As the Democratic primary heads into its most decisive month of voting, many women are feeling the white-hot sting of misogyny anew after already losing several talented female candidates in the race. Feminist writer Moira Donegan tweeted Wednesday, "This is going to destroy my mentions but I get *a lot* of emails and DMs from women who are freaked out by the misogynist aggression that they’re seeing around the Democratic primary. They all think they’re the only ones. They’re not."
It's a sentiment that has cropped up repeatedly in the last several weeks as women watch one of the race's top four candidates being virtually erased by the media from the late-stage contenders. The latest example came in recent polling from NBC News and The Wall Street Journal in which the outlets chose five of the top six Democratic candidates to test in head-to-heads against Donald Trump and mysteriously opted to omit the woman who was tied for third nationally in their poll: Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Instead, the poll tested Trump against Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vice President Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, and then Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar—both of whom ran behind Warren in the poll. To add insult to injury, MSNBC's Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell subbed Klobuchar's photo in for Warren in a graphic of the front-runner polling.
But the explanation given for omitting Warren by the outlets' pollster was that they only had five spots and they gave the fifth one to Klobuchar, since she's a newer candidate. “Amy Klobuchar was selected as the fifth candidate,” Peter Hart, who conducted the poll, said in an email to BuzzFeed News. “We have tested Warren earlier, and I suspect she will be part of the next testing.”
Which isn't any kind of explanation for why they passed up a candidate running third in their own poll for two that were running fourth and fifth—except that the fourth candidate was a man, and they clearly never considered leaving him out of the poll. Or as feminist author and writer Rebecca Traister put it, "One woman—it doesn’t really matter which—can have the fifth polling spot, as a little treat."
The omission of Warren in the poll sent her Twitter mentions trending in the top 10 once again on Tuesday night, with #WheresWarren following on the heels of #PresidentWarren hitting the No. 1 spot the previous night. But it wasn’t just one poll. Real Clear Politics noted the drop-off in Warren’s mentions on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox over the past couple of weeks, Feb. 8-17.
To some extent the erasure of Warren seems to have energized her supporters. On Wednesday, NBC reported that a new super PAC, Persist PAC, has entered the race on behalf of Warren with a seven-figure ad buy in Nevada. NBC writes, "A source involved with Persist PAC told NBC News that the group’s founders believe Warren is the best person to become president and that they need to help elect her in order to enact the campaign finance change she often talks about on the trail."
Warren has disavowed taking PAC money, and her campaign maintains that position, telling NBC that Warren "has made clear that she thinks all of the candidates should lock arms together and say we don’t want Super PACs and billionaires to be deciding our Democratic nominee.”
But the reality appears to be that when the media won't cover a female candidate, she clearly needs to blanket the airwaves in order to have a fair chance. That’s as true as ever in this Democratic primary, despite the facts that women will account for some 60% of Democratic primary voters and that female voters also turn out at higher rates than men.