Electability will be the most important factor to Democratic voters when they watch Thursday night’s debate, argues E.J. Dionne in his latest column. He may be right that this will prove the decisive factor in the 2020 nomination battle, but it shouldn’t be.
To be sure, from the perspective of a Democrat, it’s understandable that choosing a candidate who can beat President Trump would be a priority. However, the problem is that voters have no real way of being able to predict who would match up best against Trump.
In late October 2016, just ahead of Election Day, CNN released a poll showing that regardless of who they wanted to win, 68% of voters expected Hillary Clinton to defeat Trump. This isn’t to be snide toward the voting public, either — an even higher percentage of pundits probably would have predicted the same. If it were that hard to predict Trump’s victory so close to the election, there’s no reason to believe that voters choosing a nominee, with significantly less information, can project how a given candidate would match up.
The reality is that we live in a two party system, and as long as we do, any major party nominee is going to have a decent shot of winning, and many of the variables (such as the economy) are out of control of any nominee. This is especially true in 2020.
The fact that Starbucks billionaire Howard Schultz could gain no traction suggests there isn’t much of a market for a third party independent. Whoever the Democratic nominee is, thus, is going to benefit from the sizable anti-Trump vote and start off needing to flip a few states back to the blue column. Who knows what sort of Trump tweets or insults we’ll be arguing about a year from now.
There have been polls showing any Democrat beating Trump comfortably, and even Joe Biden acknowledged that “almost anybody” can beat Trump.
This isn’t to say that any of the Democrats would in actuality beat him, but just that it’s too hard to game out next fall’s general election, so it would be silly to make such predictions the basis of one’s voting decision. Instead, voters should just choose who they would most like to see as president.
