Sen. Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the presidential race this week after her campaign failed to gain steam on Super Tuesday. Her supporters expressed much dismay that she didn’t make it to the general election. Senior enterprise reporter Emma Gray talked to several Warren supporters about how they were feeling about her run and how many of them are left wondering if we’ll ever see a woman as president. Must Reads talked to Gray about her reporting:
Why did you think it was important to tell this story?
The writing was on the wall that Warren would likely be dropping out if something crazy didn’t happen on Super Tuesday. I had been hearing from Warren supporters about their frustration with the way people in their lives were speaking to them about their support for Warren, and the sexism they felt hadn’t been properly unpacked. So I just started getting on the phone with people, starting Tuesday night through Wednesday. I think since 2016 we have seen a lot written about how sexism does/does not matter in elections, and I wanted to hear from female voters, on the ground across the country, in their own words.
You talked to quite a few Warren voters for this piece. What was the most common theme in your conversations with them?
Lots of grief and lots of anger. There was a prevailing feeling that if a woman like Elizabeth Warren — a long-admired senator, incredibly prepared, a fantastic debater, progressive but with a history of working with moderates — couldn’t even get close to getting the nomination, then will there ever be a woman who is “enough”? The women I spoke to were by no means shocked, but this primary seemed to reinforce things they already felt about the realities of systemic sexism and the feeling that it would never be the “right time” for a woman to seek the nation’s highest office of power. I also heard a lot of frustration from progressive Warren supporters who like Bernie Sanders but felt very alienated by his campaign and some of his supporters. So the women I interviewed seemed largely split between Sanders and Biden.
You’ve covered gender and politics at HuffPost for years. Did you have hope that this would be the year that we’d elect a woman president?
I was heartened that we had such a diversity of women (at least politically) who were in the race. Six felt much better than one; it almost felt like a normalization of women seeking power. So I’d say, sure, I was hopeful, but did I really truly think it would happen? No. From the moment Warren jumped into the race, the narrative of “is a woman really electable?” dogged her and all of the other female candidates. Having covered 2016, including being at the Javits Center when Hillary Clinton lost — and also having been a woman in this country — I felt like people would probably be very wary of nominating another woman. It also felt clear that there was a lot of very deep-seated, institutional misogyny that the left has yet to unpack.
Where do you hope we go from here?
I hope women keep running for office at all levels, and I hope we keep electing them. I also hope that the remaining Democratic candidates take seriously Warren’s many, many ideas. And I hope that those of us who cover electoral politics continue to be wary of pushing the “Is she electable?” narrative, because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. | 
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