Such gentle yuks are a small tax to pay for the mainstream relevance that Ms. Warren has earned. She seems to have grasped some superficial lessons from the last two presidents: As the first White House victors of the smartphone era, Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump each succeeded as a kind of lifestyle brand, their campaigns experienced in viral video snippets and projected across social media by supporters eager to share pictures of themselves, and their candidate, and themselves with their candidate.
Voters know the name of Ms. Warren’s golden retriever (Bailey). They chant the tagline of her wealth tax proposal (“two cents!”) as if they are requesting a song at a concert. They shell out money for campaign merchandise, like a “Purr-sist” cat collar, and less official wares like a skull-centric “EAT THE RICH” T-shirt sold outside her events by an unaffiliated vendor.
“No other candidate has ever done this,” Wade Snowden, 23, said of the photo line, as he waited his turn in Vinton. That this is untrue — candidates have done post-event photos with all comers for years — can feel almost irrelevant.
“I was there when she was polling at 6 percent, and it was like, ‘Oh, it’s so cute you’re running,’” said Mr. Snowden, whose T-shirt captured a screenshot of Ms. Warren’s facial expression from an old video stream as she read a message from him. “Now she’s, like, the front-runner.”
Some veterans of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign have been impressed with Ms. Warren’s ability to play to her advantages, making white-paper gravitas look hipper, somehow, than Mrs. Clinton ever seemed to.
“Her campaign is doing something that she is an extremely unlikely heroine for, which is creating a celebrity around her,” said Jess Morales Rocketto, a Democratic strategist and former aide to Mrs. Clinton, comparing the effort to the popular legends constructed around Mr. Obama or Bernie Sanders.