Latest / The Fine Print of Democracy / The Myth of The Electable Candidate

Transcript

The Myth of The Electable Candidate · The Fine Print of Democracy

• Jake: Today, the myth of the electable candidate Why electability is less about who can win and more about who gets seen, funded, and talked about. The Myth of the Electable Candidate Every election cycle voters are told to think about electability. It sounds logical, even responsible, but the way we use that word has very little to do with who actually wins elections. Merriam Webster defines electability as capable of being elected as to public office. But it's not that simple. Every election cycle, voters here think about electability, or he's not an electable candidate, or she's great, but is she electable in the general election? Electability can be a useful descriptor, but more often than not, it doesn't actually tell us much. It's used after an election to give a reason for why a candidate lost. Well, he just wasn't electable. Alright, let's back up. We most often hear talk about electability during the party primary process. Parties want to nominate the most electable candidate to be successful in the general election, and to be frank that usually means an older, straight white man with political experience. The idea of an electable candidate is most often used by the Democrats, the best example being in the 2020 presidential election. The Democrats had more than two dozen serious candidates running, and when we got down to the final few, electability reared its head. Democrats began to coalesce behind Joe Biden, dropping out of the race and endorsing him instead of Bernie Sanders. Democrats were concerned that if they were to nominate Sanders, a self-described Democratic Socialist, they would lose the general election to Donald Trump. Biden was seen as the electable candidate because he was more centrist, he wasn't problematic, he was experienced, and he could bring independent voters into the Democratic column against Trump. Bernie Sanders, it was feared, was too liberal to attract enough independents or moderate Republicans necessary to win. While there is some truth to that last part, elections are much more nuanced than that. Was Donald Trump an electable candidate in 2016? No. He was a political outsider with a history of failed business ventures, bankruptcies, lawsuits, and sexual harassment claims. But here we are. And yes, Hillary Clinton had her own baggage and wasn't seen as a very electable candidate in her own right. Electability comes down to a few things: money, name recognition, media coverage, and whether a candidate can convince enough people they're already winning. In that respect, electability often becomes In a campaign, especially early in a campaign, name recognition matters. If you're completely unknown, you're going to have a hard time getting donations, getting volunteers. Not because you're a bad candidate, but because no one knows you. Which is why in a presidential election, the previous vice president is often seen as the early frontrunner. He or she is a known commodity. Pete Budej had zero name recognition when he announced his run for president. He was not an electable candidate. Yet he went on to win the Iowa caucus. Why? He grew his name recognition. He went on every new show that would have him. His donor base and volunteer base grew. When non-civically minded citizens are deciding who to vote for, they often look at who has the most support. What name do they recognize? Who have they seen on TV? That is who they will support. Because that is the candidate in their identified party that they think is the most electable. Thus growing the candidate's support and increasing their perceived electability, which then further grows the candidate's support. It's confirmation bias. If enough people think a candidate Is electable, then they become electable. Candidates don't win because they are electable, they become electable because people treat them that way. The media plays a role in the electability myth as well. Cable news, and increasingly independent creators across the internet, gives time to known candidates. Early in a primary process, news organizations, mainstream or otherwise, don't have the ability to give everyone equal coverage. So they bring on the candidates people know, people who already have supporters who will tune in. Say what you want about news media, their goal is profits. And to increase profits, they need viewers. So bringing on candidates that already have a built-in supporter base will bring in potentially new viewers. Those viewers who watch that program, no matter who the guest is, will see only a few candidates getting coverage and mistakenly assume those are the only electable candidates. There's no easy way to fix this issue in the news world. There's simply not enough programming hours in the day for a news network to platform every candidate equally. Media plays an important role in the election process, and it is important that they give as much time as possible to as many candidates as possible, leading voters to make their own decisions based on beliefs, not on who they have seen on TV the most. Without that, the same few candidates will be viewed as electable election after election, solely because they are the only candidates that voters know of. It's no secret that money plays a huge role in politics as well, and money can signify someone's electability. If a candidate is raising millions of dollars, they must have a ton of supporters, and therefore must be electable. Not necessarily. Yes, money means support in politics, but it's not the only thing. If you want to use money to judge electability, you need to look at the number of donations, not total dollar amount. For example, candidates. Candidate A raised $200,000 this week and received one donation for $100,000, one for $25,000, and then $75,000 were from 300 individual donors who each donated $300. Candidate B raised $100,000 this week, with $2,000 donors each donating $50. Candidate A raised double the amount as candidate B, so if we stop there, Candidate A must have more support. But if we look a little deeper, Candid A has 302 donors. While candidate B has 2,000 donors. This is a very simple example, but it can be multiplied out to candidates running for governor, senate, and even president. Sure, a candidate would love to have more money, but in elections, when it comes down to it, votes are what matters. Again, it's not quite that simple still. A candidate needs money to reach potential supporters, to send emails, postcards, texts, make phone calls, or pay for materials for volunteers to hand out while knocking doors. We can't completely ignore money when deciding who is electable, but we must look beyond the total dollar amount. If electability is mostly a label we apply after the fact, then what actually determines who wins? Voters don't make decisions in a vacuum. Most people aren't researching every candidate in detail. They're relying on signals, and the most powerful signal is familiarity. Candidates who are already known, because they're incumbents, have run before or have been covered in the media, start with a built-in advantage. That advantage often gets mistaken for electability, when it's really just visibility. Then there's voter turnout. No matter how many self-identified independents there are, most voters' minds are already made up. They lean one way or the other most of the time, and winning an election, especially a close election, is about turning out more supporters on Election Day. Which campaign can mobilize their supporters more effectively? Which campaign convinces more people to submit their ballot is more important than persuading a relatively small portion of actual swing voters. On paper, electability is simple. In practice, it's more complex. Electability isn't a complete fabrication. There is some truth to the idea of a candidate being more electable than another, but it's not this be-all end-all that so often gets portrayed in the media. The idea of electability needs to be revisited and understood at a deeper level. Instead of saying this candidate has more money, they are electable, or this candidate is on TV every day, they must be more electable, we must look at why those two things are the case. More often than not, it's just name recognition, or the candidate looks like all the other candidates in the past. There's a reason every president but one has been a straight white man. They are the comfortable candidate. Electability often equals familiarity. It limits who can actually be taken seriously. I'm not discounting the long history of racism and sexism in this country. That plays a factor too. So what does that mean for voters? It means we should be a little more skeptical when we hear arguments about electability. Instead of asking who can win, we should be asking why we think they can win. Is it their ideas? Or is it just familiarity, media coverage, and money? Because if electability is something we create, then we have more control over it than we think. If enough voters believe a candidate can win, that belief can become reality. We don't find electable candidates. We create them. So for this essay, the question that kept coming back to me was actually pretty simple. Why do we talk about electability like it's something a Canada either has or doesn't have? Because I think that's the really interesting part of this conversation. We talk about electability almost like it's some subjective measure. Like somewhere there is this scoreboard that tells us this candidate has a seventy eight percent electability rating, this candidate has a forty-two percent electability rating. Like there's some official calculation that exists somewhere that takes into account a candidate's experience, their fundraising, their polling numbers, their personality, their ability to connect with voters, their campaign organization, and then gives us a final answer. Yes, this person can win. Yes, this person is electable. Yes, this person is a safe choice. But obviously, that doesn't exist. And yet, we talk about electability all the time, like it does. And I think that is what makes this idea so interesting. Because electability is not really a measurement. It's a prediction. And predictions are complicated because they are shaped by the assumptions we bring into them. When someone says that candidate isn't electable, what they usually mean is I don't personally see the path for that candidate to win. And those are two very different things. Because one person might look at a candidate and see a weakness, another person might look at that same candidate and see an opportunity. One person might say that candidate is too different from what voters are used to. Another person might say that candidate represents something voters have been waiting for. The candidate did not change. The perception did change. And that is really the heart of this entire conversation. Now, before I go too far, I want to make something clear. I don't think electability is completely meaningless. Sometimes people use this argument to say, well, it doesn't matter who can win, just pick whoever you like the most. And I don't think that's realistic either. Elections are about winning. If you're running for office, the goal is to convince enough people to vote for you. If a candidate cannot build a coalition large enough to win, that matters. So the question's not, does electability matter? It obviously does. The better question is what are we actually measuring when we talk about electability? Because I think sometimes we think we are measuring a candidate's ability to win. But sometimes we're really measuring something else. Sometimes we're measuring how comfortable we are with that candidate. Sometimes we're measuring how familiar they feel. Sometimes we're measuring whether they remind us of candidates who have won in the past. And those are not always the same thing. Because nobody starts a campaign as an electable candidate. Candidates become serious because people treat them as serious. And I think Pete Buttigieg is one of the best examples of this. When Pete Buttigieg announced his campaign for president in 2019, most Americans had never heard of him. And honestly, that makes sense. He was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. And that is an important role. It is a real leadership role. But it's not exactly the type of job where someone automatically becomes a household name across the entire country. So when he entered the race, the first reaction from a lot of people. was basically who? that one word tells us something important about elections. A candidate cannot be considered electable if voters never get a chance to consider them. I think that sounds obvious, but it is actually a huge barrier in politics. Because before voters can decide whether they support someone, they have to know who that person is. A candidate who is unknown has to climb a much steeper hill. They have to introduce themselves, they have to explain their ideas. They have to convince donors to take a chance on them. They have to convince volunteers that their campaign is worse than investing their time and money into. They have to convince the media that people actually want to hear from them. And and and none of those things are necessarily about whether the candidate is good. whether the candidates visible and visibility is incredibly powerful in politics. Because once people see someone repeatedly, something interesting starts to happen. They start to feel familiar. And familiarity creates comfort. And comfort creates trust. This is not unique to politics either. We do this everywhere. Think about it. If you're buying a product online, you're more likely to trust something that has thousands of positive reviews. If you're choosing a restaurant, you're probably more likely to pick the place you have heard of before. If you're hiring someone, experience and reputation matter. Politics is no different. The problem is that familiarity can sometimes disguise itself as electability. We'll often say this person is the safest choice because everyone knows them. But sometimes everyone knows them because we already decided they were the safest choice. And that's where Buddhagh becomes such an interesting example. Because he was not considered a serious presidential candidate simply because people discovered he was talented. He became a serious candidate because he was given opportunities to prove himself. He was everywhere. He went on television, he participated in debates, he built a national fundraising network, he traveled, he talked to voters. He created moments that gave people a reason to pay attention. And w and and once people started paying attention, the conversation changed. Instead of asking, who is this guy? People started asking, wait, could he actually win? And that's the difference. The candidate did not suddenly become more electable. The public perception of the candidate changed. And once that perception changed, more opportunities opened up. More donors became interested. More voters became curious. More media outlets wanted to cover him. The thing that people were waiting for, proof that he was serious, was created because people decided to treat him as serious. I think this is one of the strangest things about politics. We often talk about elections like voters are simply discovering who the strongest candidates are. But sometimes voters are actually participating in creating the conditions that make someone successful. A candidate does not just become a frontrunner, people make them a frontrunner. And that is a really important distinction because it means voters have more influence than they sometimes even realize. But it also means voters have to be careful about the signals they are responding to. Because sometimes we mistake popularity for strength. Sometimes we mistake attention for support. Sometimes we mistake familiarity for electability. And I think that leads into one of the biggest realities of elections. Most voters are not making decisions with unlimited time and information. Honestly, that's not a criticism of voters. It's just reality. Politics is complicated. There are hundreds of issues, dozens of candidates, and thousands and thousands of pages of information. Most people are trying to make decisions while also working, raising families, going to school, taking care of responsibilities, and just living their lives. They do not have the ability to become an expert on every candidate. It's just not possible. So they use shortcuts. And humans use shortcuts all the time. It's not just a political thing, it's a human thing. We use shortcuts when we make almost every decision. If you're looking for a new restaurant, you probably don't research every single restaurant in your city. You look at reviews. You ask friends. You pick something that seems trustworthy. Maybe you go somewhere that you've always been before. If you're buying a product, you probably don't investigate every possible option available. You look for signals that tell you whether something is worth your money. Positive reviews. Your best friend uses it. Maybe your mom recommended it. Voting works the same way. People look for signals. Who have I heard of? Who seems like they have support? Who do other people seem excited about? Who looks like they have a realistic chance? And again, that makes sense. The problem is that sometimes those signals create the very thing they're supposed to measure. A candidate seems electable because people think they're electable. And people think they are electable because they seem electable. It becomes a cycle. And this is where the media conversation becomes really complicated. Because I think there are two extremes that people often fall into. One extreme is saying the media decides everything. I don't quite think that's true. The other example is saying the media has no influence. I don't think that's true either. The reality is somewhere in the middle. The media does not choose winners, but the media absolutely influences who gets the opportunity to compete. I think this is where the media conversation gets really complicated. Because it's very easy to have a conversation about media coverage and immediately jump to one of two conclusions. Either the media controls elections or the media doesn't matter at all. And I think both of those are too simple. The media does not decide who wins elections. At the end of the day, voters decide that. But the media does play a role in determining which candidates voters know about, which candidates get opportunities to explain their ideas, and which candidates become part of a larger political conversation. Because there's a big difference between a candidate losing because voters considered them and rejected them, and a candidate never really getting a chance because voters never knew enough about them to even take them seriously. And that's not necessarily because media organizations are trying to control everything. I think sometimes people assume there's this intentional effort where a group of people in a newsroom sit around and decide, alright, this is the candidate we're going to make successful. Let's do it. Honestly, I think politics is usually much messier than that. A lot of it comes down to incentives. A news organization has limited time, a television network has limited airtime, a podcast has limited episodes, a newspaper has limited space to print. They cannot cover everyone equally. It's not physically possible. Imagine a presidential primary with 20 candidates. We've had that recently. How do you give every candidate the exact same amount of attention? How do you decide who gets interviewed? Who gets invited to debates? Who gets featured in a story? Who gets analyzed? Those are all choices, and usually the easiest choices are the candidates people already know, because people are more likely to watch a candidate they recognize. A television network bringing on former vice president, a senator, or a nationally known figure is probably going to get more viewers than bringing on someone most Americans have never heard of. For example, think about the twenty twenty presidential election. John Delaney, Julian Castro, Steve Bullock, Joe Sestac, Wayne Messon, Tim Ryan, Seth Moulton, Jay Inslee, Mike Gravel, They all ran for president in the Democratic primary. And I bet you most of you have never heard of any of them. That's not because they weren't great candidates or they couldn't have been good presidents. That's because the media just didn't cover them. They didn't have the ability to cover every single one. And from a business perspective, that makes sense. The media is also an industry. They need viewers, they need listeners, they need more people clicking on stories. So they naturally gravitate toward the candidates who already have attention. But here is where the cycle becomes interesting. The candidates who get media attention become the candidates voters no. The candidates voters no become the candidates voters think are serious. The candidates voters think are serious become the candidates media organizations continue covering. And then people look around and say, see, those are obviously the strongest candidates all along. But sometimes they were not necessarily the strongest candidate. They were just the candidate who had the most opportunities to become known. And I think this is one of the hardest things about elections because it creates a chicken and egg problem. Did a candidate become popular because they were good? Or did people think they were good because they were popular? And sometimes the answer is both. A candidate usually needs some level of ability to take advantage of an opportunity. You cannot just get attention and automatically become successful. It doesn't work that that way. But without the opportunity, nobody gets a chance to prove themselves. I think this is why the early stages of campaigns are so fascinating, because early on, voters are not always deciding between the best candidates and the worst candidate. Sometimes they're deciding between the candidates they have heard of and the candidates they have not. And those are two very different things. Not to date this episode too much here for a moment, because depending on when you're listening to this, this could be a completely different conversation. But right now, as I'm recording this, people are already beginning to talk about the 2028 Democratic Presidential Primary. It's only 2026, by the way. And one of the names that is frequently mentioned is Kamala Harris. Now I want to be clear here. I'm not saying Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee in 2028 or that she won't be. There's a lot of time between now and then. There will be other candidates, there will be unexpected events, there'll be issues that become important that nobody's even talking about right now. Presidential campaigns change incredibly quickly. But I think the conversation around her is a really interesting example of this exact idea. Part of the reason she is viewed as a potential front runner is because she already has something many candidates do not have. People can imagine her running. People know who she is. She's already been vice president. She's already run a national campaign. She's already been on these debate stages and already been part of major national political conversations. Again, that does not mean she's automatically the best candidate. Does not mean she's guaranteed to win. Does not mean she's Guaranteed to lose does not mean the voters will choose her. It simply means she starts with something incredibly valuable in politics. Recognition. And recognition creates possibility. A candidate who voters can immediately picture as president feels more realistic than a candidate they've never heard of. That's not necessarily because voters are being irrational, it's just because humans naturally find familiarity easier to process. If someone asks you to imagine a person becoming president and you already know who that person is, your brain doesn't have to do much work. But if someone introduces you to a candidate you've never heard of? Your first question is usually, who? And that Canada has to spend months or years even answering that question before voters even get to the point of considering whether they support them. That's a huge advantage for people who already have national recognition. The final thing I want to talk about here is money. Because if there's one topic in politics that people are especially cynical about, it's the money. Honestly, I understand why. I get it. Money absolutely matters in election. No getting around that. Campaigns are expensive. Candidates need money to hire staff, send mail, run advertisers, build websites, travel, organize volunteers, contact voters, actually operate the day-to-day of a campaign. A candidate without resources is at a significant disadvantage. But I think sometimes we talk about money in a way that makes it sound like money itself is the reason candidates succeed. It's usually much more complicated than that. Money is both reflection of support and a tool that can create more support. Those two things can be difficult to separate sometimes. For example, if candidate raises millions of dollars, that tells us something. It tells us that someone's willing to invest in that candidate. It tells us that there are people who believe enough in that candidate to contribute. But it does not tell us everything. Because where the money comes from matters. A candidate who raises a million dollars from ten donors is saying something different than the candidate who raises a million dollars from fifty thousand donors. Both candidates raise the same amount of money, but the type of support they're showing is very different. One might one might show a small number of people with a lot of resources. The other might show a large number of people who are engaged enough to continue. And that difference matters. But even beyond fundraising, money affects visibility. A candidate with money can communicate with voters. They can send mail, they can run advertisements, they can hire organizers sometimes across the country. They can build a stronger campaign infrastructure. And that visibility creates more support, which in turn creates more money. which then creates more visibility. And again, we see the same cycle. And then after all that happens, people look at the candidate and say, Of course they were electable. But were they electable because they were already widely supported? Or did they become widely supported because they had the resources to become known? Sometimes it's just impossible to separate the two. I get it. And I think this is where the voters need to be a little more thoughtful when they hear arguments about electability. Because sometimes electability arguments are really just arguments about comfort. A candidate feels electable because they remind us of candidates who've won before. They look familiar. They sound familiar. They fit our expectations of what a politician is. And there's a reason that for most of American history, Presidents have looked very similar. That's not just because those are the only people capable of winning. It's it it's because our ex expectations of what a president looks like have historically been shaped by who's already held the office. And when someone breaks the pattern, there's often a period where people question whether they can win. Before Barack Obama won in two thousand eight, there were plenty of people who questioned whether America was even ready to elect a black president. Before other candidates broke barriers, people questioned whether voters would accept them. And sometimes those concerns were legitimate observations about where public opinion was at that moment. But sometimes those concerns became part of the reason those candidates struggled. Because voters were told people like that cannot win. If enough people believe that, it becomes harder for those candidates to actually win. That's the power of the electability argument. It can describe reality, but it can also create its own reality. And that's why I think the responsibility ultimately comes back to the voters. We as voters should not ignore electability. Ultimately, winning elections matters. Building coalitions matters. Understanding voters matters too. But we should be more careful about what we mean when we use that word. Instead of simply asking, can this candidate win? We should ask something like, Why? Why do we think this candidate can win? Is it because of their ideas? Is it because they've built a strong coalition? Is it because they connect with the voters on a deep level? Or is it just because they're familiar? They have the resources and we've been told for years that they're the safe choice. Those two things are not the same. The most important thing I hope people take away from this conversation here is that voters are just are not just observers of elections. We are participants in shaping them. A candidate is not born electable, it doesn't happen. A candidate becomes electable because enough people decide to take them seriously. And that means we have more influence than we sometimes realize. We decide, we as voters decide which candidates get attention. We as voters decide which candidates deserve a closer look. We as voters decide whether someone new gets the opportunity to become someone familiar. Electability is not something we simply discover, it's something we create.