The Electability Hustle

The following story is co-published with Luke Savage’s Substack .

By the time you’re reading this, voting will be well underway in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. At time of writing, I can’t say for certain what the result will be, but the race appears to have broken wide open for insurgent challenger Abdul El-Sayed — who looks poised to defeat establishment favorite Haley Stevens by a considerable margin. That this has even become a competitive race at all, in fact, is pretty remarkable. The dark money has been flowing fast and loose and you can probably guess which candidate it’s backing. As Mother Jones reports :

No Democratic congressional primary in history has ever attracted so much super PAC cash. The overwhelming majority of the outside money has gone toward ensuring that Stevens, a moderate, pro-Israel Democrat, defeats El-Sayed, a Bernie Sanders-endorsed champion of Medicare for All and Israel critic.

If you haven’t followed the race closely, I cannot stress enough how much it has ultimately become a retread of the Democratic presidential primaries in 2016. The difference, of course, is that in this case the insurgent challenger is a Muslim and the contest has seen Democratic alignment with Israel take centre stage. Among other things, this has often made things very ugly and evoked memories of the Clinton ’08 campaign’s truly hideous dog-whistling strategy against Barack Obama (Stevens, incidentally, worked on said campaign).

With El-Sayed’s lead in the polls looking pretty definitive, centrist voices have increasingly pivoted to the argument that he will be a bad candidate for what promises to be a competitive statewide election in November: a darling of rank and file activists, maybe, but someone whose name will be ballot poison against Republican opponents.

At risk of belaboring the point, we have definitely seen this movie before. And as far as the current Michigan race is concerned, there are some pretty obvious rejoinders to the argument.

We have definitely seen this movie before.

One has to do with enthusiasm. The El-Sayed campaign has reportedly mobilized some 10,000 volunteers, while the Stevens camp says it has “hundreds” across the state. Just as the Clinton/Sanders matchup showed us, there are some things money simply can’t buy, and grassroots excitement is one of them. General elections are, in turn, usually easier to win when your base is activated and there are real people canvassing for you. Polls moreover suggest there will be a close race against GOP nominee Mike Rogers regardless of whether Stevens or El-Sayed is the candidate. All things being equal, wouldn’t it be better for Democrats to go with the person who already has 10,000 volunteers rather than the one with unspecified hundreds who is being propped up by tens of millions in dark money?

All of this, needless to say, feels like very well-worn territory. “Electability” was already protracted meta-debate inside Democratic circles before the Clinton/Sanders primary fight and seems to recur every time the party’s establishment faces an insurgent challenge from a candidate to its left. This in itself is a reminder that the whole debate is ultimately an extension of a much deeper political and ideological struggle inside the bosom of American liberalism.

Centrist talking heads who insist that their own preferred candidates will fare better in a state or nationwide election like to pretend they’re simply making an objective, empirical argument but are invariably laundering their own ideological preferences in a cynical effort to discipline the Democratic base. Amazingly, and ironically, this often sees them disregard empirical metrics like polling entirely.

With this in mind, I cannot help but point out that some of the loudest voices currently pushing the narrative that Abdul El-Sayed is “unelectable” once said the exact same thing about Hillary Clinton. Here, for example, is Jonathan Chait (in 2016 and last weekend

Chait might have been one of the biggest media purveyors of the argument that Clinton was more electable than Sanders, but the narrative was absolutely everywhere — despite the latter faring considerably better against Trump in much of the available polling. Centrist Democratic candidates notably lost presidential elections in 2000 (Gore), 2004 (Kerry), 2016 (Clinton) and 2024 (Harris), and, if anything, the major Democratic victories over that period — 2008 (Obama) and 2020 ( Biden ) — notably involved the candidates making more progressive noises.

The defeat of an ideology or strategy in an election, of course, doesn’t discredit its potential for success in perpetuity. But, when left-leaning or progressive candidates lose elections, centrists will naturally insist that it does despite discarding that logic when it comes to their own. And this, I think, gets at the real heart of the problem with the centrist electability frame: namely that it rests on a foundation that is ultimately unfalsifiable.

Chait’s somewhat contradictory take on the 2024 presidential election was emblematic, because he spent the campaign itself extolling the pragmatic virtue of Harris’s centrism (see below) and, after it failed, abruptly pivoted to the argument she’d in fact been undercut by progressive capture. Pushed on this contradiction (forgive me, but I can’t quite locate the exact exchange in question) Chait later tried to square this circle by asserting that, while Harris’ campaign was pursuing his preferred centrist strategy, liberal activist pressure had worked to mitigate its effectiveness.

Oct. 8, 2024

This seemed like pure cope to me, but it also exposes the bigger problem that the centrist electability argument is always mysteriously validated regardless of an election’s outcome. If a candidate wins, it’s because they ran as a centrist. If they lose, on the other hand, it can only be because they were insufficiently centrist (and, this being the case, the only path forward is for Democrats to move further to the right). An argument about how to win elections that holds regardless of what their actual outcomes are is visibly unserious. But, again, that’s because the whole thing has always been a proxy for the deeper struggle between pro-corporate centrists and the progressive left.

It’s also, unhelpfully, been a major catalyst in the shifting of political discourse away from substantive questions of ideology and policy and into convoluted meta-debates that tend to obscure them. As I wrote on this Substack last year, the politically engaged citizen is increasingly “encouraged to think like a pundit who assigns Nate Silveresque abstractions like ‘electability’ to politicians and pours over poll numbers to determine their own preferences.” This just isn’t how democracy is supposed to work and the upshot has been a world where plenty of earnest liberals have been convinced by Democratic elites that the only mature way of doing politics is to disregard everything you actually believe in.

Which, of course, has always been the real point.

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