Can a woman win the presidency? The New York Times picked two.

Democratic voters have wrestled all year with whether they want to watch another female nominee face President Donald Trump in November. Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, The New York Times’ editorial board wants to force a reckoning — by endorsing Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.

The newspaper’s decision to endorse two women this week may not play a role in who ultimately wins the Democratic nomination. Still, it was historic and may be a potential turning point at a time when the politics of gender have engulfed the 2020 campaign.

The Times argued that Warren would be less divisive — and therefore more effective — than fellow progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has relished his refusal to compromise. And they made the case that Klobuchar, who is ideologically similar to former Vice President Joe Biden, “has emerged as the standard-bearer for the Democratic center.” The newspaper signed off its endorsement with words that might have seemed unthinkable a generation ago: “May the best woman win.”

But beneath the veneer of ascendant female power, the question of how deep sexism runs in America has been the long-running undercurrent of the 2020 race.

The irony is palpable. Democrats are coming to grips with that question at a time when their party has lurched in its most liberal direction ever, and at a time when the #MeToo movement has empowered women like never before. Yet many Democratic voters still worry about whether America is ready for a female president.

For the past year, voters have raised the subject uncomfortably in interviews with CNN when talking about Warren, Klobuchar and California’s Sen. Kamala Harris (who dropped out late last year).

Though many Americans are exhausted by Trump’s misogyny and bullying, some Democrats openly worry whether “Trump voters” would support a female nominee to replace him.

They wonder aloud whether a woman would withstand Trump’s withering criticism as well as a man.

They want to avoid a repeat of the kinds of moments that seemed to define 2016: when Trump stalked behind Hillary Clinton on the debate stage or his portrayal of her as a shrill schoolmarm, which somehow cut to the core of her electability.

“In the minds of some people, including mostly men, but also some women, they look at the fact that Hillary lost and they think, ‘Oh, a woman can’t win against Trump,’ ” former Clinton adviser Brian Fallon said. “I don’t think it’s correct. But in general, people always overlearn the lesson of the last election, or they always fight the last war. So it’s like, ‘Oh, we nominated a woman in 2016, we lost; so we shouldn’t do that again.’ “

“Just because something happened doesn’t mean it was the cause of what happened,” said Fallon, who’s the executive director of Demand Justice. He pointed instead to three factors: Trump’s over-performance with rural, non-college-educated whites in 2016; the drop-off among Democratic base voters, compared with the 2012 Obama campaign; and the fact that the Clinton campaign did not draw out as many college-educated female swing voters as expected.

Fallon noted that the electoral equation changed in 2018, when college-educated women came out in droves to vote for Democrats.

“There’s an easily identifiable theory of how a woman candidate this time could experience a different outcome than Hillary did,” he said.

Ready for a fight

Gender moved to the forefront of the 2020 campaign last week, when Warren and Sanders openly argued about whether he had told her during a private dinner in 2018, as first reported by CNN, that he did not believe a woman could win.

The quarrel launched a national conversation about latent sexism. But in their own ways, Klobuchar and Warren have been trying to deal with their invisible hurdle for many months.

From the beginning of the race, the senators from Massachusetts and Minnesota, along with Harris, have tried to project toughness, steely determination, a willingness to fight and a thirst for confrontation.

Warren showed those traits in the last debate: with her zinger reminding the audience that the men on the stage had collectively lost 10 elections (while only the women had won every single one), and afterward, when she walked up to Sanders when the debate was over and confronted him.

“I think you called me a liar on national TV,” Warren could be heard saying to Sanders in their tense exchange after the CNN/Des Moines Register debate. She was ready to have that fight, cameras still rolling but without the audio, in front of all the Americans who were watching.

It was Sanders who turned away.

“Let’s not do it now,” he said.

Klobuchar, too, has tackled latent sexism since announcing her candidacy, more directly than any of her rivals.

“If you think a woman can’t beat Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi does it every single day,” Klobuchar said in one memorable line at the fifth debate in November.

At that same debate, Klobuchar caught heat by bluntly telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that no woman running for the Democratic nomination would have made it to the debate stage if they had the same amount of experience as 37-year-old then-Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

“Women are held to a higher standard” and must work harder than men, she said at the debate. “That’s a fact.”

Along the way, the male candidates have been forced into their own reckonings. In November, Biden was accused of sexism after implicitly suggesting in a Medium post that Warren’s rhetoric on “Medicare for All” reflected “an angry unyielding viewpoint that has crept into our politics.”

Warren seized on the world “angry” in a fundraising email to her supporters: “I am angry and I own it,” the subject line said.

“Over and over, we are told women are not allowed to be angry,” Warren wrote in that email. “It makes us unattractive to powerful men who want us to be quiet.”

Biden said his characterization of her rhetoric had nothing to do with gender: “The strong women in my life are angry — they get angry about things,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash. “That has nothing to do with it.”

On the campaign trail in New Hampshire this weekend, Sanders acknowledged that voter anxiety about electing a woman exists, but he added: “The world has changed.”

“To those people who think that a woman cannot be elected, you’re dead wrong. If you think a gay American cannot be elected, you are dead wrong. If you think an African American cannot be elected, you are dead wrong,” Sanders said in Concord. “I think the American people have moved very significantly in trying to look at candidates based on what they stand for, not on their gender, not on their sexuality, not on their race.”

He noted that some voters hold his age against him, just as some hold Buttigieg’s youth against him, when weighing the candidates.

“If you are looking at Buttigieg, he is a young guy. People will say, well, he’s too young to be president,” Sanders said. “You look at Elizabeth Warren, she’s a woman. Yeah, so everybody, you know, brings some negatives if you like. I would just hope very much that the American people look at the totality of a candidate, not at their gender, not at their sexuality, not at their age, but at everything.”

It remains unclear whether voters will view Warren’s sex as “a negative.” But with voting beginning in two weeks, America will soon find out.