You Think It’s Hard to Run Against a Women, Bernie Sanders? Try Running as One.
Turns out Joe Biden isn’t the only presidential candidate making tone-deaf comments guaranteed to provoke key Democratic constituencies. Enter Bernie Sanders, who postulated Friday that Elizabeth Warren is gaining on him in part because “there are a certain number of people who would like to see a woman elected.” The idea that Americans—even progressive Democrats—are so eager for the coming matriarchy that it’s an obstacle for a man like Bernie is laughable, and demonstrably false.
According to a Morning Consult poll, Bernie supporters overwhelmingly break for Biden as their second choice. Somehow the woman with whom the Democratic-Socialist senator is ideologically closest loses his voters to the most conservative candidate in the field. Twenty-six percent of Berniecrats told an Emerson poll earlier this year that they would even choose Trump in a general election. Meanwhile, Warren still has to fight to win over voters who should be her natural base: women who say they like her, but worry that she can’t win. This self-fulfilling prophecy was captured in an opinion survey this month conducted by Ipsos for The Daily Beast, which showed that while 74 percent of Democrats and independents say that they are personally comfortable with a female president, just 33 percent say that their spouses and neighbors would be. That means every man in the field has a de facto leg-up by virtue of being male.
Running for president while female is a disadvantage, plain and simple. Suggesting otherwise makes Bernie sound like any other white man complaining about supposedly being passed over for a “diversity hire.”