Liberal favorite Elizabeth Warren admits she was a Republican

Elizabeth Warren, a favorite of the left, admitted that she was once a Republican.

In an interview with The Daily Beast released on Tuesday, Warren, 62, who recently began a bid to unseat Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) admitted that up into her early 40s she was a Republican.

"I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets. I think that is not true anymore," Warren said. "I was a Republican at a time when I felt like there was a problem that the markets were under a lot more strain. It worried me whether or not the government played too activist a role."

Warren admitted though that she voted for both Democrats and Republicans.

“There should be some Republicans and some Democrats,” Warren said.

But she declined to say whether she voted for Ronald Reagan in either his first presidential campaign or his reelection campaign.

Warren's admission about her past political leanings might come as a surprise to some. In 2007 in the liberal quarterly Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Warren proposed a new consumer watchdog bureau that eventually would become the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans strongly opposed her nomination to lead the new agency and eventually former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray was nominated.

Warren has also been the target of Republican attacks as a senate candidate. In September, not long after she jumped into the race to replace Brown, the Massachusetts GOP urged Harvard University, where Warren was slated to teach a class, to withhold a salary while she ran for senate.

"By restoring her to the faculty, even though she has now formed a federal election committee and is actively campaigning, the university is establishing a bad precedent for academic appointments," Massachussetts GOP executive director Nate Little wrote to Harvard's president, Drew Gilpin Faust, in a letter according to The Boston Globe.