Story highlights
The figure comes with a "righteous fist to fight for the middle class"
A Kickstarter campaign to fund the action figure has raised over $70,000 since Tuesday
If you’ve ever wanted to carry around a pocket-sized, persistent senator wherever you go, now’s your big – or, well, little – chance.
A Kickstarter campaign to create an Elizabeth Warren action figure has raised over $71,000 as of Friday afternoon, far surpassing the campaign’s original $15,000 goal. More than 2,000 people have donated since the campaign launched Tuesday.
“We expected it to do reasonably well … literally the first day it did four times better than that,” creator Jason Feinberg told CNN.
The $19 figure comes equipped with everything that any practical, liberal female politician could ask for: sensible boots to march on Washington, rolled up sleeves to wrestle with big banks, even a righteous fist raised proudly in the air to fight for the middle class.
Feinberg started making political action figures in 2008 for his company, FCTRY, after watching then-candidate Barack Obama speak at a debate in Iowa. Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders are also in the brigade of prominent pint-sized Democrats.
Adding the Massachusetts senator to the mix had been in the back of Feinberg’s mind, but actually creating the figure took a back seat during the 2016 election season. Feinberg had expected Clinton to win the presidential election, so his work with her and a complementary “Evil Trump” figure took precedence.
“Warren was like the antidote to that,” Feinberg said. “She’s a really positive figure who’s also fighting, and that’s really what we were trying to channel, that peculiar mix of strength and persistence.”
It was Warren’s famous moment of persistence earlier this year that prompted FCTRY to start a campaign for her own figure. After Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell interrupted Warren from reading a letter by Coretta Scott King on the Senate floor, he uttered what became a viral mantra of feminist resistance: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
“Right then and there we glimpsed the future; where the far left would become the mainstream,” FCTRY wrote on the Kickstarter campaign. “The fight had already begun – and Elizabeth Warren was leading the charge.”
Some of the profits from the Kickstarter campaign and Warren’s figure sales will go toward Emily’s List, a nonprofit organization helping elect pro-choice Democratic women to office.
