Largely how electable the candidate is. It could mean in part that I think they would just suck in office. But when I’m talking about someone I would prefer to get the office, I almost always mean how likely are they to win.
Example: I think Kamala Harris would make for a perfectly decent president, even if I don’t love everything about her. But I also think she would be a piss-poor candidate because she has so far shown minimal media-friendly charisma and her presidential nomination run was a mess. I’d vote for her without much hesitation, but I’m worried many others wouldn’t (she also has Biden and HC’s issue of being unattractive to dyed-in-the-wool progressives due to her spotty law enforcement background).
To me, it means how good a person the candidate is. It has nothing to do with electability; a high-quality candidate can be very unelectable. Someone could be a Nobel Prize winning scientist who donates huge amounts to charity, but he isn’t likely to win an election in rural Alabama.
In the context of political punditry, IME, it largely means the ability of a candidate to get elected.
However, those qualities are often correlated with ability to perform. 538 (back in the day) used things like holding previous state-wide office and other evidence of abilities to win elections as a proxy for “candidate quality”.
“Either how well they can win election or how well they can perform in office, depending on context.”
I went with this. Interesting question! I think I’m usually careful to avoid the inherent ambiguity by saying either:
“This person would make a great/terrible president”
or
“This person is running a great/terrible campaign”
All by itself, “candidate quality” does imply the former to me, but better to clarify (as hogarth mentioned, “electibility” is a good way to specify the latter).
I voted “exclusively how well a political candidate can win the election” because . . . that’s what candidate quality means. In particular it means how well suited the candidate is to win the specific election they’re in. How well matched are they to the electorate in the district/state/country they’re running in? How are their messaging skills? Can they raise money? Officeholder quality is a different but related thing – generally your candidate quality will suffer if people think you have done/will do a poor job in office.
IMO, one of the highest quality candidates of the last couple of decades is P&E forum public enemy #1 Joe Manchin. He ran as a Democrat but not “that kind” of Democrat. In one of his campaign ads, he shot a copy of the cap-and-trade bill with a rifle. He won reelection in WV just two years after Trump carried the state by 40 points. He’s a brilliant candidate. And his being successful as a candidate allowed Biden to pass most of his first-term agenda and get almost all of his nominations through the Senate.
This is right. And now it’s probably Jon Tester (although we will see how he does this cycle). Any other Democratic Senate candidate in Montana would have <5% chance of winning that election. But Tester is probably a toss-up. That’s a quality candidate.
ETA: The corollary are the routinely lousy candidates the GOP keeps putting up. Dr. Oz, Linda McMahon, whoever the crazy witch lady was, Herschel Walker. Kari Lake might be an example from this cycle, or Bernie Mereno.
To me “quality candidate” means someone I want to have in the office. Of course, to be in the office they have to get elected, but there’s no point (to me) in having an electable candidate if they don’t actually do the job well once they’re in it.
Any definition of “candidate quality” that allows Hitler to be on the list is a definition I cannot get behind. Perhaps “candidate viability” is a more accurate term?
I kind of look at it like a catch-all term meaning both how electable a person is, as well as how well they’ll do in office.
I mean, Kamala Harris is like you say, someone who would be a serviceable President, but she doesn’t seem to have that je ne sais quoi that successful Presidential candidates have.
And someone like a Trump is kind of the opposite- he’s got a lot of a particular sort of charisma that plays well with his side, but he’s awful at actually being President.
A high quality candidate in my mind is someone like say… Barack Obama or Mitt Romney- someone who could both plausibly be elected as well as someone who could actually govern well.
In context, this is about the phrase “terrible candidate.” And I say that, without additional context, that means they’d bad choice for the job. That’s what it means outside of politics. If Joe is a terrible candidate for the new position at work, you don’t mean he’s bad at convincing people he could do the job. You mean he’d be a bad choice for the job.
This is doubly true when the context is comparing them to someone who factually was absolutely terrible at the job.
“Candidate quality,” on the other hand, is more ambiguous. But I voted based on the former, since that was the original context that inspired this question.
I voted both, but for me, in terms of political office, the quality of a candidate is about 75% electability and 25% having the qualities to be good at the job. It’s like with a business. For me, it’s about 25% having a good product, 75% being able to sell it. Maybe even more the latter.