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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIn 2019, Let's Finally Retire 'Electability'
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/what-is-electability-774196/By Matt Taibbi
"The role of electability has always been to convince voters to pick someone other than the candidate they prefer. The idea is to tell audiences which candidate has the broad appeal to win. The metric pundits usually employ is, Which Democrat could most easily pass for a Republican? and vice-versa.
Electability tends to come up most in election seasons when the incumbent president is violently unpopular with minority-party voters. This is why people should be cautious now. With Democratic voters so anguished by Trumps presidency theyll pick anyone they think is the best bet to win, be on the lookout for experts pretending to know the unknowable how the broad mean of voters will behave nearly two years from now.
Electability is how Democratic voters were convinced to pick John Kerry in 2004. Media outlets reminded us over and over that an anti-war candidate like Howard Dean could never win, and that a tall, nuanced, fiscally conservative veteran like Kerry better fit the cold calculus of electability.
Kerry was the living embodiment of electability. His position on the Iraq War was ambiguous and he spent much of the campaign pushing a tough image. Upon securing the nomination, the Kerry campaign released a video showing him with an arm around John McCain, and touting his defiance of the Democratic Party to vote for a balanced budget."
He has a point.
Loki Liesmith
(4,602 posts)Not the only one...but it is one.
qazplm135
(7,447 posts)or even overused, does not render it without any value.
Electability is a valid thing to consider, but it also is a bit of a nebulous term.
At its base, to me, it means the ability to do one of two things:
1. Unite the base of one of the two parties enough to have a chance to win on the strength of that alone. An example of this might be Obama, or to a certain extent even Clinton given the number of votes she actually won by.
2. Able to win enough voters of one of the two parties and enough independent voters to win on the combined strength (which suggests a candidate not necessarily firing up the party but who has unusual appeal with independents). Bill Clinton probably meets this. Carter in 76 maybe as well.
If someone is on a fringe then they aren't electable. So for example, Jim Webb would not have been electable if he somehow managed to win the nomination. I don't think he could have done 1 or 2.
I don't think we currently have anyone "unelectable" but I do think some have a better chance than others.