Decision 2024: Why Asking If A Candidate Is Electable Is NEVER an Offensive Question

 

For most of my adulthood with the increasing prevalence of minority candidates for President in both political parties there is a question that has always come up. It was most prominent in 2008 when both Obama and Hilary Clinton were major candidates for the Democratic nomination and each time it was asked, so many of their defenders would argue it was either racist or misogynistic.

That question, of course, was: “Are they electable?”

This tone has been around in some form for the last fifty years, ever since Shirley Chisholm became the first African-American woman to run for the Democratic nomination by the way: that by even asking the question, you are at best echoing the patriarchy or white supremacy (depending on which) or are basically one yourself. The defenders then come back with the question that seemingly has no response: “You’d never ask a man this question?” Or in the alternative, a white man.

Because of the often vehement attitude of their defenders, most people never bother to put up a counter-argument. There’s just one very big problem with this attitude. When it comes to choosing the candidate for a major political party, one who has to run for a general election against a base that is not made up of primary voters, asking if a minority candidate can win a general election isn’t a perfunctory question; it’s a necessary one.

I’d actually like to go back to the counter-argument because it’s at the core of this. It’s understandable that women and certain minority groups are convinced white men have been running the country for more than a quarter of a century and that their forces have been ignored. I don’t debate that. However, it is kind of ridiculous to think that all conventions since 1824 have basically proceeded in the following way:

“Who shall we nominate for President?”

“James Buchanan.”

Long pause.

“Is he a man?”

“Yes.”

“Is he white?”

“Yes.”

Pause.

“That’s good enough.”

 

Now I need to be clear that from 1832 until well into the 1960s, conventions of both parties were essentially made up entirely of white men making all the decisions as to who would represent them in the coming election. It’s also true all of those candidates were white men. But I seriously doubt even the most devoted leftist truly believes those were the only considerations. On the contrary, the whole purpose of these conventions were to choose candidates (all of whom were white men I grant you) who were electable in a national campaign.

Because all of these candidates were representatives, senators, governors, military figures, all of whom had been on the national stage in some form for a while. And because the parties had vastly different positions on many issues, and more importantly, because party loyalty wasn’t nearly as important as it is now, they had to choose candidates that could build a coalition that could win a general election, usually in just a few months’ time. And these white men who were in the power structure had vehemently different positions that were divisive both to the party and the nation. I’ll give a few of the most prominent historical examples.

In the antebellum era the Democratic Party constantly had to make a balance between the Southern wing of its party and the northern wing about the issue of slavery. As I’ve written in earlier articles, this frequently led to conventions of multiple ballots leading to coalition candidates. In 1860 the Democrats couldn’t come to an agreement and split on sectional lines: the Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas and the Southern Democrats nominated John Breckenridge. Because of this split the Republicans were all but guaranteed a victory and Abraham Lincoln became President even though he only earned forty percent of the popular vote and wasn’t even on the ballot in the South.

In 1884 with corruption running rampant in both political parties, the Republicans nominated as their standard bearer James G. Blaine, former Speaker of the House and Secretary of State. Blaine was immensely popular with Republicans but because of his charges with corruption that he had never refuted, many members of the Republicans walked out of the convention and proposed to support the Democratic nominee if he was acceptable to reformers. Grover Cleveland met those qualifications and while there were many other reasons for his narrow victory on election day, the support of this splinter group – known as the Mugwumps – was a critical part of it.

In the 1896 Presidential campaign, both parties were split on the issue of whether silver or gold should be the major currency in America. When the Republicans nominated William McKinley, who was pro- gold –  those Republicans who supported silver walked out of the Republican convention and endorsed the Democrats. When the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan, who prominently believed in free silver, the contingent of Democrats who favored the Gold Standard, walked out and formed their own ticket and nominated their own candidate for President. Similarly the Populist Party, which had run in 1892 primarily on the principle of free silver, fused with the Democrats. McKinley managed to win narrowly over Bryan.

Electability was always an issue when it came to determining the standard bearer for both parties: the Republicans frequently nominated presidential candidates from Ohio because it was a critical state for them to win and both parties would nominate for Vice President candidates who they thought could bring in voters from states the standard bearer couldn’t. While this continued in the twentieth century as civil rights became more important, many Southern Democrats though more than qualified from the standpoint of their records, were rendered persona non grata for national office because of the increasing importance of the black votes. Prominent candidates such as Richard Russell, Estes Kefauver and Sam Rayburn had little hope for national office because they represented states in Dixie.

Electability, it’s worth noting, sometimes didn’t even apply to Presidential candidates. Going into the 1948 Democratic convention, top Democrats were trying to replace Harry Truman because defeat in November seemed certain. When they nominated him the only person who thought he could win was Truman – and his constituency was proven right.

Similarly when John Kennedy was trying to obtain the Democratic nomination in 1960, the biggest obstacles ahead of him were his youth – he was only 43 – and more importantly, his Catholicism. In 1928 Governor Al Smith of New York became the first Catholic nominated for President by a major party. Despite being the Governor of the most populous state in the Union, he was defeated in the biggest electoral landslide in history to that point, in large part because of the racist anti-Catholic propaganda that was both subterranean and out in the open. Much of that propaganda was still around in 1960 and many thought Kennedy was unelectable as a result. One of the biggest factors in Kennedy’s win was his choice of Lyndon Johnson, a Texas Democrat as his Vice President which made Kennedy more ‘electable’ to the South.

So the argument that you wouldn’t ask a white man if he was electable is a ridiculous statement on its face. That said, there is a double standard applied when it comes to minority candidates when they are asked this question because it seems racist. And it is – but not the way you might think.

The question is actually a different one: After a primary campaign where fewer people vote in both parties then a general, the candidate now has to face the entire nation. Their job is not just to unify the party  -  not as easy for the Democrats as it has been in recent years for the GOP – but then go to the voting public and convince the undecided voters to vote for you.

And the fact is people who have prejudices are allowed to vote. And despite everything so many people might have told you, they don’t all wear MAGA hats, have Confederate stickers or have tattoos so you can easily identify them. Some of them might say in polls or to their friends that they will vote for Obama or Hilary but that might just be cover to hide their own subtle prejudice.

It is the job of not just a minority candidate but all  candidates for public office to be able to expand their base and win over the undecided voters. That is what electability means. And much as so many leftists or progressive Democrats want you to believe, it’s not necessarily a question that can be answered even after a successful primary campaign.

Let’s take Barack Obama after the 2008 primaries. Obama had managed to win the most grueling primary race in modern times. Obama knew going in that he couldn’t rely solely on the primary voters who had given him his victory. He had to win over those who had voted for Hilary and furthermore, build a coalition that could win in November.

The coalition managed to build in 2008 was a variation on the one that came out for George McGovern in 1972. Obama managed to win not only an overwhelming majority of the black vote, but also a majority of the women’s vote, two-thirds of the Latino vote (McGovern did the same, but back then there were less than 5 million Latinos registered) and most of what we now would call the LGBTQ+ vote. This still might have failed had it not been for the outside factors of exhaustion with the Iraq War (which McCain still supported) and the financial crisis which exploded that September.

And lost in the apparent electoral landslide (Obama had carried 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173) was the fact that Obama’s coalition had the same critical flaw that McGovern’s did: the deep South.

Its worth noting that McGovern’s electoral strategy for victory never included the South directly. He was relying on the possibility that George Wallace, who’d run as a third party candidate and had taken many Southern votes away from Nixon, would do the same after the 1972 primaries were over. However on May 15^th 1972 Wallace was shot by Arthur Bremer and while he survived, he was paralyzed from the waist down. He chose not to run a third party campaign which was one of the factors in Nixon’s landslide. The biggest margins Nixon had in his 49 state run were in the deep south and in many states he won close to eighty percent of the popular vote.

I’ve noted in two different articles that between 1968 and 2008, the Democratic Party won the Presidency only three times, both times with Southern governors at the head of the ticket. Jimmy Carter won the Presidency because with the exception of Virginia, he carried the entire South as a bloc. By 1992, the South was heavily Republican but Bill Clinton still managed to carry seven Southern states including Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Kentucky, Missouri and West Virginia. He carried all six of these states again in his successful reelection 4 years later.

But while Obama’s victory was sweeping, the only Southern states he carried were Virginia, North Carolina and Florida. He didn’t carry any of the deep south states Carter had carried in 1976 or any of the ones Clinton had carried just twelve years earlier. Obama had become the first Democrat elected President who had not carried any of the Deep South states and while progressives and leftist might argue that’s for the best going forward, it was the clearest sign that this landslide coalition had cracks in it.

And as we would see, for the rest of Obama’s Presidency, the sweeping majorities he’d had both Houses of Congress would be gone by his final set of midterms. I know I will be burned in effigy for not mentioning all the factors that were involved in that but they’ve been mentioned so often by progressives I’ll save my breath. The fact remains the coalition Obama built increasingly became unsustainable afterwards in large part because Obama was never able to win over the people who’d voted against them. That may say more about them then it does about him, but as I said before having certain beliefs has never been a disqualifier to vote. Nor should it be in a democracy.

It’s also one of the critical reasons that I am absolutely certain Bernie Sanders could not have become the Democratic nominee in 2016. Yes you can argue all you want about the system being rigged against him and for Hilary, but the fact remains Sanders’s never had a coalition.

Yes he nearly won Iowa and swept to victory in New Hampshire, but as I’ve been reminded countless times before: those two states don’t represent the real demographics of America. The only major states Sanders won were Wisconsin and Michigan and it kind of is striking that many of states he did win – North Dakota, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming – are small and predominantly white states. Combined with the fact that most of his victories were on the coast and my fundamental belief that much of his vote was anti-Hilary as it was pro-Bernie, I think the narrowness of Bernie’s coalition has never been considered. By contrast all of the states Hilary won had the traditional make up of a Democratic primary – particularly Nevada and South Carolina.

However that doesn’t mean Hilary didn’t have her own flaws as a candidate and they became overly clear when she moved to the general. If the primary goal of a general election is to win over the undecided, her statement of calling Trump voters ‘a basket of deplorables’ is one of the kind of tone-deaf statements guarantee to isolate so many of the voters that many people – including her husband – had been able to win. I also think the fact that Hilary was, with the exception of Sanders, fundamentally unopposed for the Democratic nomination and yet despite that Sanders made things as competitive as they were, should have been a warning sign that she was going to have trouble being electable. When you throw in that her campaign was fundamentally more about being anti-Trump then a real reason to vote for her,  then she seemed to be counting on public disapproval for Trump to be enough to get her the White House. Being against somebody is rarely enough to win elections on a national level.

And its worth noting that there is a huge amount of critique about those few Republican minority and female officials who hold elected office, primarily in the Senate or as governors. The loudest arguments that I hear against them is that they have betrayed their race, gender or sexual orientation for the sole purpose of power.

What the left is unable to understand is that, not just on a national level but also a state one, this is by far a more workable strategy then those same Democratic candidates. It’s the main reason that Stacey Abrams has twice lost the governorship of Georgia and Jamie Harrison couldn’t defeat Lindsay Graham in South Carolina in 2020 while Tim Scott and Ted Cruz have been reelected to the Senate and why it is easier for Marco Rubio to win reelection then it will be Debbie Mucarsel-Powell to beat Rick Scott in Florida.

For all the arguments that these candidates are betraying their race or gender and so on, there’s a simple fact: it’s easier to win in certain states as a Republican. The Republican base is more substantial and will almost always come out for their standard-bearer. They just need to win enough of the minority coalitions that Democrats rely on and enough can be very small because no matter how much the left hopes otherwise, African-Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ+ and most of all women, don’t vote 100 percent for a candidate just because the Democrat on the ballot is one or more of those things. All Republicans like Scott and Cruz and Rubio have to do is peel off just enough votes from those demographics and they win their elections.

By contrast with Democratic candidates who are minorities in these same states, if  the de facto argument for your campaigns is to argue that so many of the voters in that state are either MAGA extremists or that by voting for their opponents they are by definition propagating those systems that some have benefited from or at least feel a part of, that will now doubt make those candidates many things. What it hasn’t done and is still nearly impossible to do, is make them electable. That may not be important for progressives, where electability has mattered less then purity and principles or minority candidates who have justifiably struggled for a place at the table,  but for the Republicans who benefit from it and the Democratic party that is losing ground nationally from it, that’s a lesson they have to take in consideration going forward.