Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren filed paperwork Thursday to create an exploratory committee for a Senate campaign in Massachusetts, moving the Democrat and consumer advocate one step closer toward taking on Sen. Scott Brown (R).

Warren has also set up a website to accept donations and allow supporters to sign up for updates from the nascent exploratory committee.

Warren has been attending house parties this week to introduce herself to Democratic activists and other voters.

Democratic Boston City Councilor Matt O’Malley attended one of the parties Wednesday night in the Jamaica Plain district of Boston and met Warren for the first time.

“I found her to be extraordinarily impressive,” he said. “She gave some really detailed, nuanced answers to some tough questions.”

Warren talked about her personal narrative, which she described as “growing up in the fringes of the middle class,” O’Malley said.

Some Democrats in the state have expressed concern that it would be difficult for a Harvard professor to appeal to working-class and middle-class voters and to beat Brown.

But O’Malley said she would have no trouble appealing to all types of Bay Staters. “Her personal narrative, her story, is one that will resonate in Southie, in Lowell, in Worcester County,” he said.

Warren, who served until the beginning of August as special adviser to the Treasury secretary on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, wrote a column last week on a Massachusetts political blog hinting that her time in the national spotlight wasn’t over yet. “I left Washington, but I don’t plan to stop fighting for middle class families,” she wrote.

In statements responding to her exploratory committee, Republicans revealed the narrative they may use against her if she enters the race.

The Massachusetts Republican Party called her a “Militant Liberal,” and the National Republican Senatorial Committee noted she was not born in the Bay State.

“As a native of Oklahoma, the anointed candidate of the Washington establishment, and someone who has spent many years ensconced in the hallways of Harvard, it’s a good idea for Professor Warren to learn more about her adopted state of Massachusetts as she prepares to compete in a crowded Democrat primary,” NRSC Communications Director Brian Walsh said in a statement.