Elizabeth Warren’s final hurrah….

It is, without a doubt, one of the most compelling stories that Elizabeth Warren tells.

She was just a girl when her father (“my daddy,” she calls him) had a heart attack. The family lost its station wagon and came close to losing its home. That is when her mother dug out “the dress.” “You know the one,” Ms. Warren says of the outfit that her mother saved for weddings, funerals and graduations. Muttering to herself “we will not lose this house, we will not lose this house,” her mother slipped it on, marched to Sears and won a minimum-wage job to keep their family afloat.

From Iowa to New Hampshire to California, most of the 100,000-plus people who have taken “selfies” with Ms. Warren have heard some version of the story, often listening in rapt silence. But Ms. Warren’s presidential campaign has never packaged the wrenching tale into a tidy television commercial for the millions of Americans who will vote on Super Tuesday, or who voted in any other state so far.

What Ms. Warren, the senator from Massachusetts, calls her upbringing on the “ragged edge of the middle class” is foundational for her progressive agenda of a more assertive federal government that helps the less fortunate: a higher minimum wage, universal child care, a wealth tax. But her Oklahoma origin story — she went by Betsy at the time — has largely been lost in a 2020 race where she has become defined chiefly as the wonkish “plan for that” candidate.

“What too many voters see,” said Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist who worked on President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, “is Professor Warren from Harvard Law and not Betsy from Norman, Oklahoma.”

Mr. Begala favorably compared Ms. Warren’s up-from-the-bootstraps life with his old client’s: a kid from the South who grew up amid hardship, ended up in an Ivy League institution and ultimately ran for president.

Ms. Warren’s relentless stream of erudite and innovation policy proposals — her latest would address the economic and medical implications of the coronavirus — helped lift her to front-runner status early last fall. She wowed the professional progressive class, delighted academics and activists and captured the imagination of MSNBC’s attentive audience.

But her populism and popularity never fully trickled down. Even at her peak, her strongest support came from what political operatives call the “wine track” of Democratic politics: white, affluent and college-educated voters, especially women….

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