Back at the end of March, the president and many others were already talking about Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign as if it was over. Her campaign finance director quit in frustration, basically because he wasn’t being allowed to compensate for his failure to deliver by pitching Warren to big money donors. But that just demonstrated a lack of faith. Warren raised six million dollars in the first three months of the year and $19 million in the three months after her finance director left the campaign. She did it her way, and it began to work.

Meanwhile, Anna Peele of Washington Post Magazineasks why America is ignoring Kirsten Gillibrand. On paper, you might think that Gillibrand and Warren are very similar. If anything, Gillibrand has the advantage of being the junior senator of New York, which should guarantee her more media exposure than most of her colleagues. So, why is Warren surging into third place and Gillibrand can’t break out above one percent in the national polls?

There is admittedly some mystery involved here, but one thing is pretty clear. The Democrats nominated a woman in 2016 who once held the same Senate seat that Gillibrand holds now, and it did not work out well. Working on the assumption that not learning from your mistakes is the definition of insanity, few Democrats see Gillibrand as a sufficient recalibration of strategy. She’s not getting traction because too few people accept the concept of her campaign to bother listening to what she has to say.

I know people will bring things up, like Gillibrand being the first out of the box to call for Al Franken’s resignation, but I am not sure that is actually a liability for her at all, and it’s certainly not something most voters even know about. It can’t possibly explain the giant shrug that has greeted her campaign.

Warren may just be a better politician who is running a better campaign. I could try to get granular with that theory and examine the choices each of them have made, the positions they’ve adopted, and their strategies for getting attention, but I think at the end of all that I’ll probably come out just saying that Warren is more skilled and has a better team.

What complicates the analysis is just how throughly moribund Gillibrand’s campaign has been from the very moment of its launch. If she had ever had the slightest buzz I might be able to explain how she lost it. It’s much harder to explain why she hasn’t generated any buzz at all. I could argue that she did a bad job of branding herself at the outset, but her choices haven’t seemed all that illogical. In a #MeToo moment, she’s depicted herself as a champion of women. She not only took the lead on ousting Franken, but she’s been out front on abortion rights and (in quite a turnabout) an extremely vocal proponent of gun control. It’s possible she went a bit too far into gender branding and turned herself into a niche candidate like Steve Forbes hammering a flat-tax or Gary Bauer railing against secularism. But even they were able to do considerably better than one percent in the polls.

For Peele, who spent some one-on-one time with Gillibrand in Iowa, the answer may be that she’s a little too boring for our entertainment age, but she speaks passionately, is photogenic, and isn’t shy about throwing herself into controversial topics. I don’t really see how she is boring. Peele also notes that she’s at her best on the campaign trail when she’s listening rather than talking, and there could be something to that. Maybe she’s a better retail politician than a made-for-television one.

Whatever the explanation, it doesn’t appear that her campaign is going anywhere, while Warren is resonating with more and more people each week. I’d like to give credit to Warren for being smart, showing leadership, and having a strategy calibrated to win where Clinton lost without selling out the base. But, again, that might explain why Warren is doing well but it does little to explain why Gillibrand is doing so badly.