“The Electability Conundrum”: Scalia’s Death Only Reinforces The Need For Democrats To Choose Their Nominee Wisely
The death of Antonin Scalia has brought home two truths about the presidential race to voters in both parties. First, there may be no more important issue in the campaign than the Supreme Court (which some of us have been saying for some time). And second, if that’s true, then there may be no more important criterion in picking your party’s nominee than who has the best chance of winning in November.
Unfortunately, electability is a difficult thing to predict, no matter how much you know about politics. During the 2008 primaries, for instance, many intelligent Democrats believed there was no way that the voting public would ever elect an African American with a name like “Barack Hussein Obama.” Four years before, many Democrats thought that John Kerry was the most electable Democrat because Republicans couldn’t possibly attack the patriotism of a war hero, especially with a couple of draft-dodgers like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney at the top of their ticket. Neither of those assessments turned out to be correct.
Nevertheless, it’s an impossible question for partisans to ignore, given the stakes of the election. And just how high are they? Someone (usually someone running for president) will always say “This is the most important election of my lifetime,” and it’s easy to dismiss. After all, no matter what happens, the republic will survive. If you’re a Democrat, you can console yourself with the fact that it survived Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, as much damage as they might have done; if you’re a Republican you can say the same about Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Nevertheless, there are some reasons why this election could be particularly consequential, particularly for Democrats. The first is the Supreme Court, and Scalia’s passing is only part of that story. When the next president is sworn in, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be 83, Anthony Kennedy will be 80, and Stephen Breyer will be 80. What if Republicans succeed in keeping President Obama from seating a replacement, then a Republican is elected, and some or all of those three fall ill or retire? You could have a Court made up of seven relatively young conservative justices and only two liberals, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. The days of liberals losing cases by a 5-4 margin would be but a happy memory, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the end of affirmative action, and the crushing of labor union rights would be only the beginning of a judicial scorched-earth campaign that would not only lay waste to rights liberals hold dear, but would keep doing so for decades to come.
And then there’s the matter of what a Republican president would be able to accomplish through legislation. If the GOP nominee wins in November, it will almost certainly also mean that Republicans have held on to the House and the Senate. That president might or not not be a radical conservative, though Donald Trump looks like the only contender with a chance who couldn’t be described that way. But Congress certainly will be radical. The Republican Party has been moving sharply to the right in recent years, and with unified control for the first time in a decade, it’s safe to say they will pretty much go nuts. Repealing the Affordable Care Act, slashing upper-income taxes, gutting the safety net, rolling back environmental regulations, passing federal restrictions on abortion—if it’s in any Republican’s fantasies, it’ll be able to pass through both houses and get signed by the president. And don’t think Democrats having the filibuster will stop that train; given the respect Republicans have shown for norms and traditions, do you think they’ll let that stand in their way?
So if you think electability ought to be part of your calculation, what do you need to consider? The Democratic primary makes it a little easier because there are only two candidates, but it’s still complicated. Here are the variables to consider:
- The reward to be gained from a Bernie Sanders presidency
- The reward to be gained from a Hillary Clinton presidency
- The chances of Sanders winning in November if he’s the nominee
- The chances of Clinton winning if she’s the nominee
- The consequences of a Republican victory in November
That’s not to mention how each Democrat would match up against any given Republican, which introduces another dimension of complexity. But here’s the basic calculation you have to make: Figure out whether, for your preferences, (1) is larger than (2) or vice-versa, and by how much; then figure out whether (3) or (4) is larger, and by how much; then weigh both of those figures against (5).
For instance, you might decide that Bernie Sanders’s presidency would be superior to Hillary Clinton’s, but Clinton has a higher chance of winning in November, and since a Republican presidency would be so dreadful, you’ll support Clinton even though you like Sanders better. Or you might decide that a Sanders presidency would be so good that even if Clinton might have a slightly better chance in November, it’s worth some measure of risk in nominating Sanders because the reward of him winning is so high.
The truth, of course, is that because we aren’t rational people we constantly construct post-hoc justifications for the choices we make. In this case, that means we’ll convince ourselves that whichever candidate we prefer is also the more electable one. While it might seem logical that Clinton has a higher chance of winning a general election than Sanders, I’ve yet to encounter a Sanders supporter who actually thinks so. They say that Clinton has her own electability problems (undoubtedly true), and that Sanders will bring in so many new voters that it will overcome the effect of the attacks Republicans will launch on him for his leftist views. Clinton supporters, on the other hand, find this argument laughable; they’ll tell you that Republicans will positively disembowel Sanders, and by the time they’re done with him he’ll seem like he’s too much of an extremist to get elected to the Burlington City Council.
I’ve also found that Sanders supporters are more likely to minimize the negative consequences of a Republican presidency. That might be because they don’t see as much of a difference between Clinton and the Republicans, but it’s also because they’re focused on the first variable, the potential rewards of a Sanders presidency. Clinton supporters, on the other hand, have no sweeping expectations from their candidate; for them, staving off disaster is more than enough reason to support her.
Even if your heart goes aflutter at Sanders’s mention of things like single-payer health care and free public college tuition, you’d have to grant that achieving those goals is anything but guaranteed even if he wins the White House. And most of what he would do doesn’t differ from what Clinton would do. That’s particularly true of the Supreme Court: Any Democratic president who had a chance to name a new justice would be choosing from the same pool of liberal jurists now serving in federal appeals courts or perhaps a few state supreme courts.
But even if you find the substantive differences between Clinton and Sanders to be enormous, it’s hard to see them as actually being bigger than the difference between them on one hand and the tsunami of change that will occur if a Republican is elected on the other. Which leaves Democratic voters with no choice but think hard about which candidate is more electable—even if there are no perfect answers to the question.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, February 15, 2016
“We Vote For Survival”: You’re Damn Right Electability Matters To Black Voters
Coming off his near-upset in the Iowa caucus and his massive win in New Hampshire, polls (PDF) are showing that more voters nationally are “feeling the Bern,” with Bernie Sanders now appearing to have the momentum against Hillary Clinton. These polls seem to confirm two theories.
First, the enthusiasm gap that many of us have long written about and that Hillary Clinton struggles with is very real.
Second, not caring about which candidate is actually electable might be one of the greatest forms of privilege there is. This is one reason why despite being more progressive than Clinton in some areas, Sanders has struggled to gain traction with black voters. Because ignoring whether a candidate is actually electable is a luxury most minorities simply can’t afford.
Here’s what I mean.
Every voter I’ve ever met has fallen into three camps: Those who see voting as a civic duty, those who only do it when they’re really inspired, and those who view it as an act of survival. For those who view it as a civic duty, voting is on par with volunteering for charity—something good, responsible people do regularly but not necessarily something they believe will immediately impact their lives. But they may believe that voting for a candidate who cares about climate change today could possibly have some impact on the world one day, like when their grandchildren are here.
We have all met at least one person who falls in the only when they’re really “inspired” camp. They only vote when a candidate makes their heart sing by saying something witty on The Tonight Show or giving one great speech.
Then there are those who vote for survival. That’s the person who votes, and gets family members to vote, to try to overturn a Stand Your Ground Law in her state, because she knows more than one unarmed teen in her community who was killed because of such a law. That kind of voter doesn’t have the luxury of waiting to be “inspired” by a candidate or to think long term about how their vote might make a difference a decade from now.
Which is why the battle between Bernie and Hillary is actually much bigger than the two of them. It’s a larger debate the progressive movement has struggled to settle within its broad coalition for years over whether considering electability is in itself a moral issue on par with the many policy issues voters and parties must consider.
For years there was a saying in Democratic circles: “Democrats want to fall in love with a candidate. Republicans fall in line.” (Obviously Donald Trump’s supporters didn’t get the memo this year.)
Hillary Clinton continues to struggle because she’s not a candidate who inspires love; admiration perhaps, but not love. The crowds at Bernie Sanders rallies could easily be mistaken for those attending a mega-church tent revival—all smiles, music and enthusiasm out the yin-yang. Hillary Clinton’s events by comparison have the more sobering feel of the Sunday School class your mom made you go to. But that doesn’t change the fact that beyond his core loyalists Bernie Sanders is not widely seen as presidential material. Yet watching Bernie Sanders gain momentum and be enthusiastically celebrated by the same people ridiculing Trump’s supporters as delusional has been a combination of ironic and baffling.
For starters, Sanders is a self-described socialist and a recent Gallup poll found that socialists are even less electable than atheists these days, which is saying something.
And in a poll released recently by Monmouth University a plurality of Democrats declared Clinton the Democratic candidate with the best chance of beating the Republican frontrunners, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
But details like these have not deterred Sanders loyalists. This is not exactly surprising because we have seen this before. I mean that Sanders inspires the same measure of devotion shown to previous progressive icons like Ralph Nader, who played the role of spoiler to Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. Nader’s and Sanders’s supporters have a few things in common.
For starters, few of Nader’s supporters actually looked at him and thought, “I genuinely believe this man has a serious shot of making it all the way to the White House.” But it wasn’t actually about winning. Instead Nader supporters had a whole host of reasons why they were willing to cast a vote that would help insure a Bush victory. Reasons like:
“We need his voice!”
“The system is broken and we need to send a message!”
“I’d rather vote my conscience than vote for the winner!”
“All I care about is who is right on the issues!” (i.e. which candidate most aligns with me ideologically)
Of course the message they ended up sending with their vote of conscience was ultimately, “I’m fine helping elect Bush.”
The similarities don’t end there. According to polling research Sanders supporters are primarily white, and they have higher levels of education and income than Clinton supporters. In 2000 The Washington Post described Nader voters as “disproportionately young, white and well-educated.”
Again, this isn’t a surprise. Because if there is anyone who can afford to vote for a candidate and genuinely not care whether he or she wins or loses, it is a young person of privilege who ultimately has very little at stake. For instance, it is doubtful that many of the white, well-educated voters who comprised Nader’s core constituency were among those who ultimately comprised the young men and women who ended up losing their lives in the War in Iraq that began under the president Nader helped elect.
And if we’re being honest, a person of privilege won’t really be that affected by who becomes attorney general or who is nominated to the Supreme Court. What I mean is, a white affluent college student will always be able to secure a safe abortion if she decides she wants one, whether it’s legal or not, just as a white affluent student is far less likely to have his life derailed by an arrest for narcotics possession than a poor black one. In both cases their familial and social networks will provide a safety net for them, which is why what motivates their voting decisions will be different than what motivates others.
The fact that Hillary is trouncing Sanders in the first primary state with a sizable black population, South Carolina, speaks volumes. There she is not only leading substantially among total voters but winning up to 80 percent of the black vote.
The reason is simple. If you are worried about your black son possibly walking out the door tomorrow and being shot in either random community violence, or by another George Zimmerman, then determining whether a candidate inspires you is probably not high on your list of Election Day priorities. You’ve got bigger fish to fry.
Most minorities do.
Recall that even with respect to Barack Obama in 2008, some African-American voters were enthusiastic from the start, but they didn’t really go all in until after he won in Iowa—that is to say, until they saw that he was truly electable. More specifically, that he could win support from diverse constituencies—African Americans as well as voters in white states. This is something Sanders hasn’t proven.
I guess the question becomes whether the needs of less privileged voters will ever become a priority for more privileged progressives who have the luxury of letting inspiration be their guide.
By: Keli Goff, The Daily Beast, February 12, 2016
“Electability May Be Hillary Clinton’s Secret Weapon”: “Can Win In November” Is Top Candidate Quality Voters Are Looking For
It’s a bit early in the presidential nominating process for “electability” arguments to become prominent. Voters are just now hearing candidates’ messages, which do not typically revolve around the ability to win a general election (though that may be a component in the message). Some of the more ideological voters may sense that caring more about electability than about core values or policy goals is unprincipled. But in polarized times like our own, the closer we get to the final choice of presidential standard-bearers, the more we’ll hear discussions of their strengths and weaknesses as general-election candidates.
Interestingly enough, entrance polls from Iowa and exit polls from New Hampshire show almost identical percentages of Democratic and Republican participants saying “Can win in November” is the top candidate quality they are looking for (as compared to perceptions of candidates’ empathy, honesty, and experience). But how these premature general-election worrywarts distribute their support differs considerably.
Among the 21 percent of Iowa Republicans placing a premium on electability, 44 percent caucused for Marco Rubio, 24 percent for Donald Trump, and 22 percent for Ted Cruz. As it happens, all three of these candidates stand for different theories of how a general-election campaign would be waged.
But among the 20 percent of Iowa Democrats prioritizing electability, 77 percent caucused for Hillary Clinton and only 17 percent for Bernie Sanders.
In New Hampshire, 12 percent of Republicans and 12 percent of Democrats ranked electability first among candidate characteristics.
Again, the Republicans so inclined were scattered, with 33 percent voting for Trump, 29 percent for Rubio (far above his overall percentage), and 16 percent for Kasich (New Hampshire Republicans were not, it appears, as impressed with Cruz’s “54 million missing evangelicals” electability argument, since only 6 percent of electability-first voters went in his direction).
But again, electability-first Democrats went 79-20 for Clinton.
Now it’s possible there’s some extrinsic reason for this finding other than Clinton having a superior perception of electability; maybe voters already inclined to vote for her simply find it easier to call her electable rather than “honest and trustworthy,” another choice. It’s more likely, though, that voters simply figure this well-known candidate running for president a second time is a better bet than a septuagenarian democratic socialist with a hybrid Brooklyn/Vermont accent and a strident tone. There’s really no reliable evidence for that; Sanders does as well as or better than Clinton in early general-election trial heats, but even if he didn’t, such polls aren’t terribly useful given the inclusion of many voters who aren’t yet paying attention to politics at all.
Later in the process, however, electability will begin to matter a lot to Democrats, especially if Republicans seem poised to nominate Rubio, who creates troubling generational comparisons to both Clinton and Sanders, or Donald Trump, whose character and conduct could create many millions of swing voters.
As I noted when listening to her in Iowa, Clinton does spend a good amount of time warning Democrats of the long-term damage Republicans could do if they controlled both Congress and the White House in 2017. That certainly gets people thinking about electability, and also thinking about liberal policies that need to be defended as opposed to less-immediate goals like amending the Constitution to ban unlimited corporate-campaign spending or building a majority to impose a single-payer health-care system on a balky Congress.
In any event, Clinton would be smart to explore these themes more often, and see what happens. It’s one thing to accuse Sanders of promoting “pie in the sky” policy ideas. It’s another altogether to describe him as a high-risk candidate who’ll invite catastrophe if he loses and won’t accomplish much if he wins. And Sanders would be smart to spend more time talking about the unconventional alliances he put together in and out of office in Vermont. Electability will eventually matter a lot.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, February 11, 2016
“Voter Turnout Challenges Sanders’ Recipe For Success”: There Is No Real Evidence Supporting His Thesis
It’s not exactly a secret that Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign faces skeptics when it comes to “electability.” With so much on the line in 2016, including the prospect of a radicalized Republican Party controlling the White House and Congress, plenty of Democratic voters, even some who may like Sanders and his message, are reluctant to nominate a candidate who’s likely to fail in a general election.
And on the surface, those concerns are hard to dismiss out of hand. Sanders is, after all, a self-described socialist senator running in an era in which most Americans say they wouldn’t support a socialist candidate. He’s 74 years old – two years older than Bob Dole was in 1996. Sanders has no experience confronting the ferocity of the Republican Attack Machine.
When GOP officials, leaders, and candidates take steps to help the Sanders campaign, it’s pretty obvious why.
But Sanders and his supporters have a counter-argument at the ready. Below these surface-level details, the argument goes, Sanders’ bold and unapologetic message will resonate in ways the political mainstream doesn’t yet understand. Marginalized Americans who often feel alienated from the process – and who routinely stay home on Election Day – can and will rally to support Sanders and propel him to the White House.
The old political-science models, Team Sanders argues, are of limited use. Indeed, they’re stale and out of date, failing to reflect the kind of massive progressive turnout that Bernie Sanders – and only Bernie Sanders – can create.
This isn’t the entirety of Sanders’ pitch, but it’s a key pillar: the Vermont senator will boost turnout, which will propel him and Democratic candidates up and down the ballot to victory.
There is, however, some fresh evidence that challenges the thesis.
In last week’s Iowa caucuses, turnout was good in the Democratic race, but it dropped when compared to 2008, the last competitive Democratic nominating fight. (Republicans, however, saw turnout increase this year to a new, record high.)
In yesterday’s New Hampshire primary, turnout was again strong, and with nearly all of the precincts reporting, it looks like about 239,000 voters participated in the Democratic primary. But again, in the party’s 2008 nominating contest, nearly 288,000 voters turned out, which means we’ve seen another drop. (Like Iowa, Republican turnout in New Hampshire yesterday broke the party’s record.)
This is obviously just two nominating contests, and there will be many more to come. It’s entirely possible that Sanders-inspired turnout will start to appear in time.
But Iowa and New Hampshire are arguably the two best states in the nation, other than Vermont, for Sanders. But that didn’t produce an increase in voter turnout.
It’s a metric that may give Democrats pause as the fight continues. If Sanders’ entire model of success is built on the idea that he’ll bring more voters into the process, it matters that there’s no real evidence of that happening, at least not yet.
Update: I received an update from a reader who suggested comparing 2016 turnout to 2008 turnout isn’t entirely fair, since the 2008 Obama-Clinton race was an epic fight that drove numbers up. It was, in this sense, an outlier – which makes it a poor point of comparison.
And while there’s likely something to this, it actually helps reinforce my point: if a 74-year-old socialist is going to become president of the United States, he’d need to boost turnout in ways without modern precedent. Or more to the point, he’d need to be able to match and build on the kind of turnout Dems saw in 2008. So far, the numbers simply don’t show that.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 10, 2016
“Emotions Are Too Raw, Resentments Too Deep”: Republicans Have A Serious Electability Problem — And Marco Rubio Is Not The Answer
Do Republicans want to win the presidential election next fall? Of course they do — but it’s curious that they’ve spent so little time debating not just which of their candidates is the most pure of heart and firm of spine, but which might actually have the best chance of winning the general election.
Contrast that with the Democratic race in 2004 or the Republican race in 2012. In both cases there was a long and detailed debate about electability, and voters ultimately coalesced around the candidate who seemed the best bet for the general election. After being pummeled as unpatriotic and terrorist-loving for years, Democrats in 2004 told themselves that a couple of draft-dodgers like Bush and Cheney could never pull that crap on a war hero like John Kerry, and that would neutralize their most glaring vulnerability. (It turned out they were wrong about that; in addition to the fraud of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a particular highlight was when delegates to the GOP convention showed up with Band-aids with purple hearts drawn on them on their faces, mocking the three Purple Hearts Kerry had been awarded in Vietnam).
Likewise, in 2012, Republicans debated intensely among themselves (see here or here) about whether Mitt Romney really was the only candidate who could win support from the middle, or whether they’d be better off going with a true believer like Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich.
There were always dissenters, of course, and they felt vindicated by the final outcome, even if there’s no way to know whether a different candidate would have done better. But everyone makes the electability argument that serves their pre-existing beliefs. So conservatives now tell themselves a story in which Republicans lost in 2008 and 2012 because they failed to nominate a “true” conservative, and once they do so, millions of heretofore unseen voters will emerge bleary-eyed from their doomsday bunkers and home-schooling sessions to cast their ballots for the GOP. This is what Ted Cruz will tell you — and it’s notable that he may talk more about electability than anyone else, despite the fact that if he were the nominee, the party would probably suffer a defeat to rival Barry Goldwater’s.
Cruz has a passionate if finite following, but the candidates leading the Republican field — Donald Trump and Ben Carson, who between them are winning about half the Republican electorate — represent a kind of cri de coeur, an expression of disgust with everything the GOP has failed to do for its constituents during the Obama years. That either one would almost certainly lose, and badly, doesn’t seem to matter much to their supporters.
The Republican establishment, on the other hand — that loose collection of funders, strategists, apparatchiks, and officials — thinks long and hard about electability. At first they seemed to settle on Jeb Bush, who seemed like the kind of low-risk grownup who could plod his way to victory. Sure, the name could be a problem, but Bush was the right sort of fellow, a known quantity who could be relied on. And so they helped him raise a quick $100 million, in a fundraising blitzkrieg that was suppose to “shock and awe” other candidates right out of the race.
Yet somehow it didn’t work out, partly because he turned out to be a mediocre candidate, and partly because although the Republican base wants many things, Jeb does not appear to be among them. Depending on which poll average you like, he’s in either fourth of fifth place, sliding slowly down. His campaign just announced it’ll be cutting back on its spending to save money, which is never a good sign (the last candidate we heard was doing that was Rick Perry; a couple of weeks later he was out of the race).
So now, after saying to the base, “Jeb’s a guy who can get elected, what do you think?” and getting a resounding “No thanks” in reply, the establishment has turned its benevolent gaze on Marco Rubio. The billionaires love him, the strategists are talking him up, the press is on board, he’s young and fresh and new and Hispanic — what’s not to like? But so far, the voters aren’t quite convinced. Though Rubio has always scored highly in approval from Republicans, he seems like everyone’s second choice, and he hasn’t yet broken out of single digits. Most Democrats will tell you that though he has some liabilities, Rubio is the one they really fear, but that hasn’t earned him too much support (at least not yet) among Republican voters.
Perhaps the reason is that at the end of eight years suffering under a president from the other party, emotions are too raw and resentments too deep for that kind of pragmatic thinking. In that way, Republicans in 2016 are in a position similar to that of Democrats in 2008 at the end of George W. Bush’s two terms. I’m sure more than a few Republicans would like to find the candidate who can make them feel the way Barack Obama made Democrats feel then: inspired, energized, and full of hope that a new era was really dawning, one in which all their miseries would be washed away and they could show the world how great things could be if they were in charge.
That Obama was not just a vessel for their feelings but also a shrewd politician capable of running a brilliant general election campaign was a stroke of luck. So far, Republicans haven’t found someone who can be both.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, October 16, 2015
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