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Former Obama administration adviser Elizabeth Warren made her bid to reclaim Edward Kennedy's old Senate seat for Democrats official Wednesday.

"I'm going to do this," said Warren, a Harvard law professor who helped create the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in a video on her campaign website announcing her candidacy. "The reason is straightforward: Middle-class families have been chipped at, hacked at, and squeezed and hammered for a generation now, and I don't think Washington gets it."

Speculation surrounding a Warren challenge to Republican Sen. Scott Brown has been mounting ever since she was passed over by President Obama in July to run the CFPB. (It was clear the polarizing Warren wouldn't get enough Senate support to be confirmed.) She returned home to Massachusetts soon afterward and resumed her old job teaching law in Cambridge. In August, Warren enlisted two veterans of Gov. Deval Patrick’s campaign to help her investigate a bid and she launched an exploratory committee later that month.

Progressives have been raising money for a Warren candidacy since she left the White House in July and wrote her campaign a check last month for over $100,000. Warren is expected to have little trouble fundraising and already enters the crowded Democratic primary field as the nominal front-runner. She will sharpen her campaign’s focus around middle-class families and will likely paint lobbyists and corporations as their enemies.

“Washington is rigged for big corporations,” Warren said in her video. “A big company, like GE, pays nothing in taxes, and we’re asking college students to take on even more debt to get an education? We’re telling seniors they may need to learn to live on less? It isn’t right, and it’s the reason I’m running.”

But Warren will also face the challenges associated with running a statewide campaign for the first time, including introducing herself to voters. Brown, who made history in 2010 by claiming the seat Kennedy held for decades, is popular in the Bay State and already has nearly $10 million in his campaign coffers -- much of which comes from members of the financial community that is often at odds with Warren. So far, Brown has avoided a primary challenge.

Warren will travel around the state on Wednesday, starting with a stop in Boston before she heads to New Bedford, Worcester and Springfield.