(Re)Thinking About Electability

More than two years ago, I wrote a piece suggesting that Kamala Harris was probably running for president and could be a strong candidate. I got a lot of emails in response from readers suggesting that Harris was too risky of a pick for Democrats--she might not be “electable.” Many of these messages either directly or indirectly suggested that her race and gender were barriers. In response, I wrote a follow-up piece, arguing that 1. The number of American presidential elections is so small that we have very limited knowledge of exactly what kinds of candidates are electable 2. It is deeply unfair to suggest that immutable characteristics about a person (like gender and race) should be a barrier to them for any job, let alone president in a country that prides itself on the idea that anyone can be anything they want if they try hard enough. 

During the Democratic primaries, I would often tell people that Joe Biden was probably the most electable (the most conservative of the top Democratic candidates and the person most like previous presidents in a number of ways) but that other candidates, even Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, could win. After all, many polls showed that President Trump was fairly unpopular and losing in head-to-head match-ups against not just Biden, but Sanders, Warren, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and other Democratic candidates. 

The Democrats chose Biden in part because of electability, the general election ended up being closer than polls suggested and Biden won a sizable Electoral College margin but was just barely ahead of Trump in the main swing states. So I have had to do some rethinking. 

Here’s where I am now: 

1. Electability is still a fraught concept with racist and sexist implications. 

We have a very small sample size of presidential elections, and there aren’t that many gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races either. Also, there is a lot going on in a presidential election beyond the two candidates. Did Barack Obama win in a landslide in 2008 because he was a stronger candidate than John McCain, because people hated George W. Bush due to the Iraq War, because people hated George W. Bush due to the economic crash or because Republicans had been in charge for eight years and people wanted a change? Probably a little bit of all four, and it’s hard to separate them out. Similarly, did Hillary Clinton lose in 2016 because of decades of negative coverage of her from the media, her gender, because voters were ready for a change since Democrats had been in charge for eight years or because Trump was a particularly effective candidate? Probably some combination of all those things. 

But a lot of Democrats came away from the 2009-16 period with three firmly-held views: 

1. A lot of white people, particularly white Republicans, had mobilized against Obama because he is black; 

2. A lot of voters didn’t back Clinton in 2016 in large part because of her gender; and therefore

3. The party should ideally land on a white man for 2020. 

The problems with this approach are obvious. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar are different people than Hillary Clinton; Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Julian Castro are different than Barack Obama; 2020 is not 2016. Also, this electability approach would inevitably result in what I think of as pre-discrimination---”I am not going to support Kamala Harris in the primary because even though I’m not racist or sexist my uncle/cousin/nephew is racist and sexist and he will never vote for her.” And let’s not pretend here--plenty of Democratic men and women have negative views and stereotypes about candidates who aren’t white men. “Warren is not electable” could become a politically-correct way to express their actual feeling: “There is something about Warren I don’t like.” 

Harris and Warren suffered from this dynamic in the 2020 in my view. And it didn’t just show up in the presidential race. When Charles Booker was running in the U.S. Senate primary here in Kentucky, white Democrats regularly asked me if I viewed a black Democratic candidate as electable statewide in Kentucky. I did not enjoy these questions---it felt like being asked to lend a black voice to pre-discrimination against a black candidate. (I suspect people were asking me this because I am a political writer, and not really thinking about me as a black man like Booker.) I would always answer that 1. I wasn’t sure Kentucky voters were necessarily more comfortable with a female candidate (he was running against Amy McGrath) 2. I was pretty sure that the biggest barriers for Booker weren’t race but a. His support of liberal ideas like the Green New Deal b. Most importantly, that he was a Democrat running in a federal race in Kentucky. It was surely helpful that Kentucky Democrats embraced the more electable McGrath--she lost by 20 points in the general election. (I am being sarcastic.) Booker wasn’t electable because no Democrat was in that race. 

2. The Democratic Party didn’t just choose any white man

In early 2019, my worries about electability talk seem justified. There was a lot of buzz around the presidential candidacy of Beto O’Rourke, who it seemed to me was far less qualified than Harris, Warren, Cory Booker or Klobuchar for the presidency, unless being a white man was considered an essential credential. But then Biden entered the race. For some Democrats, his chief credential was potential electability, in part because he is a white man. But it was not his only credential. Older black voters, a key bloc in the party, really liked Biden---and that support was not just about electability but from a comfort and familiarity with him. As a longtime senator and a former vice-president, Biden was perhaps the most qualified candidate in the field. 

Biden is an 1. older 2. white 3. heterosexual 4. male 5. former vice-president 6. liked by some moderate white swing voters  7. beloved by older black people and 8. in the center-left of the Democratic Party. His fairly narrow election win in the swing states suggests that perhaps other Democrats could not have won. But Biden’s profile isn’t just unlike Bernie Sanders and Warren (more liberal), Klobuchar and Harris (women), Booker and Harris (people of color.) There is no guarantee that Tim Ryan, Steve Bullock, John Hickenlooper, or any of the other heterosexual white men who ran in the 2020 Democratic primary would have won this general election either---they are not former vice-presidents who also have deep connections to the black community. 

We probably learned that Joe Biden is more electable than other potential Democratic presidential candidates were---but we don’t know exactly why that is the case. And we shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that the story is simply about race and gender or even ideology.  

Also, it’s worth noting that Trump is fairly unpopular, so maybe that is why Biden won this election. Biden’s gains compared to Hillary Clinton in 2016 were largely in urban and suburban areas and really not small towns or rural areas. He doesn’t seem to have won many Obama-Trump voters. I would imagine many of these suburban swing voters would have backed say Klobuchar too. So we don’t even really know if Biden won because of his appeal or if Biden’s appeal was simply that he is not Trump, which means other Democrats could have won too.

Joe Biden won one presidential election on one day in 2020. We can’t learn too much from this. 

3. That said, I am going to become Roy Cooper’s hype man. 

I am more convinced than before this November that a. The Democrats are struggling to win the Electoral College so b. They probably have to consider the potential electability of their nominee more than I would prefer (since I think such an electability discussion will always turn into people making random guesses about other people’s views on race and gender.)  

One Democratic politician is looking pretty strong now for a future presidential campaign: North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper. Trump won NC by about 1 percentage point, Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis won by 2 points. But in North Carolina’s governor race, Cooper won by about 5 percentage points against his Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest. Cooper got slightly more total votes than Trump. Cooper was the incumbent, so that probably helps. Perhaps Forest is a bad politician--I am not an expert in North Carolina politics. 

But Cooper has now won gubernatorial elections in North Carolina in two presidential years (2016, 2020) where his party lost at the top of the ticket. He has also won four attorney general elections in the state. 

Cooper is a 63-year-old white man who is fairly moderate on policy. So he seems electable in ways that I think are just stereotyping. But Cooper has a real case for being particularly electable that is not based on race or gender or age---he has won numerous competitive elections in a key state.