Are women elec­table? A flur­ry of recent reports sug­gests that, for many Demo­c­ra­t­ic women, the answer is no. One 20-year-old told ABC News that, though she wants a woman pres­i­dent, ​“America’s just not there yet.” Wash­ing­ton Post reporter Dave Weigel tweet­ed that numer­ous ​“mid­dle-aged women” told him ​“2016 showed that vot­ers won’t elect a female pres­i­dent.” Polls show that defeat­ing Don­ald Trump is extreme­ly impor­tant to Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers, and that the can­di­dates they believe are most like­ly to beat him are white men like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Beto O’Rourke.

Warren, the female candidate doing best in the polls, has run a robustly populist campaign steeped in policy and aimed at structural economic change.

It’s clear that Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers remain haunt­ed by the specter of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. Frus­trat­ing­ly, we seem to have learned all the wrong lessons.

For starters, when it comes to a com­plex event like an elec­tion, it’s sim­ply not true that any sin­gle fac­tor — even gen­der — pre­de­ter­mines the out­come. In 2016, if any num­ber of fac­tors had gone the oth­er way — if the econ­o­my had been just a lit­tle bet­ter, if FBI Direc­tor James Comey hadn’t reopened the email inves­ti­ga­tion at the eleventh hour, if Clinton’s cam­paign had poured more resources into key Mid­west­ern states—Clin­ton like­ly would have won.

Of course, gen­der played a role — Clin­ton was sub­ject­ed to a tsuna­mi of appalling sex­ism from the media, Trump, slimy oper­a­tives and an army of inter­net trolls — but it’s sur­pris­ing­ly hard to prove her loss was because of gen­der bias. Yes, post-elec­tion stud­ies show sex­ist atti­tudes were asso­ci­at­ed with vot­ing for Trump, and a 2015 Gallup poll revealed 8% of Amer­i­cans wouldn’t vote for a woman pres­i­dent — but these were most­ly Repub­li­cans who would nev­er have vot­ed for a Demo­c­rat any­way. One study sug­gests Clinton’s gen­der could have won her more votes than it lost.

As polit­i­cal sci­en­tists Dan­ny Hayes and Jen­nifer Law­less point out (based on non-pres­i­den­tial elec­tions), women can­di­dates are not less like­ly to win pri­ma­ry and gen­er­al elec­tions than men; the issue is that not enough run in the first place. Men are more like­ly to con­sid­er them­selves qual­i­fied and more like­ly to be recruit­ed. Per­haps there is some­thing dif­fer­ent about pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, but as any social sci­en­tist will tell you, you can’t make broad gen­er­al­iza­tions based on a sam­ple size of one.

Clinton’s own focus groups showed the glass ceil­ing argu­ment was ​“the least effec­tive pos­i­tive case” for her can­di­da­cy. Instead, what vot­ers cared about was whether the can­di­date could ​“make their own lives bet­ter.” Clin­ton failed to make that case and instead focused on her qual­i­fi­ca­tions and biog­ra­phy (remem­ber ​“I’m With Her”?) and the awful­ness of Trump.

Things might have been dif­fer­ent had Clin­ton craft­ed a strong eco­nom­ic mes­sage for work­ing peo­ple. When poll­ster Stan­ley Green­berg test­ed a Demo­c­ra­t­ic mes­sage attack­ing Trump’s char­ac­ter against a mes­sage ​“demand­ing big eco­nom­ic changes” and attack­ing Trump for ​“pro­tect­ing cor­po­rate spe­cial inter­ests,” the eco­nom­ic mes­sage ​“per­formed dra­mat­i­cal­ly bet­ter,” includ­ing among key swing vot­ers like white work­ing-class women.

To their cred­it, sev­er­al of the 2020 female can­di­dates appear to have tak­en this les­son to heart and are run­ning on plat­forms well to the left of Clinton’s. Sens. Kamala Har­ris, Kirsten Gilli­brand and Eliz­a­beth War­ren are all co-spon­sor­ing bills in sup­port of Medicare for All, a fed­er­al jobs guar­an­tee and a $15 nation­wide min­i­mum wage—posi­tions Clin­ton avoid­ed. Even the most mod­er­ate woman run­ning, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, sup­ports a $15 min­i­mum wage. War­ren, the female can­di­date doing best in the polls, has run a robust­ly pop­ulist cam­paign steeped in pol­i­cy and aimed at struc­tur­al eco­nom­ic change.

War­ren clear­ly under­stands the moral stakes involved in the elec­tabil­i­ty argu­ment. At one can­di­dates’ forum, she asked: ​“Are we going to show up for peo­ple that we didn’t actu­al­ly believe in, but because we were too afraid to do any­thing else?” If we are too afraid to vote for women, there’s a dan­ger of a self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy, dis­cour­ag­ing women from run­ning and vot­ers from sup­port­ing them.

If the Democ­rats run the kind of cam­paign that Clin­ton ran (and that Biden shows every sign of run­ning), they are like­ly to pro­duce the same dis­mal results we saw in 2016. An obses­sion with elec­tabil­i­ty will like­ly fuel the same pol­i­tics of reac­tion and inequal­i­ty that made vot­ers cling so des­per­ate­ly to ​“elec­table” can­di­dates in the first place.