Why is the 'safe' candidate considered more electable?

Politics & Elections
1

Mondale, Dukkakis, Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton were all considered to be the ‘safe’, ‘moderate’ choice and all lost their elections. The only two Democrats who’ve actually won a presidential race were considered the unsafe choice; there was certainly a lot of talk from non-Obama fans about how risky of a candidate he was (first black president, after all), and Bill Clinton got the nomination basically because none of the big names wanted to go up an incumbent with bold military victory in his record (Bush Sr looked hard to beat). So why do people talk as though running a fairly bland, safe, establishment-friendly candidate is likely to win an election for the Democrats? It failed miserably in 2016, and also in 2004, 2000, 1988, and 1980, but people on here seem to insist that ‘electability’ in the form of being pretty middle of the road and liked by ‘traditional backers’ is the key to victory.

There doesn’t seem to be any actual data supporting the claim that Biden is highly electable. Putting aside his personal flaws and vulnerabilities (‘Hunter Biden’ is a name I expect to hear any time Trump’s corruption is mentioned), it seems like he’s the kind of safe Democrat that loses elections. What victories am I overlooking, or what other data is there?

2

No offense, but Bernie supporters simply don’t effing get it when we talk about electability.

You say there’s no data about electability. You’re wrong: there’s tens of millions of data points. They’re called elections - not polls, but elections.

Bill Clinton became “electable” because he won elections.

Barack Obama was unelectable - until he won elections.

It’s winning elections that counts.

I pointed this out to you all in 2016 and I’ll say it again: Barack Obama was the black guy with the funny name - until he started beating Hillary Clinton in race after race. Bernie Sanders hasn’t done that. And until he does, his supporters need to start eating some humble fucking pie and shut the fuck up.

Winning elections takes care of a lot of problems. The problem for Bernie Bros is…their guy ain’t winning elections. And stop blaming the DNC. They bent over backwards to accommodate his cranky old whining ass this time.

3

It’s kinda hard to tell. Is the OP focused on Democrats only? McCain was safe, but Palin was unsafe - they lost. Romney/Ryan I think were safe - they lost. To the point, after those two losses, the Republicans figured they were running candidates that were too safe, so they went with Trump in 2016 (who won no elections before that one - even less than Sanders). An argument could be made that the Democrats should take a cue and select the unsafe candidate further from center just like the GOP did last time - it worked for them.

4

Dukakis was the liberal choice. He wasn’t as liberal as Jesse Jackson, but he was far more liberal than Gephart and Gore. Mondale infamously ran on raising taxes! Gary Hart tore into Mondale for being an old Great Society Democrat and not a moderate new Democrat.

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5

Being perceived as a moderate is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being elected president. We could quibble over whether this or that candidate is a moderate or not, but what is important is what people perceive.

Further, elections are won in the middle. Your side may positively HATE the Republican nominee while our side my positively HATE the Dem nominee, but our votes don’t elect a president. Those in the middle do.

Those people are generally happy with their lives. They get up, eat breakfast, drive to work, eat lunch, finish work, come home, eat dinner, have three beers while watching the History Channel, go to bed and do it all again the next day. They take one or two vacations a year depending on their income level. They have kids and families and as I said, are generally happy. Like all of us they have complaints here or there.

But what they don’t want is upheaval in the system. You want to raise taxes on the rich or add people to health care, sure, that’s fine. Most of them probably aren’t reading that much about it. You want to cut taxes and privitize part of social security. Sure. that’s fine. Most of them probably aren’t reading that much about it. You want legal abortion? Fine, no problem. Want to make it illegal? Fine, no problem.

Being moderate is a prerequisite because these swing voters do not want radical change. But that’s not to say that any idiot so long as he or she is a moderate is guaranteed to get elected. Almost all elections have the winner as the candidate you would most like to have a beer with, or someone who is charismatic, or tall, or has some other characteristic. B. Clinton and Obama had that while Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and H. Clinton did not. Although Gore and H. Clinton did win the popular vote and Kerry was almost a tie. So you are talking about the last 5 of the Dem candidates doing very, very well and the last one who got spanked was 32 years ago. You are doing something right.

How you conclude from this that Bernie is the way to go (which I think you are saying) is beyond me.

6

What is your cite for these middle voters being so content and unruffled? You seem to think that voters who identify as “moderate” are centrists, and then assume that as centrists, they’re living the American Dream, satisfied with their lives and lot. That, in fact, [URL=“https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-moderate-middle-is-a-myth/”]is not the case.

7

Mondale and Dukakis were not moderate.

They were left wing.

Electable does not mean moderate.

8

If we accept the premise that all the losers were “safe” and the winners “not safe”–

then it’s important to recognize that “safety” is not about ideology. As some have pointed out, Mondale was pretty darn liberal, and Dukakis was too–so liberal he lost a gubernatorial election as a Democrat in Massachusetts. B Clinton was not particularly far to the left. Obama may or may not have been but there wasn’t a dime’s worth of ideological difference between him and H Clinton.

So “moderate” is a red herring. I think it may be more accurate to say that B Clinton and Obama were “not safe” candidates because they didn’t have much experience–Obama a first term senator, Clinton a small-state governor, which compared to Mondale or Gore or Kerry seems kind of picayune. OTOH, Dukakis wasn’t any better qualified than Clinton–no national experience, voted out of office once. So it’s not quite as simple as nominate-the-person-with-the-fewest-political-accomplishments either (in which case, if it were true, the correct answer would be to nominate Buttigieg or I guess maybe Bloomberg or Yang).

There’s also the issue that both Gore and Hillary Clinton won more popular votes than their opponents–it’s a pretty far cry from Dukakis or Mondale.

It’s tempting to draw lines among former candidates–the more charismatic person always wins! the less moderate person always wins! the more experienced person always loses!–but it does seem to me that a lot of these are attempts to make the facts fit a narrative rather than the other way around.

(If you want a rather silly one that does hold up, try this: in the last eight presidential elections, the Democrat has won the popular vote six times–and came from Massachusetts the other two. Good thing Elizabeth Warren didn’t get nominated this time around, huh? :))

9

By definition whoever wins the primary is going to have to win a bunch of elections.

The question would be why is there a perception that the Democrats are more likley to win the general when they nominate moderates. I think moderate candidates are better with all other things being equal, but is much less important than other factors.

I do happen to agree that primary or general elections both test the main electability problem candidates have in the US, which is personality.

10

Voters aren’t thinking “Oh, I would love Bernie-care but I want a moderate instead.”

They genuinely aren’t as progressive as Bernie-crats they think are.

Let that sink in.

Please.

11

No, most voters just vote over matters other than issues. Electability is about personality and perceived authenticity before anything else. The Dem primary is much more issue focused that the general, but even then issues aren’t actually all that important.

12

Trump won by first winning the primary by being the first to stumble across the fact that in the new media environment, you could get away with being a lying asshole as long as you were saying things that people wanted to hear. This allowed him to distinguish himself in a large field. Since many of the Republican primaries were winner take all, all he needed was a plurality to coast to victory.

Once he was the nominee he had a party that marched in lock step to back him up and right wing media propaganda machine to back up his lies as gospel Truth. Meanwhile he faced a disgruntled Democratic party who had held the white house for 8 years but whose progressive agenda had been blocked by unprecedented obstruction in congress. Furthermore complacency set in since everyone knew that Trump couldn’t possibly win, so why protest the lack of progress by staying home*.

If Bernie is going to duplicate Trumps success, he will need to base his campaign around lies and hatred (presumably picking class war over race war), win the primary (doesn’t seem to be happening) and then have a fiercely united party (nope, just ask will rogers) complete with media empire behind him and a guillable population primed to hear the lies (also not happening).

Trump’s is unpopular. His approval rating is locked in at 40-45%. The key to beating him is to make sure that most people hate Trump more than they Democratic candidate, and that everyone who fits this category actually votes for their preference rather than staying home out of spite. Now although they might not admit it, I am pretty sure that pretty much everyone who prefers Bernie over Biden, deep down realizes that Biden is better than Trump. However there are those people in the middle (independents and even some moderate Republicans) who may not like Trump but are even more scared of Sanders. These are the sort of people who are going to decide the election.

*Some how there seems to be the popular idea that the best way to get your agenda enacted is to not vote, when in fact that is the best way to get people to ignore you. Just ask the homeless.

13

That’s a big part of it. The whole point of something being a centrist position is that it’s defined as a position held by a lot of people. A politician who expresses the beliefs held by a lot of people is going to get more votes than a politician who expresses the beliefs held by fewer people. It’s a pretty simple concept.

It’s not everything. Sometimes a candidate who expresses all of the most popular beliefs might lose voter support because of some personality issues. But ideology is a huge factor. If the voters were yearning for a Socialist or a Libertarian President, they would be voting for those candidates. They’re not so they don’t.

14

This would be a really interesting discussion if it weren’t Sanders vs Biden.

Why is Biden considered safe and electable on his own merits, without considering the electability of his rivals? He doesn’t seem particularly charismatic to me, or someone I’d want to have a beer with.

The main argument I can come up with is that he’s a Washington insider, and hasn’t brought disaster: sort of an anti-Trump. So “safe” in terms of “won’t burn down the house if you leave him in charge,” but not “safe” in the terms of “everyone will reliably vote for him.”

As far as I can tell, both the pro-Biden and pro-Sanders camps are… a bit divorced from reality as far as their assessments of electability goes. I prefer Sanders’s policies, but I’m under no illusion that the majority of America would.

Then again, Trump was clearly electable, so what do I know?

15

Setting aside Trump, radical candidates for President, going all the way back to Wm. J. Bryan, have consistently failed to get elected. Goldwater and McGovern lost in landslides. Perhaps FDR and Reagan seem like exceptions, but both of these had been Governors of large states and were first elected at a time of great economic crisis.

16

“Biden 2020: Let’s try to avoid disaster…Again!”

17

I think it’s true in this election because Hillary lost quite a number of states by very small margins, so if you can get someone like Hillary but without her baggage, and combine it with 4 years of Trump being Trump, the chances of swinging those votes is quite high. Whereas with Sanders, you have to be making the less likely bet that there will be more people enthused by his change than will be put off by the more-accurate-than-usual-label of socialism.

It would be a different story if there were fewer very swingy states. We might need to bank on the Bernthusiasm rather than trump fatigue.

18

My cite is their actions. They can call themselves Middlers for all I care, but we know that if they were conservative they would already be in the Trump camp and if they were liberals they would already be in the Biden/Bernie camp. Whatever we call the undecideds, they are not firebrand conservatives or liberals.

And we either know that they are content, can assume that they are content, or discard their unhappiness (for electoral purposes) because by their historical collective behavior in presidential elections they have shown that they consistently: 1) reject radicals on both sides, and 2) end up siding with the person who is most charismatic or relatable.

We have seen politicians of all stripes fall into the trap that there is this underlying current of resentment of the current system ready to rise up and deliver a revolutionary verdict. Newt Gingrich is an excellent example of this. Because in 1994, the GOP voters showed up because of a general unhappiness with a complacent congress, he took that to mean that Americans are mostly conservative Republicans wanting to dismantle any form of government, except the military, established since the New Deal. It was a mistaken proposition and Clinton beat him (through Dole) pretty easily.

Anyone who says that Dole lost because he wasn’t a right wing firebrand is delusional. Some Republicans say that McCain and Romney lost because they were RINOs. Well, if the swing voters voted for a Democrat, then they would certainly vote for a RINO.

Each election is sui generis, but those things have been consistent since FDR. For Bernie, or any candidate, to say that this election is different and that people are looking for a radical change is swimming against history and should show some compelling data to support that. And so far, the data shows otherwise.

19

Charisma and who you want to drink beer with are not matters of political ideology.

Biden is a moderate Democrat. Sanders is a left-wing Democrats. So Biden is closer to the center of the Bell Curve of American voters. That makes him more electable and being more electable makes him safer.

20

I agree with you about Roosevelt. In normal times, Hoover might have beat him but 1932 was not a normal time. The voters were looking for radical change and Hoover was offering them more of what they had.

I don’t feel the same was true in 1980. There was a recession in 1980 but it wasn’t a crisis like the Great Depression (and people often forget that the recession continued well into Reagan’s first term). I think the key factor in Reagan’s election was foreign affairs. People were scared by the situations in Iran and Afghanistan and Reagan was offering them simple solutions and reassurance.