Elizabeth Warren was, in my view, a victim of two things.

[Hortensis]

41. Might add 3 and 4: Sanders and Biden. And 5.

Both benefit from being men, of course. But Sanders already had his ardent base mostly locked up. And Biden was the favorite of most mainstream liberals, as well as others who made electability a priority from the beginning. (The power of that is evidenced by his Super Tuesday wins in spite of being broke and spending almost no money in those states. Scarborough said he spent a whole $100k or so total in VA!)

5: What I believe was a fatal mistake in not strongly sdifferentiating herself from Sanders. Warren was difficult to peg as there was no hole for a "radical in defense of traditionalism" as someone defined her. As such she is a true successor to FDR's New Dealers -- very unlike Sanders, who believes tradition is corrupt and unfixable, and FDR's capitalism-based legacy its epitome.

But with Sanders calling for the need to destroy tradition on one hand and claiming he was its defender on the other, many never broke through the confusion to see the enormous differences. Especially since it also made it easy for hostile pundits to equate her excitingly competent iconoclasm with Sanders' dysfunctional "wish on one hand" extremism, from whose planless rhetoric only one thing came alarmingly clearly: his antipathy to Democrats and the democratic systems we inherited.

Maybe a 6: She should have run in 2015, and if only she had! Sanders stepped forward out of years of obscurity to take advantage of the excitement and unfilled demand HER activism and achievements created. In the beginning he claimed to be picking up her banner. Not exactly. And if she'd run, win or lose the primary, Trump and the Republicans would have been toast. She'd have done all she had to to make sure of that.