If you write an article identifying a certain politician as the “nightmare” of a likely presidential nominee, you can’t get upset when readers tell you said nightmare stands little chance of snatching away the nomination. And yet I can’t help thinking many pundits missed the point when, in response to my recent story about Elizabeth Warren (“Hillary’s Nightmare”), they ticked off all the reasons Hillary Clinton would crush Warren in a potential primary matchup.

It’s not that I disagree. In the piece, I describe how a Warren-Clinton primary might play out before concluding that “Warren would probably lose.” It’s just that I don’t think this is an especially interesting discussion. Most overwhelming favorites go on to win the race they’re running. The difference is that, in presidential primaries, how the frontrunner wins matters almost as much as whether they do. Do they have to adopt an entirely new political persona (see Romney, Mitt)? Do they have to make big ideological or policy concessions? Do they have to replace one set of advisers with another? Do they have to break with a key constituency or embrace an entirely new one? This “how” tells us a lot about the party and where it’s headed. And it’s here where Warren’s influence is potentially enormous.

The most obvious reason Warren poses a threat is that the Democratic Party has changed quite a bit since the last time Hillary ran for president. I won’t go through all the polling data I cite in my piece, but even a quick glance at the numbers tells you Democratic voters today are much more in-step with Warren ideologically (and much less in step Clinton-era New Democrats) than they were back then. Recent polling by Pew shows Democrats becoming more preoccupied with inequality and more sympathetic to regulation since 2007. According to Gallup, the percentage of Democrats expressing dissatisfaction with “the size and influence of major corporations” rose from 51 to 79 between 2001 and 2011. And Democrats have become especially hostile to banks. Gallup finds that the percentage of Democrats with negative views toward banks has increased from 23 to 47 since 2007; the percentage with positive views has dropped from 51 to 31.

Having said that, it’s one thing for Democratic voters to evolve ideologically; it’s another for this to have electoral consequences. There are lots of steps that must come in between. For example, even if Democrats feel strongly about curtailing the power of the financial sector—Warren’s big hobbyhorse—that doesn’t mean they’ll cast their primary votes on the basis of that issue, as Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat point out. And even if Democrats do feel strongly enough to vote on this issue, there’s no reason Hillary can’t accommodate their concerns, at least not in principle. She can read polls as well as anyone, probably better.

In practice, though, I think this ideological shift is deeply problematic for Clinton. Klein touches on the reason why when he writes that Democrats’ views on corporations and banks may serve as a proxy for something bigger: