Warren has become a test case for what many wish to believe: that Democrats are sane, that policy matters, and that if a smart woman just works hard enough, she can come out on top.

I interviewed the Senator on how she persists against new headwinds: https://t.co/ynDSuLDhYA

— Charlotte Alter (@CharlotteAlter) February 10, 2020

In an interview with TIME, Warren is asked why Buttigieg “has zoomed ahead in the nominating fight with a thinner resume and airier rhetoric.” Journalist Charlotte Alter writes, “Warren did a little one-syllable laugh and wiped something under her glasses. ‘You’d have to ask someone else that,’ she says calmly.” Alter implies that Warren, like Klobuchar, is well aware of gender differences in the standards to which we hold political candidates. In the same interview, Warren references another gender difference frequently cited by gender experts — that men are more likely than women to assume both their qualifications for and entitlement to political power. She tells Alter, “I ran for president not because I’d been looking at myself in the mirror and saying, ‘You’d make a wonderful president,’ but because I believe I’ve got the best chance both to beat Donald Trump and to make the changes we need to make, starting in January, 2021.”