The Iowa caucuses are in just a few days, and in this final week, a handful of polls have come out suggesting a slight “Bernie Bounce,” putting Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in a reasonably good position to win or at least have a strong showing on Monday night. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s last-minute gambit to paint Sanders as a latent sexist seems to have sputtered, and as Pete Buttigieg continues to struggle to gain traction beyond Iowa and New Hampshire, chatter about this being a two-way race (with a strange X-factor lurking out there in the form of New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s spending bonanza) has risen.
The Bernie Bounce has been paired with a rapid ramping up of commentary from Democrats that sounds eerily similar to Republican talking points in spring 2016. They say Bernie can woo the base but will alienate the middle. They say he’s too “out there” for your average voter. They say he’s not been really, fully vetted and will wither when he is under fire. They say Bernie is the candidate President Trump would most like to run against. (Flashback: Hillary Clinton’s team in 2016 “always wanted Trump.” Oops.)
They say there’s no way America would ever, ever elect someone like that.
This is of particular salience because of the importance of electability to Democratic voters this year. The No. 1 issue in the primary has arguably been “electability.” Democrats may disagree on whether to shore up Obamacare or to junk it entirely in favor of a single-payer system. They may not all agree on what the United States ought to do about trade, or Iran, or illegal immigration. But they largely agree, and strongly, that Trump is a threat to the republic, and his removal from office is of paramount importance this year, subordinating all other concerns.
While there is considerable debate about what poll questions most effectively measure “electability” as a priority for voters, a variety of different ways of asking all have yielded the same verdict: Democrats care more about “electability” than in years past.
Electability is a strange factor that requires voters to play the part of pundit, gaming out which candidate they believe can win. Unlike a voter’s views on a candidate’s personality or platform, a voter’s assessment of electability can be based on polling or what they heard some pundit or commentator say in their favorite magazine (such as the Washington Examiner!). Electability is a much harder thing to assess truly outside of, well, who is doing better in the polls?
There is quite a bit of evidence in favor of the idea that Sanders may not be electable, even against an incumbent president who has unusually high unfavorable and low job approval despite a roaring economy. This evidence, nicely summarized by Jonathan Chait, points to the unpopularity of the label “socialist” and the fact that Sanders holds a number of policy positions that are themselves quite unpopular, along with the fact that Sanders’s decadeslong career in public service has not been scrutinized nearly intensely enough as he has gotten something of a pass from his rivals up until this point.
In Chait’s view, Sanders presents a great deal of “downside risk,” which is why choosing Sanders would be “insanity.”
But I think there’s some compelling evidence on the other side, that while it is possible Biden would have a “Clinton Campaign 2.0” coalition it is working to assemble, Sanders changes the game substantially by pressing on some populist notes that could woo back working-class voters who might not be feeling the full benefits of the economic boom. Because most of the Democratic field has embraced a major expansion of government into areas such as healthcare, Republicans are likely to deploy worries about socialism in this election regardless of who Democrats nominate, perhaps minimizing the relative downside of Sanders’s embrace of the term.
Mostly, the relatively similar standing between Biden and Sanders in polling matchups with Trump, including in key swing states, makes me skeptical of just how big the “electability” gap really is.
Biden consistently runs 2 points better than Sanders in these hypothetical matchups; in the latest, from ABC/Washington Post poll, Biden bests Trump by four, while Sanders does so only by two. Fox News’s latest national polling has Sanders running ahead of Trump with 48% of the vote, as Biden leads with 50%. Whether these 2-point gaps are minimal or huge depends on how sticky you think these numbers are and how tight you think the election will ultimately wind up. If you think people are going to swing from voting Democratic to voting Trump if Sanders is nominated, or that this will be a tight contest where picking even a half-point weaker nominee could mean losing the whole ballgame, then yes, Sanders is a risky bet.
But if you think people’s minds are largely made up, that this is a referendum on Trump, and that Democrats could nominate a cactus plant for president and it would still get 44% of the vote, then perhaps Bernie Sanders’s ability to energize otherwise disenfranchised and disillusioned voters (sound familiar?) makes him perfectly electable after all.
If the last four years of politics haven’t expanded your concept of what is and isn’t impossible, you haven’t been paying attention.
