The idea that only candidate X can beat Trump is the bogeyman of 2020. We hear about it constantly, and evidence like the last-minute deciding in New Hampshire and the weird effectiveness of Bloomberg’s advertising deluge suggests people really are worried about “electability.” Our leaders use this fear to scare us away from Bernie Sanders and toward moderates. As the NY Times bluntly put it yesterday, “the Democratic establishment collectively screams that he [Sanders] is unelectable.” (The media mostly pushes the same narrative.) This fear-mongering is working, though, so let’s really analyze electability.
Don’t speculate about what other people want. Set aside ideas of voter preferences, health care, or tax fears. Forget all the prattle about the American national character or the word “socialism.” Only people can vote, not policies, preferences, or cultural stereotypes. If there is a silent majority that will rise up in horror to stop America becoming Europe, it has to be made up of people. To analyze electability, look at the electorate. We know a fair amount about every part of it. So, let’s count the vote.
For one candidate to be more electable than others, that candidate must get more general election votes from somewhere. Where? Here are all the possible sources: more direct supporters, more of the other primary candidates’ supporters, or more non-primary voters.
Since the point of an electability narrative is to argue that someone with fewer direct supporters should be nominated anyway, direct supporters are not exactly relevant. But for completeness, note that Sanders has more direct supporters (for now) than any moderate, so that source will not show him less electable.
Direct supporters: electability, Sanders.
There is a lot of data on what people say about their willingness to support other Democrats. Most candidates’ supporters are similar and cluster around ninety percent saying they will support the nominee, whoever it is. Yang supporters are anomalous here (or were before he dropped out): “42 percent of Yang's supporters…would refuse to support any other Democratic candidate.” Likewise, Sanders supporters are outliers, and a substantial percentage of them won’t commit to a different nominee. How this affects the math is that Sanders can retain more of the other candidates’ supporters than anyone else can. So, on holding the most primary voters, Sanders is more electable than anyone else, not less.
Other candidates’ supporters: electability, Sanders.
(Side note. This reticence to go all-in for the nominee may seem mean-spirited of Sanders’s supporters, show a lack of cooperative commitment. What it shows is that the left and the center have different ambitions for election 2020: the moderates just want to defeat Trump; the left wants to defeat the whole corrupt and dysfunctional political structure that brought Trump to power. They know that if we elect another moderate Democrat, only superficial change will come, and another Trump will follow. What Nader saw under Bill Clinton, which led him to run against us in 2000, did not change under Obama. As some of us warned, even before Obama’s election, changing our politics was not really on his agenda. Everything the Democratic leadership did in 2016 and is doing now tells us real change is still not on their agenda. So, yes, Sanders supporters should support our nominee, as Bernie urges, but making that decision is more complicated for the left than it is for the moderates.)
Moving beyond primary voters, the real thesis of the moderates pushing this electability fear is that there is an important group of outsiders who don’t like leftists. Who could that group be? There are three possibilities: they could be cross-over Republicans, independents, or Democrats who skipped the primaries. Let’s look at each.
On apolitical Democrats, I see no reason to think large numbers of them (if there even are large numbers of them) would come out only for certain candidates. Apparently apathetic, they will presumably vote for whoever, if they vote at all.
Non-primary voting Democrats: electability, draw.
On cross-over Republicans, there seem to be two kinds: Trump-hating Republicans (mostly suburban women), and white working-class “Reagan Democrat” Republicans. Some Trump haters might only cross over for a moderate, that’s true. Trump’s popularity with Republicans, though, suggests not many will consider voting against him, and only a few of those will decide based on who the Democrat is. So, Trump-hating Republicans may reduce Sanders’s electability, but not much.
Trump-hating Republicans: electability, moderates.
The working class, though, is both a very large group and willing to cross over for the right Democrat (or the right Republican). Polling in 2016 and since show that they like Sanders, and are angry (rightly) at the Democratic establishment. This group, again, favors Sanders, not the moderates, and possibly in large numbers.
Working class Republicans: electability, Sanders.
That leaves independents. This is the group moderates pin their argument on that a leftist would lose us the general election. The idea is that independents are “swing voters” whose policy preferences are sort of between the two parties. I think 2016 showed that every part of this is a myth. The gap between open versus closed primaries showed Bernie defeating Hillary in most primaries that allowed independents to vote. This proved that the independents who vote Democrat are to the left of registered Democrats, not swing voters in the center.
2016 was the first time we could test out in the real world the theory many of us have long held: that there are practically no swing voters, rather independents are mostly disaffected members of both parties. The appearance of “center” is an artifact of statistically aggregating the disaffected left with the disaffected right. What this suggests is that among independents are few centrist swing voters, but a lot of angry Democrats disgusted with the party who would come back if the party would give the left its due. In any case, once again, this group of voters, the independents, the group the moderates were counting on, ends up favoring Sanders.
Independents: electability, Sanders.
There’s one last group I did not list: everyone else. For completeness, then, third party voters probably have little impact here. The Greens will favor Sanders, while the Libertarians mostly will vote Trump but may feature a chunk of Trump-hating crossovers. That chunk will be smaller than the Greens, and other parties are even smaller, so let’s call third parties a draw or slight advantage Sanders.
The largest part of everyone else would be citizens not registered to vote. This is a potentially significant pool, and Trump successfully drew from it in 2016. We can guess that if they participate, they may behave like the working-class Reagan Democrat Republicans, who favor Sanders. They are alienated from the political process; a few may be moved by Sanders’s revolution, but moderate Democrats are probably the very last politicians they would rejoin the process to support.
Everyone else: electability, Sanders.
That’s all the possibilities – there are no other sources of votes – and they add up decisively in Sanders’s favor, rather than the moderates’. Of all the voter categories, only Trump-hating Republicans favor moderates. (Side note: if our strategy for winning is picking the candidate most appealing to unhappy Republicans, we have really gone off the rails. Yet it feels so familiar…) All the other voter groups, and all the largest ones, favor Sanders.
Now, this is not an argument to vote for Bernie. There may be no real electability issue at all: maybe no Democrat can beat Trump, or maybe every Democrat can. But if some candidates can and some can’t, then when you think through how that works, electability calculations turn out to show Sanders plainly more electable than the moderates.
So, what is going on here? What are the Democratic establishment and the media doing when they push this false narrative that Sanders is unelectable, that only a moderate can beat Trump? Nothing in the analysis I just gave is subtle or complex. Should we conclude that all these political professionals are stupid? No.
No, the professionals understand this analysis as well as I do (or better). They are not stupid, but they think we are. The purpose of the electability narrative – the purpose of all fear-mongering – is to convince voters to vote differently than they want to. The anti-Sanders electability narrative is demonstrably false, but it doesn’t need to be true to accomplish its purpose; it only needs to fool enough Democratic primary voters into thinking it is true, and that a moderate is therefore a “safer” nominee.
But surely if our establishment professionals know this, they would not lie to us and risk a Trump victory! There are three possibilities: they think electability doesn’t matter because Trump will win; they think electability doesn’t matter because any of the Democrats will beat Trump; they do think electability matters, but want their preferred candidate even if it risks Trump’s reelection.
It is tempting to say the third is just evil. But are the first two really better? All three are lying to us in order to keep control of the party in centrist hands. And maybe the first two are just rationalizing their selfishness with a convenient story that it won’t matter in the end. But fine moral parsing is beyond our topic today.
The point is that analyzing the electorate shows that the Sanders-is-unelectable narrative is pure hogwash. It is desperate propaganda by the Democratic Party establishment, which is facing the first serious threat in its 35 disastrous years in control of our party. How far it will go to keep the left down is an open question.