Let The GOP Electability Games Begin!

As the Invisible Primary of 2016 intensifies and candidates refine their appeals, a key issue will be their ability to convince caucus and primary voters that they’ve got the stuff to defeat the hated partisan foe. That’s all the more urgent as events—from the U.S. Supreme Court to Vienna—conspire to make this a truly high-stakes election.

“Electability” is a hardy perennial of every nominating contest, though it’s occasionally derided by the more ideological partisans of the left and right who view it as an excuse for “selling out” sacred principles at the behest of soulless pollsters and weak-minded swing voters. To more refined political palates, the issue is getting the maximum ideological bang for one’s political buck. Among Republicans, there’s even a name for that calculation: the Buckley Rule (after William F. Buckley III), which holds that the GOP should nominate for president the most conservative candidate who can reasonably be expected to win.

The most traditional test of “electability” is the so-called Median Voter Theorem, whereby ideally a political party and its candidates should position themselves as closely as possible to the views and principles of voters at the precise center of the partisan or ideological spectrum. This theorem is the political science source of all the “move to the center” strategies political professionals talk about. It does make some sense mathematically, since winning over a sure-but-undecided voter gives you a vote while denying one to your opponent. But “moving to the center” can sacrifice other opportunities to mobilize marginal voters, and rather obviously reduces the ideological “payoff” for victory.

Still, one first-tier Republican candidate, Jeb Bush, is already making a “move to the center” argument for his electability, or so it would seem from his famous statement that you have to be willing to “lose the primary to win the general.” Thus he expects conservatives to forgive him his heresies on immigration policy and education because he reasons his positions are going to send a signal to swing voters that he’s not a strict ideologue. Marco Rubio is making a similar pitch based on the slightly different basis of his youth and his much-broadcast interest in new ideas (undercut a bit by his strong interest in old ideas like boycotting Cuba, but nobody’s perfect!). And one might expect that if they can get a viable campaign on track, John Kasich, Chris Christie and Lindsey Graham (who has a legitimately established record of bipartisanship on domestic issues to balance his militarist shrieking on foreign and defense policy) might do the same.

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