Beating President Trump in November 2020 is
really important to Democrats. Sizable shares of Democrats
tell pollsters that a candidate’s “electability” will be a very important factor in their primary vote — even more than the candidate’s policy positions. The problem is that we
don’t know for sure what makes a candidate electable.
But we can get an idea of what Democratic voters
think an electable candidate looks like by finding polls that ask voters which 2020 presidential hopeful they think has the best chance of winning the general election, in addition to asking who they would support independent of electability concerns. At least two recent polls have asked both questions: a
Quinnipiac poll of registered Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters in California and a
Granite State Poll of likely New Hampshire primary voters (conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center).
https://fivethirtyeight.com/feature...able-but-hes-not-everyones-first-choice/#fn-1
Perhaps unsurprisingly, in both cases, the percentage of voters who say each candidate is the most electable is very similar to the percentage of voters who support each candidate. But there are some telling divergences: Some candidates widely seen as electable don’t have as much support from voters, while others who have generated a lot of voter enthusiasm aren’t seen as particularly strong general-election candidates.
The table below looks at the difference in each poll between the share of voters who support each candidate and the share who think he or she is the strongest general-election candidate, then averages those differences. It turns out Democrats believe former Vice President Joe Biden is the most electable Democrat — even though fewer voters pick him as their first choice in the primary.
As for Sen. Bernie Sanders, who ranks second to Biden in most polls of the Democratic primary thus far, his perceived electability was on par with his popularity as a candidate. Apparently, Democratic voters don’t agree that Sanders’s socialism makes him
unelectable. Meanwhile, only former Rep. Beto O’Rourke joined Biden as a candidate whose perceived electability outstripped his popularity as a candidate, although for O’Rourke, the difference was quite small. Quite a few candidates showed up at the other end of the electability spectrum, including South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Kamala Harris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren. All three enjoyed decent voter support but were less likely to be seen as electable.
You probably noticed a pattern there. The moderate, straight, white men score best, while the women and the man seeking to become the first openly gay president lose points on electability, as do nonwhite candidates like businessman Andrew Yang and Sen. Cory Booker. Harris ranks particularly low considering her level of voter support, which may reflect the fact that she is both a person of color and a woman. And even Sen. Amy Klobuchar is seen as a relatively weak general-election candidate even though her strong past electoral performances make a good case for her being electable.
The theory that perceptions of electability are linked to race and gender is hardly new, but we do have some recent polling that supports it.
A March poll by HuffPost/YouGov asked Democrats how they thought a candidate’s gender and race would affect other voters’ decisions. In both cases, about a third of respondents said they expected that being male or being white would make other people more likely to vote for a candidate while a single-digit percentage thought it would make people less likely to vote for a candidate. (About 40 percent thought it would make no difference.) And being female and nonwhite were each seen, less overwhelmingly, as net negatives. Interestingly, though, the HuffPost/YouGov poll also found that respondents viewed being over the age of 70 as a serious electability problem, yet in that same poll, 64 percent of voters thought 76-year-old Biden was capable of winning the general election, and 48 percent thought 77-year-old Sanders could do so. Both candidates also had strong electability numbers in both the Quinnipiac and UNH polls. (This may be partly explained by the fact that Trump is 72, so the likely Republican nominee has the same age problem.)
poor showing. i was expecting one of your kosher one-liners
