But with the logistics of when/how Warren will end her campaign now out of the way, a bigger question arises: Why didn’t she do better?

Answering the “what happened” question is never a simple thing. Voters make up their minds for lots of different reasons — some of which they are willing to articulate and some they simply won’t. But generally speaking, there seem to be three reasons why Warren didn’t get to where she wanted to go. (These are in no particular order.)

That decline led to Warren looking like a bad bet or a risky stock in the eyes of lots of voters. And people — all people — like to be for a winner, or at least someone who they think has a realistic chance to win. When votes started to be cast, that wasn’t Warren.

You can track Warren’s slide in polling relatively directly to her decision to kind of, sort of walk away from her previously full-throated support for “Medicare for All,” a program that Sanders has long championed that would eliminate the private health insurance industry entirely in favor of a government-run plan. After struggling for weeks to answer her critics’ questions about whether she fully backed Sanders’ plan and how she would fund it, Warren released her own detailed plan that tried to find a middle ground between Sanders and Biden on the issue.

It failed — angering liberals who thought she was walking away from her principles in hopes of appearing more attractive to general election voters and not satisfying more moderate voters who still thought the plan went too far.

3) Sexism: This is an indisputable fact: We have had 44 presidents and not one of them has been a woman. Coincidence? Probably not. How much did the fact that Warren is a woman and ran on an unapologetically feminist platform for president affect the outcome? It’s almost impossible to know, but it’s equally impossible to think it had no role in how voters perceived her.

“That is the trap question for every woman. If you say yeah, there was sexism in this race, everyone says, ‘Whiner.’ And if you say no, there was no sexism, about a bazillion women think, ‘What planet do you live on?'”

She added that she would “have a lot more to say on that subject later on.”

Again, how much each of these factors played into Warren’s inability to turn her momentum over the summer into actual votes in Iowa, New Hampshire and beyond is very difficult to say. But there’s little doubt that each of them were part of voters’ calculations as they decided who to be for — and who not be for — by the time votes actually happened.