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Thursday’s New York Times story by Lisa Lerer and Jess Bidgood was a 1,500-word excuse-making lament over Kamala Harris’s embarrassing loss to Donald Trump, “Will the U.S. Ever Be Ready for a Female President?”

Former President Bill Clinton and Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, don’t agree on much. Yet, recently the ideological adversaries found some common ground on a political question that has quietly endured over nearly two decades.

Yes, a woman can win the White House, they agree. But she’s probably going to be conservative.

Why does the Times make that sound like a bad thing?

For Democrats still scarred by Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald J. Trump in 2016, Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat at the hands of the same man in November has only deepened anxieties over gender bias and prompted a fresh round of debate over the electability of women to the nation’s highest office.

While few will say so aloud, some Democrats are already quietly hoping their party doesn’t nominate a woman in 2028, fearing she could not overcome an enduring hold of sexism on the American electorate. Many others anticipate another — perhaps even more aggressive — round of questions and doubts about female presidential candidates that have plagued the party for the better part of two decades..

“People feel pretty stung by what happened,” said Liz Shuler, the first woman elected to lead the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the largest federation of unions in the country, who supported Ms. Harris and believes she made no significant missteps in the race….

No real “missteps” by Harris? Apparently avoiding interviews, insulting the Teamsters, and never daring to move out of President Biden’s shadow don’t count as “missteps.”

As they process the second defeat of a female nominee, Democrats are divided over the question of how much Ms. Harris’s gender actually contributed to her loss, making it hard to divine what exactly that could mean for their party in 2028. Two weeks before Election Day, Ms. Harris openly dismissed concerns that sexism could hurt her chances, saying in an interview with NBC News that the country was “absolutely” ready to elect a female president.

….

Now, after her defeat, few Democrats dispute that sexism was a factor in a race against a man who had been found liable for sexual abuse — a verdict Mr. Trump called a “disgrace” — and has long made hyper-masculinity part of his political brand.

But the “sexism” whines from the Times started even before the devastating election results for Democrats, encapsulated in headlines like “The Quiet, Stubborn Aversion To Putting a Woman in Power” and “Michelle Obama Decries a ‘Double Standard’ in Treatment of Trump and Harris.” Michelle Obama — now there’s an objective source!

Eventually reporters Lerer and Bidgood briefly logged in to reality:

Yet to chalk Ms. Harris’s loss up to sexism alone — and to the idea that women are held to a higher standard when seeking the White House — could also be a way of minimizing campaign missteps.

“Kamala Harris made a very bad decision in her choice of vice president. So that was her first big decision to make, and in my judgment, she did not choose well,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said of the selection of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a relatively untested national figure, as her running mate. Behind Ms. Harris and Mrs. Clinton’s losses, she added, “there were circumstances in the campaign that were unrelated to gender.”

The paper buried the rebuttal to the “sexism” charge in paragraph 16.

The results indicate that, yet again, voters were not particularly motivated by a desire for greater female representation. Despite the liberal hope that women would flock to her candidacy over issues like abortion rights, Ms. Harris won the lowest level of support from female voters of any Democratic nominee since 2004, according to an analysis by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

They also noted “A smaller percentage of Latino and young women backed Ms. Harris than backed any other Democratic nominee since Barack Obama first ran in 2008.”

But fear not, the reporters found some lefty female senators to buck up their former colleague.

Still, other members of the Senate, where women make up a quarter of the body, said they believed Ms. Harris’s gender more significantly affected her support.

“Some people think that a woman can’t run a country, and so there are those kinds of views that we need to address among them,” said Senator Mazie Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii and a close ally of Ms. Harris. “There are a lot of cultural issues involved in electing a woman.”

Hizono is notorious for suggesting in judicial confirmation hearings that the rape allegations against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh were more believable because of his conservative ideology. Another flawless source for the paper.