On Primaries, Electability, and Bernie Sanders
There has been much hand-wringing during the 2020 Democratic Primaries, particularly regarding Bernie Sanders and whether he should be the Democrats’ nominee for President. Often these disagreements focus around legitimate policy differences, but occasionally (and far too often, in my opinion) these disagreements take on a far more personal tone. Legitimate policy differences are painted as centrist fear-mongering or fake narratives deployed by the establishment to maintain power. Some of these disagreements I have seen recently regard the idea of ‘electability.’ Bernie supporters often dismiss ‘electability’ as pseudoscience, a fiction invented by centrists because they don’t have legitimate criticisms of him. This is preposterous, of course, and yet it’s repeated in pro-Sanders circles. So I thought I would take a moment to explain ‘electability’ and how it is a very real consideration.
To provide some quick context: American presidential elections are basically two-stage elections. Each political party has its own election to determine a nominee. Those nominees then face each other in a general election to determine the president. The concept of ‘electability’ essentially says that people will consider performance in the general election when determining who to support in a primary election.
Voters generally engage in two types of voting behavior: sincere voting and strategic voting. The former is simply voting for a candidate closest to one’s own preferences. The latter is supporting a different candidate in order to prevent an undesirable outcome. Say there are three candidates in a race: you really like A, B is tolerable, and C is the absolute worst. Sincere voting would have you support A regardless, but strategic voting might have you support B in order to avoid C winning the election. (There’s probably room here for a larger discussion about rational choice theory, but I’ll save that for another time.)
Voters concerned about ‘electability’ are thus engaging in strategic voting: supporting a less-close candidate in the primary election because they might fare better in the general election. This is a seemingly straightforward behavior, and yet a common refrain is that this is simply a fabrication made up by centrists who don’t like Sanders. What’s more, there’s actually a great deal of empirical evidence demonstrating that this behavior actually occurs and that electability is indeed a factor in primary voting decisions.
At least as far back as 1989, scholars have consistently demonstrated that primary voters consider electability when making decisions. Abramowitz shows that Republican and Democratic primary voters weighed electability as an important consideration. A 2007 study by Rickershauser and Aldrich and a 2016 study by Simas both show experimental evidence that primary voters utilize strategic considerations of candidates’ electability in making voting decisions. The long-standing general consensus in the field of primary voting is that voters weigh ideology and electability and that voters will often compromise on the former in favor of a more electable candidate. The literature on electability is really quite extensive.
Why, then, is such a concern so readily dismissed as pseudoscience? Part of it might simply be a misunderstanding of the meaning of the term. Indeed, oftentimes people who dismiss electability will still point to indicators of electability in favor of dismissing electability. (I know, it’s weird.) Part of it might also be the lack of a specific, concrete measure of electability. “If you can’t quantify exactly how ‘electable’ one candidate is versus another one, it’s made up.” This is nonsense, of course, yet it remains a persistent complaint. Many other concepts lack concrete measures. Social desirability bias has a widely-accepted effect on many behaviors, yet it has no explicit measure.
To return to an earlier point, electability often arises in conversations about Bernie Sanders and his fitness as a party nominee. Yet rather than engage with the very real evidence not in Sanders’ favor, these concerns are usually dismissed outright. Consider, for example, public attitudes towards socialism. A recent poll indicates that only 28% of the public views socialism favorably. Even among Democrats, socialism only reaches 50% favorability. And only 24% of respondents in another poll said they’d vote for a socialist candidate. Consider also things like race. Hillary Clinton won a large majority of the black vote in 2016 and Sanders continues to lag behind Biden amongst black voters in 2020.
This isn’t to argue that Sanders has no path to victory in a general election, or that Candidate X is better than Sanders because of electability, or anything else. This is only to say that 1) electability is an actual thing, not pseudoscience, and 2) there are very real concerns based on actual reality that people can have.
