Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Vice President Joe Biden arrives at a campaign stop in Burlington, Iowa.
Everyone, it seems, is debating electability—that is, which Democratic candidate has the best chance to defeat Trump. The media, the pundits and pros all have their theories and are having a field day discussing them. And not just them: Many voters are playing the electability game, too, trying to decipher which candidate can win in November before basing their vote on their answer.
The theories abound. Some say only Sanders and Warren can light enough of a fire among Democrats to win. Others say only Biden, Buttigieg, or now Bloomberg can move enough swing voters to beat Trump. Still others add that unless the Democrats put a candidate of color on their ticket as the vice-presidential nominee, they won’t be able to motivate enough of their base to win.
All interesting and plausible theories.
Most public polls now show Sanders, Biden, and Bloomberg beating Trump by between three and seven points, with most of the other candidates beating him by slightly smaller margins. And the most recent CNN poll shows that 57 percent of Democrats believe the party should nominate the candidate with the strongest chance of defeating Trump—the highest it’s been since last June.
Here’s the rub: Trying to figure out who is the most electable candidate is a losing proposition. In 2016, most of the same pros who are promoting their electability theories this year told us Trump was totally unelectable. In 2008, most of those same pros believed that a newly elected African American senator named Barack Hussein Obama could never win the White House.
Remember Republican Fred Thompson in 2008, who was going to be the next Ronald Reagan, or basketball star and senator Bill Bradley, who was supposed to win it all in 2000? Decorated war hero, astronaut, and senator John Glenn was going to wipe the field in 1984 according to the pros. Same with another war hero, Republican John McCain in 2000.
Precisely none of these won their party’s nomination in those years.
The path to the White House is littered with countless candidates who on paper and in early polls were supremely electable and created a fair amount of excitement—but then something happened.
Running for president is really hard; ask one of this year’s early favorites, Senator Kamala Harris, about that. It’s a difficult marathon with land mines everywhere. And at some point, voters begin to check in and they voice their opinions with their votes.
In reality, the answer to this whole electability thing is actually pretty simple: We will know who is electable by who begins to win primaries and caucuses. Ultimately, the voters will tell us who is electable.
Someone will emerge from this pack and capture the imagination of the voters. Hopefully that candidate will enter the Democratic National Convention with enough delegates to win the nomination in mid-July and then she or he will have a little more than three months to draw a contrast with Trump. The campaign will then be fought in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Florida. If the Democratic candidate emerges victorious, then we’ll know that they were indeed eminently electable.
So—cast your vote for the candidate you believe in. The one who captures your imagination. The one who will fight for the things you care about. The one who has the best vision to lead us out of this nightmare. Forget about electability—it is fickle and elusive. And Democrats must stop bickering among themselves about this ridiculous electability notion. There is a much bigger fish to fry.
In the meantime, smart Democrats should be doing everything they can to help set the table for victories in the states that will decide the White House in November. That will determine who’s really electable.
