In 2019, Let’s Finally Retire ‘Electability’
Quote:
We can expect to hear a lot more about “electability” in the next two years. Voters should understand: It’s alchemy and a crock.
In our current era, it should be buried permanently, as the 2016 victory of Donald Trump – the most “unelectable” politician to ever run for president after David Duke (I’m including “free ponies for all” candidate Vermin Supreme) – exploded what Bloomberg View called “everything we know” about who is and is not electable.
The role of “electability” has always been to convince voters to pick someone other than the candidate they prefer. The idea is to tell audiences which candidate has the broad appeal to win.
The metric pundits usually employ is, “Which Democrat could most easily pass for a Republican?” and vice-versa.
“Electability” tends to come up most in election seasons when the incumbent president is violently unpopular with minority-party voters. This is why people should be cautious now. With Democratic voters so anguished by Trump’s presidency they’ll pick anyone they think is the best bet to win, be on the lookout for experts pretending to know the unknowable — how the broad mean of voters will behave nearly two years from now.
“Electability” is how Democratic voters were convinced to pick John Kerry in 2004. Media outlets reminded us over and over that an anti-war candidate like Howard Dean could never win, and that a tall, “nuanced,” fiscally conservative veteran like Kerry “better fit the cold calculus of electability.”
Kerry was the living embodiment of “electability.” His position on the Iraq War was ambiguous and he spent much of the campaign pushing a “tough” image. Upon securing the nomination, the Kerry campaign released a video showing him with an arm around John McCain, and touting his defiance of the Democratic Party to vote for a balanced budget.
The 2004 race, we later learned in The New York Times, was about “electability itself,” with voters acting like players in a futures market, guessing how other market actors would behave down the line.
The result was a campaign in which Kerry didn’t win a single Southern or Southwestern state.
The same thing happened to Republican voters in 2012, when a near-consensus of pundits told red-staters Mitt Romney was the most “electable” choice in the field to take on the hated Barack Obama. We know how that turned out.
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Journalist Matt Taibbi goes on to quote all the pundits opining on the un-"electability" of the candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
I also learned from this article that
the first Dem debates take place in June 2019.