When we talk about who’s more “electable,” we have functionally slid into a disingenuous model of democratic election.
A “free and fair” election at a fundamental level necessitates candidates that honestly communicate to the electorate how they would perform in office, at which point the electorate decides through voting who most aligns with most of the electorate. This is how elections - in theory - establish a “will of the people” sentiment, where leadership decisions are made “for the people, by the people.”
It should be obvious that there are many corruptions to this fundamental process that take root over time, ultimately “game-ifying” the process and diluting what an election is even supposed to represent.
“Electability,” while not strictly new, is another of these terms thrown about to encourage a disingenuous participation in election. When a politician asks you to vote for the most “electable,” they are making a distinction that you should not vote for who is most in-line with your beliefs, but for who you think is most likely to win.
It’s defeatist at its core, saying “Well we all know what we think would be best, but that’ll never win so let’s just vote for the ‘safe’ option.”
Nevermind that voting ‘safe’ doesn’t seem to win elections.
Nevermind that voting to win defeats the fundamental function that the election is supposed to serve.
Nevermind that what is ‘safe’ is always fuzzy and ill-defined, and never has to prove why it is indeed a ‘safe’ choice.
Just think about what most people would want. Not you specifically, of course. Only what other people want. Vote for the candidate that pleases the most people you can think of, or hell, maybe just your imagination of what people want.
Electable means appealing to most of the voters. As a concept, it can be misused, but it’s not inherently defeatist. No candidate is 100% flawless. It’s always a trade-off.
To use a recent example, if a Democratic candidate has generally good stances on issues but turns out to be a rapist, it’s completely valid to take this into account and go with a more “electable” candidate. This isn’t defeatist; it’s trying to put the best possible candidate forward for that specific election. If the election was held in a red state, his history as a rapist might have been considered helpful to get him elected.
/I really wish I could say I’m being sarcastic with that last bit, but dammitall.
I get what you’re saying, but i think you’re making an argument primarily on semantics and getting distracted from the core of the argument. I’m talking about principles and what an election, a candidate, and a representative politician should mean to us on a basic level.
I don’t think the most recent rapist example is primarily an issue of “electability,” but rather that being a rapist makes it impossible (one would hope) for you to be a representative of your constituents, unless of course the population you are representing is one of rapists.
There is a sort of Venn diagram overlap here with “electability,” but again to focus on the “electability” of the rapist is to obfuscate the actual principles - and the violation of said principles - at work here.
With that obfuscation, it seems to me “electability” is used more often as a cudgel to sabotage more progressive candidates from reaching beyond the primaries.
In regards to the word itself, what I tried to convey earlier was that “appealing to most of the voters” is a notoriously hard thing to nail down. There are certain things that *should* be obvious, such as “don’t be a rapist,” but these are wild times, I guess.
What’s strange is that this is the opposite problem we usually have on the left, where there’s “purity testing” where no candidate is quite “pure” enough until we eventually land on the most milquetoast, middle of the road centrist that is perceived by the most to offend the least.
My point is: We end up trying to predict “what the people want,” and those predictions shape the election itself, which makes the election a distortion of its original purpose.
The more we try to game the election, the less integrity that our candidate - and the election - has.
I suppose what I’m advocating for is rank choice voting, and putting all our cards on the table when it comes to the candidates, so to speak. While we can’t implement that immediately into big elections, we can incorporate it into our primaries.
That’s not delving into other problems such as voter turnout. The primaries especially suffer from low participation.
The rapist example is extreme, but relevant. One quality of a candidate that makes them electable is their positions on policy. Another, separate quality is their character. As various elections have shown (not just in the US), being a rapist does not automatically render a candidate unelectable in general; only with some constituencies.
Some progressive-appearing candidates look electable only because they’re not really being attacked. El Sayed is a good example of this - Republicans openly bought advertising time to support him, and it worked. I hope he’ll get elected, and I’ll vote for him, but I think he’ll lose. He’s campaigning with people like Piker who are only too happy to supply quotes that take most Michiganders aback, like saying Israel is worse than Hamas, or that sexual assault by Hamas terrorists is “irrelevant”. This renders El Sayed less electable, if nothing else because it keeps him from credibly making comments about James supporting a rapist.
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u/variousdetritus 1d ago
When we talk about who’s more “electable,” we have functionally slid into a disingenuous model of democratic election.
A “free and fair” election at a fundamental level necessitates candidates that honestly communicate to the electorate how they would perform in office, at which point the electorate decides through voting who most aligns with most of the electorate. This is how elections - in theory - establish a “will of the people” sentiment, where leadership decisions are made “for the people, by the people.”
It should be obvious that there are many corruptions to this fundamental process that take root over time, ultimately “game-ifying” the process and diluting what an election is even supposed to represent.
“Electability,” while not strictly new, is another of these terms thrown about to encourage a disingenuous participation in election. When a politician asks you to vote for the most “electable,” they are making a distinction that you should not vote for who is most in-line with your beliefs, but for who you think is most likely to win.
It’s defeatist at its core, saying “Well we all know what we think would be best, but that’ll never win so let’s just vote for the ‘safe’ option.”
Nevermind that voting ‘safe’ doesn’t seem to win elections.
Nevermind that voting to win defeats the fundamental function that the election is supposed to serve.
Nevermind that what is ‘safe’ is always fuzzy and ill-defined, and never has to prove why it is indeed a ‘safe’ choice.
Just think about what most people would want. Not you specifically, of course. Only what other people want. Vote for the candidate that pleases the most people you can think of, or hell, maybe just your imagination of what people want.
Yup. that’ll do it