Why Elizabeth Warren Lost

Senator Elizabeth Warren, who ended her presidential campaign last week, was an unusually popular candidate among political journalists and white professionals with college degrees, so perhaps it’s no surprise that I, too, like her a lot, despite our significant political and ideological differences.

I like her intelligence, her range of experience, her energetic comportment, her ability to grasp and grapple with complicated matters of public policy, and the incisiveness of her best writing and remarks. Among her rivals, I found her less likely to start a dumb war than Joe Biden, more perceptive about capitalism’s vital upsides than Bernie Sanders, more possessed of virtues like strength, toughness, and honor than Donald Trump, more heterodoxly attuned to some of America’s most pressing challenges, as Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center argues, and personally likable. I’d rather have a beer with her than any of the other present or former Democratic candidates this cycle.

[Read: America punished Warren for her competence ]

The failure of her campaign warrants a public conversation about its causes that is as nuanced, rigorous, and comfortable with complexity as Warren herself is at her best. But so far, the narrow question of whether sexism was to blame for her loss has so dominated public discourse as to miscast a formidable political actor as a hapless victim.

Sexism could well be one factor among many that cost Warren votes. But taking the sexism hypothesis seriously requires subjecting evidence to scrutiny like with any other argument. When asserting that the Warren campaign was disadvantaged by sexism, does the speaker simply mean that there is a tiny number of sexist voters who refuse to support women? Or are they making the narrow claim that Warren lost more votes of people averse to a female candidate