Will the 2020 female candidates be spared the Hillary Clinton 'likable enough' BS?

McSweeney's had a wry, Onion-like tongue-in-cheek response to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) entering the 2020 presidential arena: "I Don't Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary And Coincidentally I'm Starting To Hate Elizabeth Warren." But it was anchored in reality.

"The 2020 presidential campaign is expected to include the largest field ever of female candidates, all of them campaigning in the wake of the defeat of the first female nominee of a major party," say Annie Linskey and David Weigel at The Washington Post. And like Warren, they'll probably all "feel compelled to come up with an answer" to a question "asked of female candidates and rarely of men: 'Is she "likable" enough to be president? Others put it another, potentially more devastating, way: Is she too much like Hillary Clinton to be the nominee?'"

Warren and the other potential 2020 women — Sens. Kamala Harris (Calif.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) — differ significantly from Clinton in age, personality, policies, and life stories, but "the women looking at White House campaigns continue to shoulder gendered criticism and demands not placed on their male counterparts," the Post says. And for the Democratic women, they may have their own preliminary primary: "Demonstrating they're not Hillary Clinton — nothing like her! — before they earn the nod to take on Trump."

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On the other hand, the #MeToo movement changed how women campaign in 2018, and there may be strength in numbers. "With more women in the race you're less likely to become a caricature of ambition and more likely to have your qualities come to the fore and be examined," Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton's 2016 communications director, tells Axios. Warren's already facing the "likability" question, she added to the Post, but "if it continues to happen to the other female candidates, it will be more obvious that there are gender biases at work."