The Weekly Sift

Like most Democrats I know, I wish someone could tell me who is electable. If I knew for a fact that one Democratic candidate would beat Trump in the fall, but that all the others would lose, I would absolutely vote for the “electable” one. Bloomberg is currently my least favorite Democrat, but if I were certain that it would come down to either him or Trump, I’d pick him. Bernie? Joe? Elizabeth? Amy? Doesn’t matter. If only one of them can win, sign me up.

And wouldn’t you know it? Lots of people claim they have that information. The problem is that they disagree.

Two theories. There are two basic theories of how Democrats can beat Trump in November:

• Swing-voter theory. Elections are decided by moderates who swing from one party to the other, depending on who sounds the most reasonable to them.
• Turnout theory. Non-voters lean Democratic, but they don’t vote because they don’t see politics making a difference in their lives. To get them to turn out, you need to offer bold ideas that clearly would make a difference.

Obama’s 2008 landslide came from doing both: inspiring new voters without scaring off moderates. Doug Jones’ surprising senate win in Alabama followed a similar formula. Jones was a moderate, but turnout was high anyway.

People arguing that Bernie Sanders isn’t electable usually apply swing-voter theory: He’s the most extreme candidate in the Democratic field, so he will alienate moderate voters who otherwise would be ready to vote against Trump. In particular, Trump’s know-nothing style of governing has alienated a lot of educated suburbanites who used to be loyal Republicans. Those votes are available to a centrist Democrat like Biden or Bloomberg, but not to Sanders.

Conversely, turnout theory says that Sanders is the most electable candidate.

In Michigan and Wisconsin, which were decided in 2016 by roughly 11,000 and 22,700 votes respectively, close to a million young people have since turned 18. Beyond the Midwestern trio of states, the demographic revolution has even more transformative potential. Mr. Trump won Arizona, for example, by 91,000 votes, and 160,000 Latinos have turned 18 in that state since then.

Getting those voters to the polls, the theory says, wins not just for Bernie, but for Democrats in general.

Giving voters too much credit. Neither theory is entirely crazy, but both, in my opinion, oversimplify things. Each in its own way gives some group of voters too much credit.

Like iconoclastic political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, I don’t believe in “this informed, engaged American population [of swing voters] that is watching these political events and watching their elected leaders and assessing their behavior and making a judgment.” Similarly, I don’t buy the turnout-theory image of non-voters as disaffected socialists waiting for the clarion call of political revolution.

No doubt there are a few analytic middle-of-the-roaders judiciously weighing each candidates’ positions on the issues, and a few idealistic left-wing radicals who haven’t been voting because see little difference between Nancy Pelosi and Paul Ryan. But in my opinion, the vast majority of swing voters and non-voters are far less impressive examples of American citizenry: They have little interest in politics and little knowledge of it. They’re more likely to be turned off by Bernie Sanders’ hair than by his policies, or they voted for Obama and then Trump because “Yes We Can” and “Make America Great Again” were both good slogans.

These days, knowledgeable people who care about politics have well-defined opinions and show up to vote. Overwhelmingly, the swinging from one party to the other, or from voter to non-voter, is being done by uninformed folks for not terribly intelligent reasons. CNN’s Ron Brownstein observes:

An exhaustive study from the Knight Foundation that examined the roughly 100 million eligible Americans who did not vote in 2016 underscores [Ruy] Teixeira’s point [that non-voters don’t favor either party]. For the study, which was released last week, the foundation commissioned a survey of 12,000 nonvoters nationwide and in swing states, and held focus groups with Americans who habitually do not vote. The results found nonvoters united by their disconnection from the political process and disengagement from the news, but divided quite closely in their views of the two parties. …

[T]he geographic distribution of nonvoters creates challenges for a Democratic strategy centered on mobilizing them, especially in the Trump era. On a national basis, the best evidence suggests, the Americans who are eligible to vote but don’t split about equally between whites without college degrees, who lean Republican, on one side; and minorities and college-educated whites, who lean Democratic, on the other.

Bold liberal ideas are likely to motivate both groups, not just the one.

But the distribution looks very different in the Rust Belt states that tilted the 2016 election. In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the three states Trump dislodged from the “blue wall,” whites without college degrees represented a clear majority of the adults who were eligible to vote but did not, according to calculations from census data by David Wasserman of The Cook Political Report. The adults who have become newly eligible to vote in those states since 2016, mostly by turning 18, do lean more toward minorities, according to analysis by the States of Change project, which Teixeira directs. But even accounting for those young entrants into the electorate, many Democrats believe that Trump has a bigger universe of potential new voters available to harvest across the Rust Belt than the Democratic nominee does.

Polls. Whenever people argue about electability, they start comparing polls. A few months ago, moderates touted head-to-head polls that had Biden beating Trump by a larger margin than Bernie beat Trump. Lately, progressives have been pointing to polls that either say the opposite or indicate that there’s no real difference.

In either case, the problem is the same: Polls are pretty good at telling you how people will vote tomorrow, because the people they interview are pretty good at predicting their own short-term behavior, as long as nothing important happens between the interview and the election. But polls about what will happen eight months from now are not nearly so enlightening.

They’re especially useless in evaluating candidates most of the public hasn’t formed a firm opinion about yet. My personal intuition (which may not be worth much) is that the Democrat who would run the best race against Trump in the fall is Amy Klobuchar. I have no data to support that opinion, I just think she contrasts well against Trump: She’s sunny where he’s angry. She’s in the prime of life while he’s a fat old man. She’s sharp where he’s confused. She’s a woman while he’s the embodiment of toxic masculinity. And so on.

But whether that’s true or not, I wouldn’t expect to see it in the polls this far out, because most of the country has never really tried on the idea of President Klobuchar. Or President Buttigieg, for that matter. Either one of them (or Kamala Harris or Cory Booker or one of the other longshot candidates who has since dropped out) would look completely different in November than they do now. By November, Nominee Klobuchar would have been at the center of a successful primary campaign, would have given a convention acceptance speech, and stood toe-to-toe with Trump in the debates. What an election would say then just isn’t predictable from a poll taken now.

But OK, let’s consider the possibility that polls can tell us something about the electability of the two best-known Democrats: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. As of this morning, the RealClearPolitics average of head-to-head polls of Biden vs. Trump had Biden up 5.4%. The same number for Sanders vs. Trump had Sanders up 4.9%. (The outlier was Emerson, which had Sanders beating Trump by 2%, but Biden losing by 4%.)

That’s a difference of half a percent, with eight months of events still to be processed. And there are more factors to consider. Political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla point out that the Biden voters and Sanders voters are not the same people.

We found that nominating Sanders would drive many Americans who would otherwise vote for a moderate Democrat to vote for Trump, especially otherwise Trump-skeptical Republicans.

Republicans are more likely to say they would vote for Trump if Sanders is nominated: Approximately 2 percent of Republicans choose Trump over Sanders but desert Trump when we pit him against a more moderate Democrat like Buttigieg, Biden, or Bloomberg.

Democrats and independents are also slightly more likely to say they would vote for Trump if Sanders is nominated. Swing voters may be rare — but their choices between candidates often determine elections, and many appear to favor Trump over Sanders but not over other Democrats. Despite losing these voters to Trump, Sanders appears in our survey data to be similarly electable to the moderates, at least at first blush. Why? Mainly because 11 percent of left-leaning young people say they are undecided, would support a third-party candidate, or, most often, just would not vote if a moderate were nominated — but say they would turn out and vote for Sanders if he were nominated. …

The case that Bernie Sanders is just as electable as the more moderate candidates thus appears to rest on a leap of faith: that youth voter turnout would surge in the general election by double digits if and only if Bernie Sanders is nominated, compensating for the voters his nomination pushes to Trump among the rest of the electorate.

(BTW: The Sanders campaign also believes it will bring Trump-leaning non-college whites back to the Democrats. The Broockman/Kalla data does not support this claim.)

So you can try to be as data-driven as you like, but in the end you come back to a “leap of faith”. Will that youth-voting surge really show up? Young people who say they will only vote if Bernie is on the ballot — might they change their minds?

How I wind up thinking about electability. Some pundits go so far as to say there’s nothing to know here, so you should just forget about the whole notion. Unfortunately, I find that impossible. November is so important, it’s hard not to form opinions about it.

Whatever conclusions you come to, though, you should hold them lightly. Use your notions of electability as a tie-breaker between candidates you like, not as your only criterion. Few political experiences are worse than to give up on someone you believe in so that you can win, and then not to win. Cast a vote you can live with.

For what it’s worth, my hunches about electability — and they’re really just hunches — come down on the moderate side rather than the progressive side. My confidence in a 2020 Democratic victory comes from the 2018 victory: Democratic candidates got 53.4% of the vote in congressional elections in 2018. If all the people willing to vote for a Democrat for Congress decide to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, it’s a landslide.

I see that win as mostly supporting the swing-voter model. Democrats flipped seats by running moderate candidates in suburban districts where educated professionals used to be reliably Republican.

Conversely, I have never seen the turnout model work. If some progressive candidate had won an unexpected victory in some red state senate or house race by using radical policy proposals to bring in vast numbers of new voters, then I could more easily imagine the same thing working on a national level. But I don’t know of any such example. The best-known progressives in Congress come from liberal bastions like Vermont (Sanders) and Queens (AOC). They don’t flip red states. Or at least they haven’t.