There’s absolutely nothing wrong with arguing that your preferred candidate in a primary has a better shot at winning the general election than another candidate. General election strength is just like any other attribute: Some candidates will have more of it, some will have less, and it’s more than reasonable to base your decision on whom to support on this quality.
In fact, many folks would say it’s a very important factor, which is why some prominent backers of Hillary Clinton are giving it renewed attention now that Bernie Sanders is looking like a legitimate threat to win the Iowa caucuses. But there are both good ways and bad ways to go about making an electability argument, and some of these Clinton supporters are not going about this smartly. Indeed, some of what they’re saying might just backfire.
A new piece in the New York Times focuses in on the chief electability issue that these Clinton surrogates are now trying to raise: socialism—particularly, the notion that Republicans will eagerly remind voters that Sanders, should he emerge as the Democratic nominee, has called himself a democratic socialist and will pillory him for it.
There’s good reason to believe that this would indeed be an effective attack, since polling shows socialism to be a very unpopular concept among most Americans. Indeed, an October YouGov poll found that just 25 percent have a positive view of socialism while 47 percent see it negatively. Other polls have issued similar findings. Gallup’s respondents, for instance, gave socialism a 36 percent positive/58 percent negative rating back in 2010; last June, meanwhile, only 47 percent said they’d vote for “a socialist” for president while 50 percent said they wouldn’t. That made it by far the least popular candidate descriptor among a group that included “Jewish,” “a woman,” “gay or lesbian,” and “an atheist” (all of which earned majority support).
But—and this is key—there is one group that has a favorable opinion of socialism: Democrats. Fifty-nine percent of Democrats say they’d vote for a socialist, per Gallup, and YouGov says that they view socialism positively by a 49-24 margin. And note that these figures come from polls of all adults. Among Democratic primary voters, who typically represent the most liberal segment of the party, warm feelings toward socialism are likely to be even greater.
Which is why raising the specter that Republicans will use the dreaded “socialist” label as a way to pummel Sanders (and drive a wedge between him and downticket Democratic candidates) simply isn’t likely to work. For many people, if you think something is a good idea, it’s pretty hard to accept that you should not vote for the candidate who agrees with that idea simply because most Americans differ from you.
So even under the best of circumstances, this is a difficult message to convey, and the language some Clinton supporters are using makes it even harder. Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, for instance, used some choice words that will likely do Clinton no favors:
“The Republicans won’t touch him because they can’t wait to run an ad with a hammer and sickle,” said Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s.
For many voters, particularly those who came of age after the fall of the Soviet Union, the “hammer and sickle” imagery won’t even register. For others, it evokes the ugliest sort of red-baiting from more shameful times in our country’s past. If you were an undecided but persuadable Iowa voter, would language like this really convince you to pick Hillary Clinton? That seems unlikely. If anything, it might make you more sympathetic to Sanders.
Now of course, McCaskill isn’t canvassing door to door in Des Moines. But she’s one of Clinton's top endorsers and most prominent surrogates in the Midwest, so what she says carries weight—and may even reflect the thinking among some at Clinton HQ. For Clinton, though, McCaskill’s is the wrong message to send.
But fortunately for Clinton, if she does want to raise the issue of electability, she has plenty of much stronger arguments to make. The best of them is that she’s indisputably battle-tested in a way almost no candidate has ever been: She’s spent nearly a quarter-century in the white-hot glare of the Republican attack machine and yet she hasn't withered. In fact, it’s only made her stronger—just witness the ass-kicking she delivered during the GOP’s Benghazi inquisition.
Sanders, by contrast, has not faced anything like the decades of assaults Clinton has. Perhaps he’s capable of withstanding something similar for a single election year, but perhaps he isn’t. This is an entirely fair case for Clinton to make to primary and caucus voters, and it’s one that focuses on her strengths. And unlike the socialism angle, it doesn’t attempt to call into question something that many voters may like. It’s a positive argument, it reminds people of something to like about Clinton, and it can’t backfire.