Elizabeth Warren is desperate. That’s the only way to explain her ugly gambit today.

From the looks of it, her campaign called up reporters at CNN and other outlets to push out the line that Bernie Sanders is a sexist who thinks a woman can’t be president. Since nobody is quoted or named in these pieces, we are getting a reporter’s paraphrase of a source’s paraphrase of Warren’s supposed characterization of something Bernie said. It’s clearly an effort by Warren to rally the women of Iowa behind her.

It’s also risky. She’s playing very dirty and exploiting the fact that she is the favored candidate of the national media in order to fling mud at a colleague who will possibly be the nominee.

So why would Warren get so desperate?

Because of Iowa Democrats’ “viability” threshold.

The Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3 take place in nearly 1,000 precincts around the state. Those precincts select delegates to a county convention. A candidate can only win delegates to the county convention if he or she has 15% in a given caucus. That is, he or she must be viable in a precinct.

Warren’s statewide average is now 16%. In the latest Monmouth poll, she hit exactly 15%. If she really got 16% statewide, there would surely be many precincts, maybe half of them, where she was not viable. And while the national media will have access to some of the “first ballot” numbers, you never know how much of the caucus-night reporting will count only the official votes that go into delegate selection.

In other words, a fourth-place finish for Warren could end up looking like a distant fourth-place finish, with her closer to fifth-place Amy Klobuchar than to whoever finishes third among Sanders, Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg.

Iowa could knock Warren out of the race. So she needed to take drastic action. And she’s done so.

