This is a very interesting piece by Ron Brownstein about the question of electability. I don’t normally put much credence in the work of Third Way but this seems to be a legit study and my anecdotal experience suggests it’s conclusions are correct. Electability isn’t just about which white guy can get Republicans to vote for him. It’s more complicated:
In the 2020 Democratic primary, electability is like the end of The Sopranos: Everybody talks about it but nobody agrees what it means.
Third Way, a center-left think tank, offers important insights on the question of electability in an extensive new study of Democratic primary voters it is releasing this morning. The results, provided exclusively to The Atlantic, signal that primary voters may be judging electability on different grounds than most political insiders believe, and that the verdict on which candidates are most electable may be more malleable than many expect.
“So much of the Beltway chatter about electability is about race, gender, and ideology,” says Lanae Erickson, Third Way’s senior vice president for social policy and politics. “That was not what people talked about.”
But the research also indicates that however voters assess electability, it looms as an overriding factor in the decision-making for most Democratic voters. That suggests former Vice President Joe Biden’s consistent lead in polls on the question of which Democrat is most likely to beat Trump could be a sturdier cushion under his candidacy than his opponents may think.
“If those numbers don’t change,” Erickson told me, “it is going to be very, very hard for someone to overtake [Biden], because this is the question on Democrats’ minds: How do we beat [Trump]? I don’t think those numbers are set in stone at all, but that’s the argument [other candidates] need to make.”
To better understand Democratic voters’ views on electability, Third Way worked with Avalanche Strategy, a Washington, D.C.-based research firm. Avalanche surveyed 1,600 likely Democratic primary voters through a technique that mixed typical poll questions with open-ended queries that allowed voters to express their priorities and perceptions in greater detail. The firm then used artificial intelligence to draw out patterns from the open-ended responses. The process essentially sought to combine the quantitative sweep of a traditional poll with the qualitative depth of a focus group.
The first major takeaway from the research wasn’t surprising: Democratic primary voters feel an overwhelming imperative to beat Trump. Ninety-seven percent of them called defeating him either “extremely” or “very important.” But only about half of the primary voters the group surveyed called it “extremely” or “very likely” that Democrats will in fact do so. “The tension between Democrats’ urgency to beat Trump and their uncertainty that it will happen is why electability is driving the primary process,” writes Ryan Pougiales, a senior political analyst at Third Way, in a memo releasing the study today. Over three-fifths of Democrats said they preferred a nominee with the best chance of beating Trump, even if they didn’t agree with him or her on most issues; only about one-fifth prioritized a candidate they agreed with most of the time.
“But how Democrats conceive of electability—specifically as it relates to the adoptable characteristics that they think make a candidate electable—is more complicated,” Pougiales argues.
Maybe the most striking pattern in how Democratic voters assessed electability was what they did not prominently mention. In open-ended questions, the race and gender of a candidate did not surface frequently as an important factor: In other words, at least in how people responded, electability was not just code for “old white man.” The research did not provide exact figures on how often voters raised those issues, but Erickson said, “People did not say race and gender—they didn’t volunteer that. Are they really thinking that in some way? Maybe, but they certainly didn’t volunteer that.”
Another consideration that surprisingly few primary voters raised in weighing electability was a candidate’s ideology. The share of respondents who thought an aggressively liberal path improved the Democrats’ odds against Trump was slightly larger than the share who favored centrist positioning. But these ideology-focused voters amounted to only 6 percent of respondents. These “are all tiny slices of the primary electorate,” writes Pougiales. “The bottom line is that Democratic primary voters generally don’t believe that ideology will be the key to beating Trump in 2020.”
Not many more voters said they believe the issues a candidate stresses will be critical to beating Trump. Those who did consider issues paramount cited health care, followed by both climate change and immigration, as the concerns they thought the nominee most needs to stress. But only about one in five cited a strong emphasis on any issue as central to victory.
If these Democratic voters didn’t measure electability primarily through ideology, issues, or identity, how did they measure it? By far, more voters—about two-thirds in all—picked a candidate’s personal qualities than any other choice. According to the analysis, the most common response was honesty and integrity, followed by compassion, strength, and then competence. Gender mattered here: Women were more likely to stress honesty and compassion, while men gravitated toward strength.
These responses in some ways can seem like Democratic voters are projecting their own views on the electorate’s: They basically responded that the qualities that would make a candidate most electable are the same ones they would like to see in a president. But those projections are far from proven. Trump, after all, won in 2016 even as voters held grave doubts about his honesty and compassion, and had mixed feelings about his competence.
The Trump precedent looms large over the final ingredient that Democratic primary voters picked as a key component of electability: campaign tactics. The research found that about three-in-10 primary voters thought that specific tactical choices the nominee pursues before Election Day would be critical in beating Trump.
This dimension, as clearly as any other, exposed the stark division among Democrats about how to respond to the norm-shattering president. The action that most of the Democratic voters surveyed thought would help beat Trump was taking the high road and uniting the country. But what ranked next was the exact opposite: fighting back and standing up for beliefs.
The same divergence was apparent when the survey asked Democrats head-on what traits would cause them the most concern in a nominee. “Too left” and “socialist” led the list, but combined for only about one-fifth of the primary voters. Slightly more voters said they worried about an alternative set of concerns that included “too old,” “too middle,” “man,” and “white.” Older voters worried more about “too left”; younger voters expressed more concern about “too middle,” “man,” and “white.”
In some ways, this detailed research reinforces what strategists working in the Democratic race already know: Different wings of the party are operating on very different theories about what it will take to oust Trump. Progressives insist that winning in 2020 requires a vanguard liberal agenda to mobilize young and minority voters; moderates say that the goal must be balanced against the need to hold white suburbanites moving away from Trump and to recapture working-class white women.
The major new insight in this research is that as Democrats assess electability, both of these tracks may be less consequential than whether they think a candidate demonstrates strength, integrity, and an ability to unite the party.
Brownstein points out that so far, Biden has the inside track on that but other candidates have the opportunity to show they too have these personal characteristics and the ability to unite the party. I suspect that this is the main reason Warren has been doing well. She’s clearly competent, but she’s shown resilience (strength) and integrity. And her happy warrior persona may be interpreted as a possible “uniting” characteristic.
Obviously, I have no idea how most people think about any of them. But I do think that these perceptions of personal qualities are more important that a lot of pundits and analysts portray. Cerebral assumptions and issues and politics are part of it, of course. But a lot of our impressions of politicians happen on a heuristic level that we aren’t even conscious of. And it’s no surprise that Democrats would be yearning for someone who is honest and trustworthy after this atrocity we call the Trump administration.
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