America Loves a Loser (as Long as He’s White and Male)

The media lavishes attention on Pete Buttigieg, Beto O'Rourke, and Bernie Sanders, all of whom lost high-profile races. When will it focus on women who've won?

“Wow, I like this Mayor Pete fellow!” I caught myself thinking last week. I knew almost nothing about him, other than the fact that Pete Buttigieg is an openly gay veteran, publicly shames Vice President Mike Pence for his homophobia, and sounds like a super-chill, empathetic genius in all these interviews that have clogged my Twitter feed of late. Until this past weekend he hadn’t even formally entered the presidential race. After two weeks of nonstop Mayor Pete coverage, I couldn’t help it. The notion came unbidden: I bet this Pete Boody-something-Guy is the one who can beat Trump!

For a hot second, when former representative Beto O’Rourke first entered the race, I had the same thought about him. He’s a cool skater dude from a Republican-held state where he almost won against that Munster-looking man who ate that gross white thing on his lip. But you know what I keep forgetting about him and all the white men the media keeps getting bromance boners over?

They’re losers.

These men? The losers? Recent polls show them ranked above qualified female candidates, all of whom won their elections, sometimes by historic margins.

Yes, these front-runners, who just so happen to be white and male, are losers. Buttigieg lost the 2017 election for DNC chair and the race for Indiana state treasurer in 2010, Senator Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton, and Texan O’Rourke lost the 2018 Senate race to Senator Ted Cruz…which, oddly enough, also happens to be the election that made him famous. Of course a white man would be catapulted to fame after losing a super-important race and then think, I know! I’ll run for president now! (He was born for this.) Perhaps the best known loser of all, who likes to unapologetically rub noses with women and hug them like his teddy bear and then joke about it when people ask him to knock it off, is former Vice President Joe Biden. This is the man who lost both the 1988 and 2008 presidential primaries.

But I haven’t even gotten to the worst part yet: These men? The losers? Recent polls show them ranked above qualified female candidates, all of whom won their elections, sometimes by historic margins.

Did you not know? You wouldn’t, based on how the media has covered them. As much as we’d like to think that we learned from 2016 and that this time sexism won’t be as prevalent, it absolutely is. According to recent polls, men still question whether women are emotionally fit to be president. And women get far more bad press than their male peers, per a recent analysis from Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. As Li Zhou writes for Vox, the very idea of “electability” is now becoming a code word for male and white.

But the sexism isn’t just overt in how the press talks about these women. It’s implicit in their general disinterest in them as candidates. On regular basis, the men get more coverage than the women. Even in the immediate aftermath of their presidential bid announcements, FiveThirtyEight reports that female candidates (and some of the nonwhite men in the race) received less press than white male candidates, despite the fact Senator Kamala Harris, for example, attracted a huge turnout for her kickoff event, has gone viral for her fearless interrogations in the fall, and is running a historic campaign—our first black female candidate since Shirley Chisholm! Of course, if elected, Buttigieg would become the first openly gay (and youngest) president. And that deserves attention. But the prospect of the first woman president should attract just as much. So far, it hasn’t.

The press has jumped at the chance to chase O’Rourke around to every tiny diner in America and cover his countertop speeches. But how often is the same rhapsodic attention paid to Senator Elizabeth Warren's rallies? She’s had more than 30 of them, some of which had crowds of 1,500 or more. You’d have no idea, based on the headlines that declare her an underdog and obsess over how she could lose her own state. Some feel the need to frame her as the “female Bernie Sanders,” which is not true in its substance, but also casts her in his shadow.

Remember all the people who begged Warren to run back in 2016? The stories about her rapt base, who wanted so badly to vote for a woman—just not that woman? Yeah, I don’t know where those are now either. It’s true that Warren’s principled refusal to accept PAC money and do high-dollar fund-raisers could cost her some much-needed campaign funds, but the media has no excuse. She is a proven winner and has a great shot at this race. But again, while O’Rourke and Buttigieg have been hailed out of the gate for their promise to unite America and defeat Donald Trump, neither comes even close to her level of experience.

White men in general tend to be heralded as the “one candidate” who could help Democrats win back Republicans (whom it’s not clear that we need)—what with their “neutral” and “uncomplicated” identities. Perhaps it’s because “bipartisan appeal” is shorthand for “white and male” that I rarely see Senator Amy Klobuchar mentioned in the news unless it’s something about rumors that she is a complete bitch to work for. I’m not defending her…maybe she is—but these stories also overlook the fact that she’s the one who has demonstrated that she can win over working-class voters in states that swung for Trump in 2016. She’s beaten Republicans in Senate races three times in her huge Midwestern home state of Minnesota. And she didn’t just beat them. She crushed them with double-digit margins far higher than Hillary Clinton or even Barack Obama secured.

So why on earth are these women not getting their fair share of air time? Could all five of them be “unlikable” like that “shrill” Hillary Clinton?

Don’t forget: It’s women who won the midterms for Democrats. Fifty-nine percent of women voted Democratic in the midterms. We have the power at the polls. The candidates need us. And the country needs them: Studies show that female representatives outperform their male peers once they’re on the job. Or as Tina Fey says, “Bitches get shit done.”

So why on earth are these women not getting their fair share of air time? Could all five of them be “unlikable” like that “shrill” Hillary Clinton? If the attention paid to Warren’s “wonkiness” at the supposed expense of her charisma is an indication, the press sure seems to think so. (Except for Harris, whom Politico absurdly deemed too likable.) The truth is that men still own most of the media, are in positions of power to make decisions about which stories get run, and are the ones assigned to political beats. Men control the narrative.

I want the person who runs the most dangerous and powerful nation in the world to know what the hell she (or he) is doing. But convention holds that men get promoted (and get votes) based on promise, while women have prove their worth with the same experience that’s used to tag them as “old news” or “establishment.” With 2020 on horizon, the women have my attention. Do they have yours?

Melanie Hamlett is a comedian, writer, and storyteller.