The "electability" discussion on the Democratic Presidential candidates

Alexandra Petri recently had a provoctive column that raised some actual "electability" issues in a humorous manner, You have to think about electability Washington Post 04/25/2019.

I've been following some of the current "electability" arguments in the Democratic 2020 Presidential contest. One line of argument goes like this:

• If Sanders wins the nomination, enough Democratic voters will vote for a 3rd party so Trump will win and it will all be Bernie's fault.
• If Sanders loses the nomination and Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar get easily rolled by Trump, that will be Bernie's fault, too. Somehow.
• But if the Dems nominate someone who can appeal to the center and whose positions are more popular than Trump's - like, say, Hillary Clinton in 2016 - the Dems will win for sure! Unless Bernie finds some way to sabotage them.

Actually, electability games are always good clean fun. But "electability" at this stage is basically a way of saying, my candidate is electabile and yours is a LOSER. I think the fact that Trump could win the Presidency (even while losing the popular vote) brings into question every "electability" argument made for at least the previous half century.

Unfortunately, Democrats all too often hear "electability" and think that means we should pick people like Joe Manchin. Or candidates who are either opposed to abortion, or apologetic and embarassed to defend "choice" and would never let the phrase "abortion rights" enter their vocabulary. Obviously, conventional wisdom and the "church of the savvy" were convinced that Donald Trump was anything but electable in 2016. Unitl he got elected. That's another twist on electability. With the Electoral College, it depends on which particular states you can win.

Petri's column is a reminder that the actual swing voters are mostly not ideologues and are not making their choices based only on some kind of measurement of which candidate is closer to the center on a left-to-right ideological specturm. If they did, President Hillary Clinton would now be looking good for re-election in 2020.

Also, what happened to those polls we used to see that showed people think that they are more liberal than other, even though their outlook and the positions they support are popular?

This report by Lydia Saad (U.S. Still Leans Conservative, but Liberals Keep Recent Gains 01/08/2019) reports this finding from a recent Gallup poll:

Since 1992, the percentage of Americans identifying as liberal has risen from 17% then to 26% today. This has been mostly offset by a shrinking percentage of moderates, from 43% to 35%. ...

The percentage of Democrats identifying as liberal averaged 51% in 2018, up from 50% in 2017, marking the first time a majority of Democrats have adopted this term, following gradual increases since the 1990s.

In 1994, nearly half of Democrats described their views as moderate while equal percentages, at 25%, identified themselves as liberal and conservative. That fundamental pattern held until about 2002, during the first half of President George W. Bush's first term in office. From 2002 through 2014 -- spanning the Iraq War under Bush and the Barack Obama presidency -- the liberal share increased approximately one percentage point a year, while the percentages moderate and conservative fell. Since 2014, the percentage of Democrats identifying as liberal has increased at an even faster rate of two points per year on average. [my emphasis]

The 1990s was the period when the Clinton Administration was following a Democratic Leadership Council script that emphasized presenting policies on business, crime, and the social safety net that echoed conservative Republican positions and tried to avoid presenting themselves as "liberal." So some of that two-decade shift in Democrats' self-descriptions may be more that "liberal" became a more comfortable/respectful label and not necessarily a shift to the left in the political perspectives.

I think in some ways this Democratic inclination to look for supposedly "safe" moderates like Manchin or Diane Feinstein is an admittedly strange hangover from the days when liberal Republicans were not nearly-unimaginable fantasy creatures. And when Democratic Presidential candidates had to win some Southern states to win the Electoral College.

Today's Republicans would be ready to burn characters like Jacob Javits or Mark Hatfield at the stake. And while Florida is still an important Electoral College goal, that game of needing Southern states to get Presidenta elected changed drastically in 1992 when Clinton won California. Then Pete Wilson came along with the xenophobic Proposition 187 in 1994, which passed, but also energized Latino voters like never before and made California a "safe" Democratic state even in the conventional wisdom. Thank God for that instance of Unintended Consequences!