“Electability” tends to come up most in election seasons when the incumbent president is violently unpopular with minority-party voters. This is why people should be cautious now. With Democratic voters so anguished by Trump’s presidency they’ll pick anyone they think is the best bet to win, be on the lookout for experts pretending to know the unknowable — how the broad mean of voters will behave nearly two years from now.
“Electability” is how Democratic voters were convinced to pick John Kerry in 2004. Media outlets reminded us over and over that an anti-war candidate like Howard Dean could never win, and that a tall, “nuanced,” fiscally conservative veteran like Kerry “better fit the cold calculus of electability.”
Kerry was the living embodiment of “electability.” His position on the Iraq War was ambiguous and he spent much of the campaign pushing a “tough” image. Upon securing the nomination, the Kerry campaign released a video showing him with an arm around John McCain, and touting his defiance of the Democratic Party to vote for a balanced budget.
The 2004 race, we later learned in The New York Times, was about “electability itself,” with voters acting like players in a futures market, guessing how other market actors would behave down the line.
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