All this subjective candidate bashing over electibility is getting to me, so I thought I'd try and pull together some actual numbers...
I commented on another diary thread that most of the bashing of Dean over electibility end up making purely subjective arguments. I'm all for qualitative assessments of candidates, but is it possible to measure electibility in a quantitative manner?
Polling Data
Money
Supporters
Summary
Polling Data
From Newsweek Poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates. Nov. 6-7, 2003. N=809 registered voters nationwide. MoE ± 4 (total sample). Taking the latest figures gives the following:
Bush 49
Dean 45
Other 6
Bush 48
Clark 45
Other 7
Bush 48
Lieberman 44
Other 8
Bush 49
Kerry 45
Other 6
Bush 49
Gephardt 44
Other 7
So on national polling, they're a wash. All of the candidates would currently lose to Bush by a small margin.
Money
Well, the last money figures we had were the Q3 totals, posted here.
[Raised Q3 | Cash on hand -- in millions]
Dean $14.8 | $12.4
Kerry $4.0 | $7.8
Gephardt $3.8 | $5.9
Lieberman $3.6 | $4.1
Clark $3.5 | $3.4
Edwards $2.6 | $4.8
Kucinich $1.7 | $800K
Graham $1.4 | $800K
Braun $125K | $30K
Sharpton $121K | $24K
Any arguments about how much they'll raise this quarter is pure speculation; yes, Clark will almost certainly raise more money than last quarter as he's got all three months this time, but we don't know how much.
Number of Supporters
I've no idea how you can measure this in actuality. You could look at Meetup.com figures which give:
1. Dean in 2004 (>141,100 members)
2. Clark in 2004 (>44,000)
3. Kucinich in 2004 (>17,600)
4. Kerry in 2004 (>15,800)
5. Democratic Party (>10,200)
6. Townhall (>6,100)
7. Join Arnold (>5,900)
8. Common Cause (>4,600)
9. March for Choice (>3,800)
10. Republican Party (>2,400)
11. Gore in 2004 (>1,900)
12. Million Moms (>1,900)
13. Edwards in 2004 (>1,900)
14. Bush in 2004 (>1,700)
But it's only a tiny subset of the electorate and no sure sign that they'll get out and work for the candidate.
Number of contributors might be a better measure (individual contributors to the Q3 report):
Dean 22934
Kerry 14400
Gephardt 9602
Lieberman 11069
Clark 3063
Edwards 12485
Kucinich 2493
Braun 366
Sharpton 223
Again, these figures fall apart for Clark, as he hasn't had a full quarter of campaigning.
The only other count of supporters that I can think of is union endorsements, and the figures were totalled by ohwilleke in this diary thread.
Summary: Total Members of Endorsing Unions
Gephardt 6,632K
Dean 3,165K
Kerry ??250K??
Edwards est. 20K
Lieberman est. 10K
Clark None
Summary
So in summary, taking the quantitative figures available to me, Dean cannot be considered unelectible unless all the democratic candidates are unelectible. Based on the head-to-head matchups at the top, they all rank about the same against Bush. About the only other measure would be to look at head to head figures against Bush in every state and see who has the most electoral votes, but I haven't seen a poll with a large enough sample size to do this.
Does anyone have any other concrete measures on which to rate electibility, or are we left with subjective "people don't vote for angry candidates" arguments?