Elizabeth Warren Seeks to Revive Senate Campaign SPRINGFIELD, Mass. - After a month of floundering, Elizabeth Warren, the embattled Senate candidate in Massachusetts, is hoping to impress Democratic activists here Saturday at their state convention, where they will endorse a candidate for the September primary; the winner then faces the Republican incumbent, Senator Scott P. Brown, in November. It is a foregone conclusion that Ms. Warren, who has been widely perceived as the presumptive nominee, will win the endorsement. The question is how many votes her rival, Marisa DeFranco, will receive. Ms. DeFranco, an immigration lawyer, needs 15 percent of the vote to earn a spot on the ballot. Party officials said that in the last 30 years, no candidate had achieved the 86 percent of the vote that Ms. Warren would need to keep Ms. DeFranco off the ballot, all but guaranteeing Ms. Warren a primary fight that will divert some of her time, money and attention from the race against Mr. Brown. But some Warren supporters suggest that a primary would not necessarily be a bad thing. It would give Ms. Warren, who has never run for office before, a chance to hone her message and would probably produce a victory on which she could build momentum toward November. Either way, Ms. Warren received some largely good news Saturday morning with two new polls - from The Boston Globe and from Western New England University - showing her running essentially even with Mr. Brown. Ms. Warren has been back on her heels for weeks because of two separate but related problems: allegations that she had unfairly claimed American Indian ancestry to advance her academic career, and her campaign's failure to respond more quickly and fully to questions about that ancestry. Even Democrats were complaining that Ms. Warren, a Harvard professor, was failing Politics 101. She has started taking more aggressive steps to try to counteract these problems in advance of the convention. Governor Deval Patrick, one of the state's most popular politicians, broke his pledge to stay neutral in the Democratic contest and endorsed her a few days ago. Ms. Warren, who had been nonresponsive to the news media for weeks, also called Brian McGrory, an influential columnist for The Boston Globe, and spoke to him for 30 minutes. The Globe, and Mr. McGrory, had become more pointed in their questioning of Ms. Warren and the details of how Harvard, where she teaches, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she used to teach, had come to portray her as a minority. The paper reaches liberal voters, a crucial demographic group Ms. Warren cannot afford to lose if she hopes to win the election. She did not answer all of Mr. McGrory's questions but seemed to win a few points for talking to him at length. She has also been demonstrating a new feistiness. During a whistle-stop tour by train to the Springfield convention from Boston on Friday, accompanied by scores of Democratic activists, she sent an e-mail to supporters in which she took on Mr. Brown more directly than she had before. "Just yesterday," she wrote, "he called my mother a liar - and then he smirked to reporters when told I said that attacking my deceased parents is offensive. If that's all you've got, Scott, I'm ready. "I'm not backing down," she added in the appeal. I didn't get in this race to fold up the first time I got punched. On Friday night, she made the requisite rounds of pubs and parties here packed with the activists whose enthusiasm she will need to get out the vote in November. "I don't care what they throw at me," Ms. Warren declared to the activists gathered in Theodore's blues club. I will stand my ground. John Walsh, chairman of the state Democratic Party, said Saturday that the 4,000 delegates at the convention were the party's most active grass-roots organizers and the convention would give Ms. Warren a chance to engage with those who "can really make a difference in beating Scott Brown in November." Asked if he was hearing any concerns from delegates about Mr. Patrick's having broken his pledge to stay neutral, Mr. Walsh chuckled. "Anybody who gets the governor's endorsement is very lucky," he told reporters. What Deval Patrick is going to add is a remarkable focus on the grass-roots, door-to-door effort. Nobody in America knows how to do it like he does.