About Presidential Candidates...

Plus all the links

Last week we were treated to speculation about presidential runs by Jon Stewart and George Clooney. As I said on our audio episode, this probably marks the beginning of the silly season portion of the presidential nomination process, which certainly beats the recrimination season. I’ll save the rest, including where Julia picks a fight with me, for the (paywalled) item. I thought it was a good one!

What I’ll add here is that while it’s very understandable that parties think in terms of the campaign and candidates, it’s really the wrong way to go about it. Granted, some of what seems to be about candidates is actually implicit arguing about what the party should be. That’s fine; that’s what parties should be arguing about in nominations.

But actual electability? What the research mostly shows is that it matters a whole lot less than people think, and that to the extent it does matter we probably can’t guess about what works anyway. There’s been a whole lot of discussion, for example, about whether moderates do better than more extreme liberals or conservatives (see Bonica and Grumbach below) but as far as I can tell the evidence says that to the extent it matters moderates might have a slight edge…but not for sure, and just barely anyway.

The bottom line is that candidates just aren’t all that important to general election outcomes, especially at the presidential level. Most voters stick with their party; most independents are actually partisans; and most true independents tend to be swayed far more by “fundamentals” such as the state of the economy than they are by the candidates’ personalities or campaign styles. It doesn’t seem that way because US political culture supports voting for the person, not the party, and so people not only are reluctant to say that they’re just knee-jerk voting for Democrats or Republicans but actually don’t think they’re doing so. And to most of us, it seems that we’re considering candidates individually and voting for the one we like the best. But it (almost always) ain’t so.

(One big caveat: We can only know what we’ve experienced. I’m extremely skeptical that there are people out there capable of outperforming generic candidates by large margins. I do think that there’s at least some possibility of significant downside potential; indeed I still think that Donald Trump has underperformed generic Republicans in three general elections. But that took an extraordinary candidate, not a standard-issue boring one).

So I think things would be better if people were explicit in wanting their party to be more moderate, or more extreme, or place a higher priority on this issue or change positions on that issue. There’s a fair amount of this, to be sure; there should be more. And I think the parties should care a lot more about which candidates would be good at presidenting – as long as, that is, that the candidate can be trusted to support the party consensus if elected.

On to the links.

1. Erica Chenoweth, Soha Hammam, Jeremy Pressman, and Christopher Wiley Shay on the No Kings protests.

2. Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach on moderates in general elections.

3. Alexandra Guisinger, Elizabeth N. Saunders, and XT Tay at Good Authority on US public opinion on Ukraine.

4. Lindsey Cormack on when members of Congress talk about “fascists.”

5. Dan Drezner on Israel.

6. And Seth Masket on how Trump is destroying the US’s competitive advantages.