Tuesday’s election results demolished the conventional wisdom that Democrats need to run cautious, corporate-friendly centrists to win in purple and red states.
demolished the conventional wisdom that Democrats need to run cautious, corporate-friendly centrists to win in purple and red states
Hah, no. We’ll have the year of the Linux desktop before that ever happens. Leftist candidates won because the Democrats were so strongly favored that even weak candidates won, but the leftists did worse than a generic Democrat would have done.
El-Sayed, for example, won Michigan 52.5 to 45.5 as of the current count. Meanwhile the Democratic candidate for governor Jocelyn Benson won 54.5 to 43.7. There were enough people voting for her but not for him to swing a normal election to the Republicans.
Do you have the count of total votes cast in each of those contests to hand? I’d look, but I’m in the middle of things (yes, yes, lmgtfy and so on ;) I’m interested in if there was a significant difference there too.
El-Sayed with 2,497,852 and Benson with 2,591,316 as of right now. I haven’t added up all the other candidates but according to the votes to percentage ratios, about the same number of people voted in each contest.
Two things to counter that argument. First, the advertising blitz against Abdul El-Sayed was insane. I have never seen so many attack ads, and a lot of money was spent in the primary and the general to bury Abdul. By contrast Benson barely got mentioned.
Second, the John James factor. This is John James third statewide office run, and third loss. He hasn’t come within 100k of winning. Rogers lost to Slotkin by only ~30k
Being the sort of candidate who motivates special interests to spend a fortune trying to stop you from getting elected makes you a weaker candidate, if all else is equal, where “weaker” here is referring to electability rather than ideology or the preferences of a Platonic ideal public.
Okay, I don’t really agree that having special interests spend against you makes you a weak candidate. Especially when that money doesn’t lead to your loss. If someone puts a 5 foot high hurdle in front of you, you are not weaker if you fail to clear it by the same margin as the runner next to you clears their 3 foot hurdle.
In fact going into the next race without knowing what the hurdle height will be, I’m more likely to pick the runner who cleared 5 feet. You can’t rely on your positions not attracting outside opponents, but you can rely on conservatives to make accomplishing anything good into a fight. I would rather have candidates ready for that fight than ones who are trying to avoid it by triangulating their positions to not offend conservatives.
It makes the candidate weaker than he would otherwise be if everything else was equal, but you’re right that a candidate opposed by special interests can overall be stronger than a candidate not opposed by them. My point is just that you can’t judge a candidate’s strength or weakness as something independent of those attack ads.
Well since the attack ads were primarily focused on his name, religion, and ethnicity, I don’t think we should accept that as a rationale. I found myself unable to skip them when they played, and holy shit were they bad. His ability to attract those attack ads was almost entirely because he offended AIPAC and because he is Muslim. They tried some other tactics early on (Medicare, ‘fake doctor’, etc), but the last few weeks has been almost nothing but attacks on his identity.
Hah, no. We’ll have the year of the Linux desktop before that ever happens. Leftist candidates won because the Democrats were so strongly favored that even weak candidates won, but the leftists did worse than a generic Democrat would have done.
El-Sayed, for example, won Michigan 52.5 to 45.5 as of the current count. Meanwhile the Democratic candidate for governor Jocelyn Benson won 54.5 to 43.7. There were enough people voting for her but not for him to swing a normal election to the Republicans.
Counterpoint: Even centrists are adopting progressive rhetoric on issues such as affordability and Israel. Clearly they think it works.
Do you have the count of total votes cast in each of those contests to hand? I’d look, but I’m in the middle of things (yes, yes, lmgtfy and so on ;) I’m interested in if there was a significant difference there too.
El-Sayed with 2,497,852 and Benson with 2,591,316 as of right now. I haven’t added up all the other candidates but according to the votes to percentage ratios, about the same number of people voted in each contest.
2,497,852 / 52.52 = 47,560
2,591,316 / 54.54 = 47,512
Two things to counter that argument. First, the advertising blitz against Abdul El-Sayed was insane. I have never seen so many attack ads, and a lot of money was spent in the primary and the general to bury Abdul. By contrast Benson barely got mentioned.
Second, the John James factor. This is John James third statewide office run, and third loss. He hasn’t come within 100k of winning. Rogers lost to Slotkin by only ~30k
Being the sort of candidate who motivates special interests to spend a fortune trying to stop you from getting elected makes you a weaker candidate, if all else is equal, where “weaker” here is referring to electability rather than ideology or the preferences of a Platonic ideal public.
Okay, I don’t really agree that having special interests spend against you makes you a weak candidate. Especially when that money doesn’t lead to your loss. If someone puts a 5 foot high hurdle in front of you, you are not weaker if you fail to clear it by the same margin as the runner next to you clears their 3 foot hurdle.
In fact going into the next race without knowing what the hurdle height will be, I’m more likely to pick the runner who cleared 5 feet. You can’t rely on your positions not attracting outside opponents, but you can rely on conservatives to make accomplishing anything good into a fight. I would rather have candidates ready for that fight than ones who are trying to avoid it by triangulating their positions to not offend conservatives.
It makes the candidate weaker than he would otherwise be if everything else was equal, but you’re right that a candidate opposed by special interests can overall be stronger than a candidate not opposed by them. My point is just that you can’t judge a candidate’s strength or weakness as something independent of those attack ads.
Well since the attack ads were primarily focused on his name, religion, and ethnicity, I don’t think we should accept that as a rationale. I found myself unable to skip them when they played, and holy shit were they bad. His ability to attract those attack ads was almost entirely because he offended AIPAC and because he is Muslim. They tried some other tactics early on (Medicare, ‘fake doctor’, etc), but the last few weeks has been almost nothing but attacks on his identity.
Benson is the governor-elect.