Sexism didn’t kill Elizabeth Warren’s campaign. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt her chances.
As my Washington Examiner colleagues have written, Warren’s campaign was marked by dishonesty and pandering, which voters quickly saw through. And unless she wants to blame internalized misogyny, Warren can’t blame sexism for her losses on Super Tuesday: In her home state of Massachusetts, 34% of women voted for Joe Biden, 26% chose Bernie Sanders, and just 24% went for Warren. Try to pin that on the patriarchy.
But despite the irritatingly endless claims of sexism from the media and the Warren campaign, there is a legitimate double standard faced by women in politics. According to a study recently published in The Economic Journal, women need to be likable to be successful. Men, on the other hand, don’t. This is because women expect both genders to be likable, while men expect only women to be likable, but don’t care so much if other men have, say, the personality of Sanders.
So when Warren complained about sexism throughout her campaign, that was another example of her constant pandering. But there was a grain of truth to it — just not as much as Warren claimed.
“Gender in this race, you know, that is the trap question for every woman,” Warren said to the press on Thursday afternoon, after she dropped out of the presidential race. “If you say, ‘Yeah, there was sexism in this race,’ everyone says, ‘Whiner.’ And if you say, ‘No, there was no sexism,’ about a bazillion women think, ‘What planet do you live on?’ I promise you this: I will have a lot more to say on that subject later on.”
Warren’s problem was not that she acknowledged that sexism can still exist, but that she played the victim card over and over, even as a cheap shot against Sanders. Voters saw that she treated sexism not as an unfortunate reality, but as a convenient cudgel against her opponents.
Warren weaponized the sexism card, perhaps leading those who dismissed her erroneous claims of victimhood to reject altogether the idea that women face different barriers than men. She may have “a lot more to say” about sexism later on, but because this has always been just a talking point for her, we already know exactly what she’ll say. She’ll exaggerate her status as a victim, doing a disservice to other women who, thanks to Warren’s hyperbole, will have their own claims of discrimination reflexively dismissed.
