is the most attention that’s been paid to in a long time,” said Koczela, who thinks questioning her heritage might go further in a general election because she’s less well known nationally than she is in Massachusetts, and he suspects the presumptive GOP nominee’s rhetoric will likely be more “direct and inflammatory” then Brown’s ever was.
“As hot as the spotlight was in 2012, it will be 100 times hotter in the presidential election,” Koczela added.








