Elizabeth Warren’s Rise Is Not Surprising

The Senator’s ultra-prepared, substantive campaign is typical for women competing in male-dominated fields

Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Just two months ago, Elizabeth Warren was regarded as a “weak” candidate. She was, people said, too wonky, too nerdy, too wooden. Her unforced error in responding to Trump’s “Pocahontas” taunt — not only performing a DNA test to “prove” her Native American heritage, but releasing a video about it — made her seem clueless. She was outflanked on every side: by establishment stalwart Joe Biden, by cult of-personality candidate Bernie Sanders, and by media darlings like Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg.

Yet, a few weeks later, here we are: Beto has cratered in the polls, Buttigieg is falling fast, and Warren is consistently at the top, right behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. In some polls, she outperforms Sanders. Sure, some headlines are still dismissive or pitying. (“Warren tries to break out with flurry of policy proposals.”) But for the most part, the headlines have shifted to quiet bemusement at how well she’s doing: “Elizabeth Warren Gains Ground in 2020 Field, One Plan at a Time,” the New York Times proclaims. “Slowly and Persistently, Elizabeth Warren Is on the Rise,” says New York Magazine.

We should not be surprised by Warren’s rise, or by the dogged tenacity she’s shown throughout her campaign. It’s who she’s always been — as she likes to remind people, no one thought she could win her first Senate election against incumbent Republican Scott Brown, either . But it’s also evidence of a distinct advantage she brings to the table, which the Bernies and Buttigiegs and Bidens can’t share: Warren is a woman, and women are used to being underestimated. Women, with their famous “likability” problem, cannot coast on personality or charm the way men can. They get half the applause for doing the same job. Many of them, like Warren, have learned to cope by putting in twice the work.

Warren is perfectly positioned to outperform her male opponents, to take advantage of their overconfidence, to make that steady climb to the top of the polls while their bubbles form and pop.

Warren’s impulse to future-proof and failure-proof, to overproduce, to sweat the small stuff, has come to define her. It’s not just about her famously prolific policy rollouts — though she’s laid out detailed strategies on everything from housing discrimination to abortion access — but about the depth and care with which she approaches every aspect of her campaign.

It’s about her tactical preparation in Iowa, where she has already hired more staffers than any other candidate. It’s about the depth and breadth of her learning, and her commitment to having answers on the issues that matter: In 2014, after Ta-Nehisi Coates published “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic, Warren requested a meeting to talk with him about it. “She was deeply serious, and she had questions,” Coates said. Indeed, when Warren launched her campaign earlier this year, reparations was one of the first issues she included on her platform.

This diligence, obviously, is a testament to Warren’s character. But it isn’t specific to Warren. It is a prototypical coping strategy for women working in a male-dominated field. In their book Gendered Vulnerability, political scientists Jeffrey Lazarus and Amy Steigerwalt found that female politicians put in more effort to serve their constituents than men do. They held more constituent meetings, they put more staff in district offices to handle voter concerns, they co-sponsored more legislation that was relevant to their home districts, and they voted in line with their constituents’ wishes more often.

This is not because women are inherently better or nicer people than men; female politicians are simply aware that they face greater hostility due to their gender, and they are thus more fearful of being voted out. Even in the most basic interactions, Lazarus and Steigerwalt found, women felt the need to work harder: “Staffers told us that the women they worked for were more worried about being questioned or challenged,” they told the Washington Post, and therefore, “their female bosses felt a more pressing need to be prepared for all meetings, no matter who they were with.”

Once you know about this pattern, you can spot it everywhere: In 2016, when a blizzard snowed in the Capitol, the female Senators were the only ones to show up to work. More recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made headlines for the careful, handwritten notes she takes during constituent meetings. AOC also “consistently attends even the most mundane committee hearings,” where most of her male colleagues do not.

Of course, the approach can backfire: Hillary Clinton’s famously detail-obsessive and policy-heavy 2016 campaign earned her the label of “overprepared.” But it is also exactly what people like about Elizabeth Warren.

It’s illustrative, here, to contrast Warren to her male competitors, many of whom seem like the kind of guys who forget their homework and charm the teacher into giving them an extension. Biden often seems happy to coast entirely on name recognition and residual fondness for the Obama years; Buttigieg and Beto have made their names on nice-sounding platitudes and human interest stories, without advancing a single specific policy idea that makes them stand out. (Seriously: Julian Castro has immigration, Kamala Harris has equal pay, Kirsten Gillibrand has family leave and childcare — what one bedrock policy of Pete Buttigieg’s can you name? “Liking James Joyce” doesn’t count.) Sanders is unprepared to the point of incoherence when answering questions outside his wheelhouse.

The difference here is not one of intelligence, but of expectations. When you expect your job to be easy, you may stumble on rough terrain. If you expect the job to be hard, those challenges don’t throw you. Warren is perfectly positioned to outperform her male opponents, to take advantage of their overconfidence, to make that steady climb to the top of the polls while their bubbles form and pop. While the men have been able to vamp and fake, to deploy personal charisma to disguise flimsy ideas, Warren has internalized the idea that she must always be ready to show her work at a moment’s notice. It makes her a shockingly good campaigner.

It would make her a great President, too.