Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator and longtime consumer protection advocate, became the first Democratic candidate to formally enter the 2020 presidential race on Monday, with a New Year’s Eve announcement that seemed timed to pre-empt the slew of candidacies from her fellow Democrats that are expected in the coming months.

In a five-minute video, she stands in her kitchen and emphasizes the injustice of rising economic inequality, an issue she has focused her career on with an almost religious devotion. The Hillary Clinton comparisons followed immediately, with Politico asking just hours later: “How does Elizabeth Warren avoid a Clinton redux – written off as too unlikeable before her campaign gets off the ground?”

Elizabeth Warren’s ‘likability’? The US media has learned nothing from 2016 | Arwa Mahdawi Read more

The comparison to Clinton is an odd one, since there is considerable political daylight between the two women. Warren advocates for redistributive efforts far to the left of what Clinton campaigned for, even after her campaign was shifted into a more progressive position following the bruising 2016 primary fight against Bernie Sanders. Warren has called for an end to corporate personhood, has declared trickle-down economics “a lie” and has tentatively endorsed a “Green New Deal”. The two women can seem to have little in common besides a party affiliation and a haircut.

The fact is that Elizabeth Warren is likable. She speaks frankly and in moral terms, avoiding the cajoling sliminess of politicians such as the reptilian Texas senator Ted Cruz, or her probable Democratic primary opponent, New Jersey senator Cory Booker. She is better at avoiding the air of professorial condescension that was sometimes indulged by her fellow former legal scholars Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. At times, she even achieves the unaffected folksiness that endears voters to politicians such as Beto O’Rourke or Ronald Reagan. She has an air of kindly authority that might remind you of your old school teacher – probably because she used to be one.

But none of this is what we mean when we ask whether or not Elizabeth Warren is “likable”, just as it was not what was meant when that tiresome question was asked about Clinton in the 2016 election cycle. Instead, the question of “likability” as it is applied to women candidates has become a kind of cipher through which pundits, strategists and ordinary Americans discuss our collective discomfort with women in power.

The claim that a woman candidate is not “likable” is a code for saying she defies our shared cultural understanding that power and authority are implicitly male, and that women who claim them are illegitimate, threatening or breaking the rules. If it were possible for Warren to be “likable”, under this rubric, it would only be if she were able to adhere to prevailing ideas of what is appropriate behavior for her sex – that is, if she were not seeking public office at all.

Of course, there are reasons for committed progressives to dislike Warren. She was a registered Republican in the early 1990s, and in the past she has made enthusiastic proclamations of the virtues of the free market, statements that are likely to strike the Democratic party’s left wing as suspicious or naive. Troublingly, she recently made a stupid and unforced error when she took a DNA test to prove her Native American ancestry. The test was meant to dispel Donald Trump’s accusation that Warren fabricated her heritage – her calls her “Pocahontas” – in order to take advantage of affirmative action programs. It was a smear that was designed by the president to pique the racist enthusiasms of his base, and it worked.

But by taking the test, Warren angered Native Americans, who have correctly argued that their culture is more than DNA, and she has made the rookie mistake of engaging with Trump on his own bad-faith terms. If she is to be successful against him in a general election, she will have to learn to deflect his attacks more intelligently, without playing into his hands.

But the biggest obstacle to Warren’s candidacy will be sexism, and not only from the trumped-up mobs of rightwingers who are sure to start chanting “Lock her up” in reference to her at Trump’s next rally. Misogyny is alive and well in the Democratic party; it knows no political affiliation. Much of the sexism that Warren will face will be from Republicans, but it will also come from Democratic voters – men and a few women who are liberals, leftists and progressives.

Many of these voters are people who esteem themselves to be feminists or otherwise free of bias, but who will nevertheless find themselves uncomfortable with a woman in power, unable to articulate what it is that bothers them about Elizabeth Warren – except for a vague sense that they just don’t like her.

• Moira Donegan is a writer