The countdown to the US 2020 election has only just begun, but it’s already starting to look like a hellish repeat of 2016.

On Monday, senator Elizabeth Warren became the first major Democrat to announce her intention to run for president. As you may be aware, Warren is a woman, which means that it is basically illegal not to compare her with Hillary Clinton, despite the two being very different politicians. It is also mandatory to analyse her “likability”, which we all know is the most important issue when it comes to female candidates. Indeed, less than 24 hours after Warren had announced her bid, Politico published a story headlined “Warren battles the ghosts of Hillary”. They publicised the story with a widely derided tweet, asking: “How does Elizabeth Warren avoid a Clinton redux – written off as too unlikable before her campaign gets off the ground?”

I’ll tell you how Warren avoids a Clinton redux. It’s actually very simple: the media focuses on the issues the Massachusetts senator stands for instead of fixating on her “likability”. The media stops using “likability” as lazy shorthand for: “Is the US too misogynistic to vote in a female president?” The media stops perpetuating the narrative that powerful women are unlikable. The media starts treating her as a candidate, rather than a female candidate.

This isn’t to say that Warren’s gender doesn’t matter. Of course it does. But there are ways to write about that without perpetuating sexist tropes. There are ways to address that without making her gender overshadow her policies. And there are ways to talk about that without making her gender more of an issue than it actually is. Let’s not forget, after all, that despite Clinton’s supposed unlikability, she won the popular vote. She got almost 3m more votes than Donald Trump; the largest ever total among a losing candidate. Despite her supposed unlikability, more Americans wanted her to be president than Trump.

Let’s also not forget that a record number of women and minorities were elected in last year’s midterms. On Thursday, the first day of congress, the halls of power in DC became more diverse than they have ever been. A record 102 women are now in the House of Representatives, and more than a third of these are serving for the first time. US voters have shown they are very capable of finding women likable enough to vote for; the media, on the other hand, seems to have a hard time coming to terms with this.

I know it’s fun to blame all the ills of the world on Russia, but it wasn’t just Russia that put Trump in the White House. The media played a significant part; one I don’t think it takes enough responsibility for. Trump got billions of dollars in free coverage, with the press obsessing about his every inconsequential word. The press helped turned him from a joke into a viable candidate. At the same time, the media helped stoke vitriol towards Clinton. They helped turn her from a viable candidate into a caricature of a nasty woman. The way in which the media is already seizing on Warren’s likability suggests that, unfortunately, we might not have learned very much from 2016.

The Politico article, by the way, didn’t go unnoticed by Warren’s campaign team, who quickly leveraged it for a fundraising email. “If you get frustrated when commentators spend more time covering Elizabeth or any woman’s ‘likability’ than her plans ... do something productive about it,” the email read. It would be productive, I think, for the media to take that advice to heart.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist