The Massachusetts senator, whose presidential campaign almost self-destructed before it began over her clumsy use of DNA testing in a pointless argument about whether she is descended from Native Americans, has picked herself up and fought her way into third place, or a third-place tie, or a close fourth, among Democrats in recent polls. This was as unexpected as the simultaneous rise into serious contention of Pete Buttigieg, an unknown Midwestern mayor in a same-sex marriage. Warren is a tenacious campaigner but an inexperienced candidate who got rattled by Donald Trump’s “Pocahontas” gibes; she has a compelling personal narrative as a child of the working class who rose to Harvard and the U.S. Senate, but she can’t seem to sell it convincingly to voters; her attempts to project homeyness come off as forced and self-conscious. She has risen by her own tenacity, a detailed and coherent set of policy ideas, and her uncanny ability to persuasively explain and defend them to voters.

And that would seem to make her a natural as a candidate to challenge the most policy-ignorant, belligerent and verbally incoherent president in American history. But there is an undertow of anxiety that pulls Democrats away from Warren: a pessimism, born of Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss in 2016, over the prospect of a woman ever actually winning the White House absent some unforeseen and dramatic shift in the electorate, such as an epidemic spread by tainted beer that selectively wipes out adult white males.