By Brian Schaffner and Jon Green

At one point last year, Elizabeth Warren looked poised to become a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. She was second in the national polling during much of the fall and was even leading polls in key states like Iowa and New Hampshire. But, by December, she had faded in the polls. She didn’t finish higher than third in any state through Super Tuesday, including her home state of Massachusetts. Today, she is dropping out of the race.

Why didn’t she catch on?

Primaries are idiosyncratic contests, where candidates with broadly similar policy platforms compete for voters with broadly similar policy preferences. Without party labels to rely on and with few ideological differences between the candidates, voters often base their decisions in primary elections on other things -- such as social identity or strategic considerations -- and differences in early results on the margins can have dramatic effects on whether the media treats a candidate as a contender later on. A variety of compounding factors likely contributed to the gap between Warren’s early polling strength and her low delegate count.

One such factor -- again, among many -- appears to be sexism. The idea that sexism has hampered the campaigns of the women running for the Democratic nomination is not new. Last summer, there was a clear relationship between Democratic voters’ sexism and their willingness to support women candidates like Warren, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, or Kirsten Gillibrand. Here, we show that this effect has persisted into 2020.

Data for Progress surveyed 2,953 likely Democratic primary voters in August, 2019 and then re-interviewed as many of them as possible (n = 1,619) at the end of January, 2020 -- just before the Iowa caucuses. In the first wave of the survey, respondents reported how much they agreed or disagreed with four statements that are meant to gauge one’s level of “hostile sexism”:

Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist. Women are too easily offended. Most women fail to appreciate fully all that men do for them. Women seek to gain power by getting control over men.

As you might imagine, many Democratic primary voters tend to strongly disagree with all of these statements, but this is not true for everyone. Roughly one-third of likely Democratic voters do not, on average, disagree with these statements.

If sexism mattered for Warren’s failure to gain traction in the early primaries and caucuses, then we should find that how people answered these questions last summer strongly predicted whether they planned to vote for Warren when we interviewed them in January. In purely descriptive terms, this certainly seems to be the case. As our first graph shows, Warren’s support was concentrated among those who reject sexist sentiments. To be clear, this does not show that voters who did not support Warren are necessarily sexist -- there are plenty of likely Democratic primary voters who strongly disagree with the items in the hostile sexism battery and supported other candidates. Instead, what this shows is that Warren received little-to-no support from the roughly one third of the Democratic primary electorate that does not reject these sentiments. The current front-runners, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, have support from voters with a variety of views on these items.