Electability

This is Joseph

Ok, I am bracing for being taken down by Mark, but I wanted to comment on one of my current pet peeves.

There is a presidential primary going on right now. One of the big issues I keep hearing is whether a candidate is "electable". Now, historically speaking this might have been a valid concern. From Wikipedia:

The impetus for national adoption of the binding primary election was the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention. Vice President Hubert Humphrey secured the Presidential nomination despite not winning a single primary under his own name.

So in earlier eras it was a reasonable concern that the delegates at the convention might not be a representative sample of the voting population. Now primaries today are not necessarily representative of the electorate as a whole, but they are broadly based elections. It's pretty clear that anybody who wins a primary is "electable" in some important sense of the term.

Now, I think that this argument is a proxy for what people don't want to say out loud. All candidates who are able to win the primary do it from a combination of "crossover appeal" (get the other side to vote for you) and "enthusiasm" (get more of your base to run out and support you). In general, these things tend to be negatively correlated. Making your core supporters super-happy is often in conflict with reaching across the aisle.

In the small number of cases where this is not true, there doesn't tend to be much life in such a proposal. Both parties are united in not wanting to return big pieces of the country to Mexico, and you will note the absence of such proposals.

So I loathe the term "electable" in this context. Instead, I want the more precise discussion of the trade-off between exciting people and building bridges. Anybody who can survive the primary process looks like they are at least potentially "electable" to me. We'd probably all have had a clearer view in 2016 if we'd remembered that about Donald Trump.