Yesterday, people voted, their votes were counted, and we got (most of) the results. Normally, that observation would be routine, but it’s already been quite a year. Shortly before midnight, the Associated Press—which gave up on naming a winner in Iowa last week—projected that Bernie Sanders would win the Democratic primary in New Hampshire; as of early this morning, with 87 percent of results in, Sanders was slightly ahead of Pete Buttigieg, who will finish second. Not that everyone had their eyes on the winner. While voting was still underway yesterday, Adrienne Elrod, who was a spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, said on MSNBC that the “real thing” she was looking at was “that key third-place finish”; if Amy Klobuchar could snag that, Elrod argued, it would almost “be stronger and more important than a first-place finish for Bernie.” (The remark reminded more than one reporter of Marco Rubio’s third-place “victory” in New Hampshire in 2016.) Klobuchar did, in the end, finish third, and decisively so. “Everyone counted us out—even a week ago,” she told her supporters, victoriously, before waving sarcastically at the news cameras. “Thank you, pundits!”

Feeling aggrieved at media coverage is practically obligatory for political candidates. In Klobuchar’s case, it doesn’t really feel justified—not uniformly, at least. On numerous occasions, we’ve seemed keen to count Klobuchar in, even before we saw much evidence that she appeals to voters. “Despite Klobuchar’s consistent position just outside the top tier of candidates, pundits cannot get enough of her,” Libby Watson wrote last month, in the New Republic. “She satisfies every self-evident truth in the pundit bible about what Americans want. Most importantly, she is Midwestern. But she is also this field’s queen of Tellin’ It Like It Is—by which they mean being outspoken about what Beltway elites consider to be objective truths about the limits of political possibility in policymaking.” The Klobuchar-surge narrative has tended to peak after debates: after the most recent one, hosted by ABC on Friday, the notion of a “Klobucharge”—or “Klomentum”—attracted ample Kloverage (sorry) in major newspapers, and on cable news. Klobuchar’s coffers swelled—her campaign took $2 million in donations between the debate and 1pm the next day—and so did her crowds. In the same window, her numbers in New Hampshire jumped from roughly 8 percent to almost 12 percent. As things stand, her vote share is nearly 20 percent.

Related: Coverage of Bernie Sanders suffers from a lack of imagination

Between them, Sanders, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar mopped up the delegates on offer in New Hampshire. Neither of the other top-tier candidates—Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, who are fourth and fifth, respectively—has broken the 10-percent mark. In her speech to supporters, Warren singled out Klobuchar for praise, and echoed her dig at the press; Klobuchar, Warren said, had shown “just how wrong the pundits can be when they count a woman out.”

Warren, unlike Klobuchar, does seem to have been counted out in recent days. She came out of Friday’s debate on a down note; she told MSNBC afterward, “I just didn’t say enough, didn’t fight hard enough, didn’t tell you how bad I want this,” and coverage since then has mostly echoed that negativity, when it’s mentioned Warren at all. In recent days, Warren’s supporters—including US Rep. Joaquin Castro, who, along with his twin brother, Julián, has endorsed her—have complained that the media has erased Warren’s candidacy. Journalists including Joan Walsh, of The Nation; Jennifer Rubin, of the Washington Post; and Charles P. Pierce, of Esquire, have made similar points. This, in a sense, is odd: Warren (eventually) finished third in Iowa, and while Klobuchar’s New Hampshire third looks stronger, there isn’t that much difference between them. (In national polls, Warren is doing about the same as Michael Bloomberg, and yet, as FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver has noted, “the media takes his chances a lot more seriously than it takes hers.”) Last night, CNN didn’t carry Warren’s speech live, but did show Biden’s, even though he finished behind her, and had preemptively fled New Hampshire for South Carolina.

For some time, Warren and Klobuchar’s respective candidacies have felt tied. When Kamala Harris dropped out, they became the only women left in the race with substantial support. (Sorry, Tulsi Gabbard.) Since then, some media discussion has taken on an either/or hue, as if there couldn’t be room for two top-tier female candidates at once. Last month, the editorial board of the New York Times made room for both Warren and Klobuchar when it jointly endorsed them for president, but that choice was as binary as it was inclusive—Warren and Klobuchar, the Times said, were respectively the best advocates for two very different approaches, “the radical and the realist.” Now, taken together, they’re a case study in a different dynamic: the horserace journalism model’s obsession with momentum. Last summer, Warren was up, but she’s trended down since then, whereas Klobuchar has (sort of) gone the other way. Their respective results in Iowa and New Hampshire are similar, on paper, yet the dynamics behind each have dominated coverage. (Inconveniently for Warren, no syllable of her name rhymes with “the Big Mo.”)

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These dynamics may be mostly organic, of course—we can’t always know why voters vote the way they do. We do know, though, that “electability” has loomed larger than ever in our coverage of the primaries to this point. This, in part, is a reflection of Democratic voters’ anxiety about Trump, but they don’t decide in a vacuum, and media narratives can have a particularly important influence. Yesterday, Peter Hamby, of Snapchat and Vanity Fair, was listening to New Hampshire Public Radio, and tweeted that “like five straight women callers have said they switched from Warren to Amy K because Klobuchar is ‘feisty’ and ‘tough’ and she can take on Trump—but they’re worried Warren can’t win. Recency bias is a helluva drug in a crowded field.”

Below, more on the primaries:



Other notable stories:

ICYMI: Why did Matt Drudge turn on Donald Trump?

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.