Elizabeth Warren’s exit should come as no surprise. Granted, she was the smartest and most substantive candidate in the Democratic race, and that should’ve buoyed her in the early balloting. But she shouldered a burden that her male rivals didn’t share, and we all know what it was.

In 2016 too many people said of Hillary Clinton, “We’re fine with putting a woman in the White House, but not this woman.” In 2020 too many people said of Warren, “We’re fine with putting a woman in the White House, certainly this woman, but we’re worried that other people won’t support this woman, so we won’t.” Or something like that.

Yeah, I know, she made a few mistakes. She endorsed government health care, then partially walked it back by extending the timeline – and somehow that cost her. Male candidates flip flop all the time, far more blatantly, and it doesn’t cost them. Joe Biden was steadfastly opposed to federal funding for poor women’s abortions until he reversed himself last year, and it didn’t cost him. Warren released a meticulous accounting of how she’d pay for her health reform plan, and everyone pounced. Bernie Sanders brusquely stonewalls everyone who dares question his magical thinking on Medicare for All, but that seems to be OK. To cite just a few examples.

And to think that one of her final indignities was to be relentlessly hectored by Chris Matthews (bye bye), for the sin of believing a woman who’d filed accusations against Michael Bloomberg. What a way to go out.

I’m not claiming to be a seer, but it nevertheless seemed obvious, way back in the spring of 2019, that Warren – and the other female senators in the race – would have trouble. A CBS News poll found that, of the top 10 candidates set to run in the New Hampshire primary (four of them women), the men garnered 71 percent of likely voters. For the South Carolina primary, the men took 78 percent.

Hillary PTSD – the shock of a well-credentialed woman losing to an imbecilic groper of women – was still rampant. A trio of political scientists had concluded in a 2017 book that Hillary “was more hurt by gender than she was helped,” and that the ’16 election “appeared to activate modern sexism, especially among white men.” An international survey had concluded in 2018 that just 52 percent of Americans – and only 45 percent of men – felt “very comfortable” with the notion of having a woman in the White House.

No wonder women who loved Warren were nervous about her prospects. Last June, a Warren supporter in Iowa told NPR, “I think there’s a lot of men out there that would never vote for a woman. I hate to say that, but I think that.” I agree. A lot of men are threatened by very smart women. (And it’s not just men, by the way. In 2016, Donald Trump won 47 percent of white women; Hillary, 45 percent.)

Granted, it’s tough to prove the misogynist metric beyond all reasonable doubt. But there’s a mountain of anecdotal evidence that many voters in the early primaries passed on Warren because they feared that other voters would pass on Warren because those voters feared her gender was an impediment, so therefore potential Warren supporters passed on Warren. I believe this is what Joseph Heller called a Catch-22.

Kate Manne, a Cornell University author of a book on misogyny, has a name for that kind of attitude: “pragmatic defeatism” – a voter’s notion that “sexism and misogyny play a large role in elections, yet who responds not by doubling down on efforts to support and bolster female candidates, but by voting for a male rival.”

And what does Warren think about all this? That posed yet another dilemma. Yesterday she said: “Gender in this race? You know, that’s the trap question for everyone. If you say, ‘Yeah, there was sexism in this race,’ everyone says, ‘Whiner!’ If you say there was no sexism, about a bazillion women think, ‘What planet do you live on?'” However, “I promise you this. I’ll have a lot more to say on that subject later on.”

For now, at least, she should sing these lyrics by Taylor Swift:

I’m so sick of running / As fast as I can

Wondering if I’d get there quicker / If I was a man