Recently, I wrote about why Elizabeth Warren lost the race for the Democratic nomination. My thesis? Warren failed to consolidate the progressive vote, and then her pivot to the center didn’t work. And even had she done these things, she’d have quickly run into problems winning among voters of color, especially black voters. Many Warren supporters, by contrast, cite misogyny as the major factor in her loss. They think the U.S.’s culture of misogyny cost Warren the win.
I didn’t mention misogyny in my own post. But not because I forgot about it or think it’s not important. I didn’t, and it is. I think it operated as an important background force rather than as a major cause of her loss. And getting at these things required more space and time than the previous post offered.
So, let that space and time be here and now.
Does Misogyny Explain Warren’s Loss?
I’m not going to review all the arguments for misogyny as the main explanation of Warren’s loss. There are lots of them, and I think many are bad. Some appeal to ‘Warren erasure,’ which I think has already been debunked. Instead I’ll skip directly to the best argument. Which one is that? I’m talking about Kate Manne‘s argument in the Washington Post.
I’ve mentioned Manne’s work before. But her recent book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is a highlight of the philosophical literature on misogyny. She thinks of misogyny as the enforcement arm of patriarchy, as a force punishing deviance. I’ll follow Manne in that.
Manne’s Argument
Manne appeals to the social psychology literature on bias. This literature shows bias against women operating through judgments of likability and competence in certain job hiring situations. In short, when both a man and a woman are highly competent, people judge the man more likeable. A woman can overcome this bias only through cultivating certain pro-social values, like considerateness. As Manne describes the studies – a description I’ll take issue with below – these are situations where men and women competed for a traditionally male position of authority.
She thinks many of the decisions Warren made during the campaign were part of an effort to overcome these biases. Decisions such as the one to send Sanders staffers dinner and cookies during his heart attack recovery or the one to stand in endless selfie lines or call one of her supporters to develop a ‘plan’ for her love life. Warren needed to cultivate twin images of competence and likeability because she needed both. But, ultimately, this situation was precarious for Warren. Warren wasn’t able to maintain it until the end of the campaign.
I think Manne clearly believes voters would have selected Warren, had they operated without bias. Voters didn’t do that, and therefore misogyny – in the form of the punishment of the most competent candidate in the race – was the major driving force behind Warren’s loss.
Evaluation
Manne’s thesis is compatible with my own. I focused on Warren’s campaign strategy, while Manne focused on deeper forces. But she claims any hard division between these two routes is a false dilemma. I think she’s right about that. However, even though they’re compatible theses, I think Manne tries to make misogyny do too much explanatory work. It’s a deep force, but I don’t think it explains Warren’s loss. Why?
Hiring vs. Voting
First, the social psychology literature on these biases is about hiring, not voting. To get from the one to the other requires arguing by analogy, and I suspect the analogy is much weaker than Manne thinks it is. Manne includes both under the heading ‘traditionally male position of authority,’ but I think we have to separate them. I doubt most people vote like they ‘hire’ in social psychology experiments. Among the last four U.S. presidents – Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton – each one had fewer qualifications than their respective opponents – Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Al Gore, and George H. W. Bush – by conventional U.S. standards.
Of course, Manne might claim it’s subjective judgment of competence that matters. Perhaps. But this only gets at the bad analogy. Hiring for a job is an activity with specific criteria. Often criteria drawn out in detail by an HR department. People’s judgments about competence – or likeability, for that matter – are framed and guided by a highly structured process. Voting isn’t like this. Voters use whatever standards they want, and candidates appeal to visions and lofty rhetoric having little to do with quantifiable criteria. Their narratives are ones of ‘change’ or ‘hope,’ et al.
Voters have little in the way of guidance, and ‘competence’ may well just be a term that comes from the biases of researchers rather than actual voter concerns. Cognitive biases, therefore, don’t apply in anything like the clear way they do in hiring decisions.
Liberal Bubble
The rhetoric of competence speaks to the kinds of highly educated, white and/or progressive voters who made up a large segment of Warren’s base. This is a base she partly shared with Pete Buttigieg, but it made up a small percentage of Democratic primary voters. And so, I suspect some of what’s happening here is a liberal bubble effect. Warren’s ‘have a plan for that’ rhetoric just wasn’t appealing to most Democrats. At least, not appealing enough to win votes. Consequently, appealing to the social psychology literature might miss the point in a way analogous to the way Warren’s campaign missed it.
I think the irony at work, then, is that Manne might be correct about Warren’s campaign strategy. And there’s evidence from interviews with Warren’s campaign staff that this is indeed correct. But social psychologists – and often their research subjects – operate within liberal bubbles similar to those of many Warren voters and Warren campaign staff. The analogy between job hiring and voting may therefore have made sense to Warren, and thereby misled her campaign. The result? Warren might have run a campaign directed against a specific form of misogyny that appeared only among a very small part of the Democratic electorate.
Of course, it’s possible Manne’s making the normative claim that voters should make decisions the way they’d hire for jobs. But I don’t think there’s much evidence for this. There doesn’t appear to be any significant correlation between resume and performance when it comes to U.S. presidents.
Neutralizing Misogyny
The second reason this use of misogyny as a major explanatory factor doesn’t work is that I think it misses how Warren fought against misogyny. Yes, Warren may have fought it by cultivating likeability, but she also fought it through her policy proposals and image. And this fight mostly succeeded.
Let’s move on to how Warren used policy to fight misogyny.
Warren’s Fight Against Misogyny
Warren effectively disarmed some aspects of misogyny with her policy proposals. To see this, I think it’s useful to compare Warren to Kirsten Gillibrand. Gillibrand never got traction. In that sense, her campaign was comparable to that of Chris Dodd or Joe Biden in 2008, two other senators who were ‘also-ran’ candidates. Gillibrand and Warren faced misogyny, but they handled it differently.
Warren vs. Gillibrand
Warren put heavy focus on gendered issues in her policy proposals, and she did it without stereotyping or pandering. The best example of this is her ‘universal child care‘ proposal. Despite the name, the funding and benefits are means-tested. But the proposal would greatly benefit women who struggle with the social norm that they do most of the work raising children. The benefits would flow disproportionately to working class women, particularly working class women of color. And it all hit Warren’s central theme as ‘capitalism’s heart surgeon,’ as it would enable more people to participate in the workforce.
That’s a textbook strategy for turning gender into a winning political issue and fighting misogyny with good policy.
And then there’s Kirsten Gillibrand. While Gillibrand did introduce targeted policy around gender, her entire campaign image was crafted around gender and gender stereotypes – pink text all over her website, pink shirts, endless references to ‘intersectionality’ and ‘the future is female,’ et al. It was all so unsubtle that even her own staffers called her campaign ‘obnoxious and performative.’ Gillibrand ran, in short, a gender-identitarian campaign. And it didn’t come even close to working, because hardly anyone is interested in that kind of campaign. Warren did a much better job.
Policy vs. ‘Old White Guys’
The biggest problem any candidate not named Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders faced was…Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. They led for most of the race. Why? They started with universal name recognition, and they were the leaders of the ‘moderate’ and ‘progressive’ factions of the party, respectively.
Misogyny probably limited Warren’s options, and using the social psychology literature might have prompted her to mishandle it. But when it comes to policy, she had significant successes that I think balanced the failures. There was a large segment of the electorate looking for a candidate who wasn’t an ‘old white guy,’ and I think Warren won a lot of that vote with her policy game. Warren performed every bit as well as we could’ve expected of someone running against two front-runners.
The Lessons of Warren 2020
I think the upshot is that women running for the presidency have a lot to learn from the Warren campaign. For one, women running in 2024 need to build a campaign that looks much more like Warren’s than Gillibrand’s. That’s to say they should address issues of gender without practicing any kind of gender reductionism or pandering.
But second, they shouldn’t play too hard into issues of competence and electability. Near the end of the campaign, Warren leaned especially hard into the idea that her problem with voters is that they didn’t think she was electable. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence for that thesis. If anything, it’s likely the opposite – voters first decide which candidate they like, and then they argue other candidates aren’t electable. It’s also possible some voters never even had the idea Warren wasn’t electable until her campaign started trying to ‘counter’ it. Thus, there’s a danger in focusing on electability narratives.
