Read: Elizabeth Warren has momentum. Can she build a movement?

The speakers in these stories are always enthusiastic about Warren, delighted by her intellect, inspired by her policy agenda, and happy about the prospect of a woman president. But they seem confident that they’re alone, or at least in the minority, in liking these things. The speakers are progressive, but think that nobody else is; they want a woman president, but they feel that the rest of the electorate is too sexist to vote for one. They want to vote for Warren in the primary, but feel that they shouldn’t, or can’t afford to. Instead, they should capitulate to what they imagine are other voters’ bad impulses, so that when the general election rolls around, the Democrats will have a candidate who they think is more likely to beat Trump—a centrist, that is, and a man.

The tendency found in these reported stories is at least somewhat backed up by polling. Data for Progress, a left-leaning think tank, found that Warren had a significant advantage in its “magic wand” poll, which asks voters which candidate they would choose to make president if they could wave a magic wand to bestow the office, rather than having the contenders go through a general election. She did less well, however, in a more traditional survey.

It seems that Warren is extremely popular—but that voters do not trust one another to share that high opinion of her.

The result is a kind of sexism by proxy, in which voters think that they can’t vote for a progressive woman in a primary because they don’t believe other, supposedly less enlightened voters will vote for her in a general. They intend to reduce suffering, and to secure the best outcome available—isn’t the most important thing to beat Trump? They want to convey worldliness, sophistication. But the effect is to disadvantage worthy candidates like Warren because they are progressive and female, and to unfairly privilege unworthy candidates because they are centrist and male. It is voter masochism disguised as pragmatism, sexism disguised as common sense.

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Even as these voters seem to acknowledge the seriousness of sexism, they wind up reinforcing it with their actions, reducing the likelihood that a woman could become president by asserting confidently that it is not possible.

The perception that a woman can’t win the presidency stems mostly from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, a single data point that is given undue importance in voters’ minds. After all, the loser of every other presidential election was a man, but no one questions men’s viability as candidates because of their gender. There is some empirical evidence to suggest that women have a harder time in races for executive positions than they do in elections to legislatures, and there is a good deal of evidence that women face uphill battles to attain positions that have not been held by women in the past. But Vox reports that while data suggest that sexism was a factor in the 2016 race, it was not decisive. And in 2018, women who were not incumbents were more likely to win their midterm elections than any other kind of candidate.