The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

I don’t always agree with Matt Yglesias but in this case I think he has it exactly right. In the process, he cements his position as Vox’s token political realist. If his judgement here is right–and I think it is–we may look back on South Carolina as not only a positive inflection point for the Biden campaign bit as a negative one for a certain kind of politics popular with a voluble set of activists and no one else.

“Loser (from the South Carolina primary): Assuming normal voters think like professional activists

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Ron Brownstein has an excellent article on CNN on the fallacies of a turnout-based strategy, such as Sanders has repeatedly advocated, for winning the 2020 election. He effectively summarizes the key points I and others have made against this strategy. But perhaps the most interesting part of the article is a series of quotes from Sean McElwee going on record that he, too, thinks the turnout strategy is bats.

This is a bit surprising since McElwee rose to prominence through his advocacy of the “abolish ICE” slogan and his fervent support for the AOC-brand of strenuous progressivism. He went on to co-found Data for Progress, whose work has generally seemed aimed in the same direction. That said, they have done some good work and are to be commended for fighting their battles on progressive strategy with data instead of dogma and assumptions.

Perhaps it was the experience of staring over and over at the actual data that has led McElwee to part company with orthodox Sandersism on this issue:

“[James] Carville has emerged as a leader among Democrats concerned that nominating Sanders will doom the party to defeat against Trump and put the House majority at grave risk as well. Unlike Carville, Sean McElwee, founder of the liberal-leaning group Data for Progress, believes Sanders can find a pathway to victory against Trump by attracting working-class voters across racial lines. But McElwee agrees with Carville that no candidate, Sanders included, can bet on winning mostly by transforming the nature of who votes.

“I think that all campaigns are incentivized to portray themselves as doing something unique and groundbreaking and really changing the structure of turnout.” McElwee says. “But turnout is a pretty durable attribute and it tends to correlate with intrinsic human identities: Older people tend to vote at much higher rates than younger; college educated vote more than non-; homeowners vote more than renters. It is really, really hard using the tools available to campaigns to change that.”

This dispute has profound implications as Democrats’ assess Sanders’ potential viability as a general election candidate. The Democratic front-runner brushes off concerns about whether his agenda will alienate swing voters by insisting he can compensate by bringing in millions of new voters to overwhelm them.”…

If Sanders can’t win a general election by changing the electorate, as these Democratic experts believe, that means he, like any other potential nominee, would need to win primarily by converting swing voters. Though Sanders always stresses mobilization, especially of young people, some of his supporters — and advisers — believe that he would be more likely to beat Trump by attracting working-class voters across racial lines, including whites, African Americans and Hispanics.

“If you are hitching your wagon on a youth quake [of new voters] you are in a bad place,” says McElwee. “But Bernie doesn’t have to hitch his argument on that. Bernie has a persuasion argument for swing voters.”

Now I have my doubts about Sanders’ ability to appeal to swing voters–or even interest in doing so–but at least we’re aiming at the right target here! Sanders could indeed be the nominee and he could indeed win, but to do so he will have take some of this wisdom on board.

He will also have to deal with these problems, as summarized by Brownstein:

“* [S]ubstantial resistance to his unprecedented tax-and-spending plans among the college-educated suburbanites who moved toward the party in 2018 because of their distaste for Trump. (A recent analysis using 170,000 interviews from the nonpartisan Nationscape survey found that Joe Biden and Sanders posted similar leads over Trump overall in tests of 2020 sentiment, but that the former vice president ran much better among college-educated white voters.)

* [R]esistance to many of his views on issues relating to race and culture. Polls last year by the Marist Institute found that most noncollege whites supported such core Sanders economic proposals as a wealth tax on large fortunes and raising the minimum wage. But they registered overwhelming opposition to other ideas he’s embraced: In one Marist survey, 67% of noncollege whites opposed eliminating the death penalty, 72% opposed decriminalizing illegal border crossing and 76% rejected providing subsidized health care to undocumented immigrants. In the Marist polling, a majority of noncollege whites have also consistently opposed one of Sanders’ core policy proposals: a single-payer national health care system that would eliminate private insurance with only a very few exceptions.”

It’s a steep hill to climb once you discard the turnout mythology. Perhaps it can be done, but it will require Sanders and his advisors to stop getting high on their own supply.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Well, as Ronald Reagan said in another context and another debate long ago: “There you go again”. In the debate tonight, Sanders once again gave his electability pitch and it was exactly the same as it has been all campaign: a gigantic, humongous surge of turnout that will sweep all the Democrats’ troubles away. I’ve been whacking away at this ridiculous assertion as best I can and, coincidentally released the same day as the debate, we have a new and thorough political science study (summarized on Vox) that makes clear just how heroic and unrealistic Sanders’ assertions are.

The study, by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla of Berkeley and Yale respectively, essentially shows that Sanders’ seeming electability in trial heat surveys–where he runs as good or better than “moderate” candidates–is attributable to two dynamics: (1) Sanders losing voters to Trump relative to moderate candidates but (2) making this up as people who say they are neither/third party/wouldn’t vote with a moderate candidate move to Sanders. The net of these two trends keeps Sanders afloat and “electable”.

Could this happen in real world? Probably not. The problem is that the implied turnout increase for young voters–who are the ones who come off the sidelines in a Trump-Sanders trial heat– is wildly implausible. As the study notes, Sanders would have to generate a larger increase in turnout among young voters than Obama managed to generate among black voters in his historic 2008 election. Looked at another way, youth turnout would have to not just go up 11 points but 11 points more than everyone else goes up in the 2020 election. So if turnout goes up 11 points in the rest of the population in 2020, youth turnout would have to go up 22 points. you get the idea.

So, more evidence that Sanders’ theory of the case on how he would beat Trump is furshlugginer (look it up).

Some excerpts from the researchers’ Vox summary of the study:

We found that nominating Sanders would drive many Americans who would otherwise vote for a moderate Democrat to vote for Trump, especially otherwise Trump-skeptical Republicans.

Republicans are more likely to say they would vote for Trump if Sanders is nominated: Approximately 2 percent of Republicans choose Trump over Sanders but desert Trump when we pit him against a more moderate Democrat like Buttigieg, Biden, or Bloomberg.

Democrats and independents are also slightly more likely to say they would vote for Trump if Sanders is nominated. Swing voters may be rare — but their choices between candidates often determine elections, and many appear to favor Trump over Sanders but not over other Democrats.

Despite losing these voters to Trump, Sanders appears in our survey data to be similarly electable to the moderates, at least at first blush. Why? Mainly because 11 percent of left-leaning young people say they are undecided, would support a third-party candidate, or, most often, just would not vote if a moderate were nominated — but say they would turn out and vote for Sanders if he were nominated….

[T]he “Bernie or bust” phenomenon appears almost entirely limited to left-leaning young people, who are usually a small share of the overall electorate. This stands in contrast to many theories of Sanders’s electoral appeal: For example, whites without a college degree — a demographic some speculate Sanders could win over — are actually more likely to say they will vote for Trump against Sanders than against the other Democrats. The same is true of the rest of the electorate, except left-leaning young people….

The case that Bernie Sanders is just as electable as the more moderate candidates thus appears to rest on a leap of faith: that youth voter turnout would surge in the general election by double digits if and only if Bernie Sanders is nominated, compensating for the voters his nomination pushes to Trump among the rest of the electorate.

There are reasons to doubt a Sanders-driven youth turnout surge of this size would materialize. First, people who promise in surveys they will vote often don’t, meaning the turnout estimates that Sanders’s electability case rests upon are probably extremely inaccurate. Second, such a turnout surge is large in comparison to other effects on turnout. For example, Sanders would need to stimulate a youth turnout boost much larger than the turnout boost Barack Obama’s presence on the ballot stimulated among black voters in 2008….

And this enormous 11 percentage point turnout boost is only enough to make Sanders as electable as the more moderate candidates, given the other votes he loses to Trump. For him to be the most electable Democratic candidate based on his ability to inspire youth turnout, Sanders’s nomination would need to increase youth turnout by even more….

There is no way to be sure whether Sanders’s nomination would produce this historic youth turnout surge — but it seems doubtful. Turnout in the 2020 primaries so far has not exceeded 2008 levels, including among young voters. If anything, research suggests the opposite is more likely to occur: In response to an extreme Democratic nominee, Republicans could be inspired to turn out at higher rates to oppose him.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Can Sanders Beat Trump?

It is certainly possible. But that’s really not the right question. The right question is: how likely is it that Sanders would beat Trump if he were the nominee?

Jon Chait makes this point with admirable clarity in his latest column:

“The truth is we are all clueless about what voters want or will accept,” argues conventional-wisdom-monger Jim VandeHei, in a signal of how deeply the anti-probabilistic fallacy has spread. It is true that there is uncertainty attached to every outcome. The talking heads who guarantee Sanders will lose are wrong — any nominee might win, and in a polarized electorate, both parties have a floor of support that gives even the most toxic candidate a fighting chance. In 2016, Trump was the most unpopular candidate in the history of polling, but he squeaked into office because everything broke just right for him. It could happen for Bernie, too.

But to concede that we cannot be certain about the future does not mean we know nothing. An imperfect comparison might be to predicting the outcome of sporting events. You don’t know the outcome in advance, but it is usually possible to make probabilistic predictions. Those predictions are wrong all the time. But it would be silly to conclude that, just because upsets happen, every game should be treated as a coin flip. A huge amount of pro-Sanders commentary is based on simplistically conflating the correct claim that we lack perfect clarity with the incorrect claim that we have no clarity at all.”

With that in mind, what do we know that might shed light on how Sanders would do against Trump? First, of course, there is the trial heat polling. That polling, according to RCP averages, has Sanders and Biden running ahead of Trump nationally by essentially identical amounts and both ahead of other tested Democratic candidates.

The same pattern with Biden and Sanders relative to the other Democratic candidates can be seen in swing state polling, with the difference that Biden generally generally runs a little bit better than Sanders in most swing states. You can see this both in the RCP trial heat averages and in preliminary state-level breakdowns of the Voter Study Group Nationscape survey (more than 170,000 interviews so far, 6000 nespondents per week)

This suggests that both Sanders and Biden, neither of whom has name recognition problems, are currently capturing anti-Trump, pro-Democratic preferences fairly efficiently. Put another way, simply hearing their names and knowing who they are, does not, at this point, deter large numbers of respondents from expressing pro-Democratic sentiments.

But in a general election campaign, of course, the Trump campaign will be working strenuously to sow doubts about the Democratic candidate and convince undecided voters and those with soft Democratic preferences that Trump, whatever objections such voters may have to him, is by far the lesser evil when compared to the Democrat. This is where Sanders will run into trouble, since since he is poorly set up to parry such attacks among persuadable voters.

David Leonhardt summarizes his problem succinctly:

“[Sanders] has taken a nearly maximalist liberal position on every major issue. It’s especially striking from him, because he has shown over his career that he grasps the importance of building a coalition.

Sanders once won over blue-collar Vermonters with help from a moderate position on guns. “We need a sensible debate about gun control which overcomes the cultural divide that exists in this country,” he said in 2015, “and I think I can play an important role in this.” He was also once an heir to organized labor’s skepticism of large-scale immigration. “At a time when the middle class is shrinking, the last thing we need is to bring over in a period of years, millions of people into this country who are prepared to lower wages for American workers,” he said in 2007.

Now, though, Sanders has evidently decided that progressives will no longer accept impurities — or even much tactical vagueness. He, along with Elizabeth Warren, has embraced policies that are popular on the left and nowhere else: a ban on fracking; the decriminalization of border crossings; the provision of federal health benefits to undocumented immigrants; the elimination of private health insurance.

For many progressives, each of these issues has become a moral litmus test. Any restriction of immigration is considered a denial of human rights. Any compromise on guns or health care is an acceptance of preventable deaths.

And I understand the progressive arguments on these issues. But turning every compromise into an existential moral failing is not a smart way to practice politics. It comforts the persuaded while alienating the persuadable.

F.D.R. and Reagan understood this, as did Abraham Lincoln and many great social reformers, including Frederick Douglass, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. Strong political movements can accept impurity on individual issues in the service of a larger goal: winning.”

That’s the nub of his problem right there. He really is extremely vulnerable to brutal attacks from his Republican opponent, which will require unusual deftness and savvy to counter successfully. So far, we haven’t seen a Sanders who seems capable of doing that.

Of course, Sanders does have a response to the potential difficulty summarized here: turnout, turnout, turnout! But as I and others have shown, this is a chimera. If Sanders is to beat Trump, he’ll have to it the old-fashioned way: convincing many voters who don’t adore him that he is indeed a superior choice when compared to Trump.

Who are these voters? Some clues may be found a recent piece by Patrick Ruffini based on Nationscape data. Ruffini finds that while both Biden and Sanders have solid leads over Trump in the national data, their coalitions are not identical. Specifically, Sanders does quite a bit better than Biden among young voters but lags seriously lags behind among voters over 45. And while Sanders is comparably strong among nonwhite voters and lags Biden only slightly among white noncollege voters, he trails Biden’s performance by 8 points among white college voters.

If Sanders is the nominee and wants to maximize his probability of beating Trump, he is going to have to face up to these difficulties. If not, I fear we’re in for a long and painful next four years.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Is Trump’s Approval Rating Really Going Up?

I’ve written about this before but there are reasons to be skeptical that his remarkably stable approval ratings are suddenly headed upwards. The excellent G. Elliott Morris explains in The Economist.

“[E]ven after correcting for demographic biases, pollsters’ data can still be unrepresentative. They may have the right shares of Latino voters and boomers, but nevertheless have too many Republicans or Democrats. This concern is pronounced when an event causes especially good, or bad, news for a political party. At such times surveys can suddenly be swamped with partisans who are eager to voice their love, or hate, for the president.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

I’ve questioned the wonder-working powers of high voter turnout before but, shockingly, not everyone has agreed. But here is some more evidence undercutting the more-turnout-will-solve-everything thesis from a massive study by the Knight Foundation.

There’s a great deal in their report, including a very interesting typology of nonvoters, both their characteristics and reasons for not voting, which suggest a complex phenomenon not reducible to voter suppression and/or insufficiently radical candidates.

But, regardless of motivation,what if all those nonvoters really did vote? Surely the Democrats would kick Trump’s ass back to Mar-a-Lago for good. Sorry, it’s not that simple, as the chart of key swing states below shows. Democrats would benefit some in the national popular vote but wouldn’t be helped sufficiently in the Electoral College to take Trump out.

If this doesn’t make you question the turnout mythology currently popular in Sanders wing of the Democratic party, I don’t know what will.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Washington Post:

The following article by Jack Metzgar, is cross-posted from Working-class Perspectives:

When I talk with relatives who are not only Trump voters but Trump enthusiasts, I feel pretty damned polarized – especially when I lose my temper and find myself saying some of the things my tribe often hatefully says about theirs.  But as long as we don’t talk about abortion or gun control and tippy-toe carefully around immigration, we share a lot of common ground on a wide range of economic justice issues.  This broad agreement is reflected in survey research that almost never gets reported in the mainstream media.

Worse, that media seems completely unaware of any common ground.

One night during the impeachment trial coverage on MSNBC, for example, as the talking heads were marveling at polling results that showed more than 70% of people supported Democrats’ demands for new evidence and witnesses, Brian Williams quipped that this was astounding in a country that can’t agree that today is Thursday and tomorrow will be Friday.

The polarization around Trump is real, both intellectually and emotionally, but there are a whole bunch of people – not just the Russians and Trump – who have vested interests in keeping us ignorant of how much we agree with each other on economic justice.  It is, in fact, not at all unusual for some 70% of Americans to agree on:

• Reducing inequality by creating a 2% wealth tax (70%)
• Reducing poverty by “ensuring that all families have access to basic living standards such as health care, food, and housing if their wages are too low.” (72%)
• Creating good jobs by “investing $1 trillion in our nation’s infrastructure, including . . . expanded production of clean energy.” (78%)
• Capping prices on prescription drugs (81%), and
• Allowing “people who don’t get health insurance through their employer to buy health insurance from a public plan.” (81%)

Read more…

In his post, “Dems Should Temper Their disappointments” at The Cook Political Report, Charlie Cook shares a more hopeful perspective on the Iowa caucuses turnout:  “Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty, whom I think very highly of, wrote the other day that Democrats “should worry” about the “mediocre” turnout at the Iowa caucuses, it being roughly the same as the 170,000 who attended in 2016 but far less than the 240,000 from 2008, when Barack Obama won. Another word for the turnout might have been “normal.” We shouldn’t use as a baseline for comparison a caucus that had unprecedented turnout, featuring not only an electric candidate like Obama, but also Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, in a three-way photo finish instead of the two-way this year between Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg.”

“Face it, Democrats,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his Washington Post column, “You are the diverse party and Republicans are the homogeneous party. Democrats include moderates and the left; Republicans are almost uniformly conservative. Among their elected officials, Democrats are the party of racial and gender diversity; Republicans aren’t. In the House, 37.9 percent of Democratic members are women, and 36.6 percent are African American or Latino. The numbers for the GOP: 6.6 percent women, 3.6 percent black or Latino.”

From Ruy Teixeira’s blog, The Optimistic Leftist: “Meanwhile, In Wisconsin – In the most recent Marquette Law School Wisconsin poll, Biden, who has been running the strongest of tested candidates in the state, was up on Trump by 4 points. That’s better than the December poll (a one point advantage) and the November poll (3 point deficit)…What’s Trump’s Achilles’ Heel in the state? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: white noncollege women. In a recent Global Strategy Group study, Trump’s net approval was +28 among white noncollege men and -2 among white noncollege women. Wow. That’s a really big difference. Leverage that difference and the Democratic candidate wins the state.”

Perry Bacon, Jr. notes in “Other Polling Nuggets” at FiveThirtyEight that “Only 45 percent of Americans say they will vote for a “‘well-qualified” candidate who is a socialist, according to new Gallup polling. More Americans say they would vote for a candidate who is an atheist (60 percent), a Muslim (66 percent), over the age of 70 (69), under 40 (70), gay or lesbian (78), an evangelical Christian (80), a woman (93), Jewish (93), Hispanic (94), Catholic (95) or black (96.)”

However, Jason Sattler contends that “Moderate Democrats have a duty to consider Sanders. He has a clear path to beating Trump.” Subtitled “Bernie Sanders isn’t even my favorite senator running for the 2020 nomination. But I see his potential to unite the Democratic Party and oust Trump,” Sattler’s article explains that “If you believe in saving democracy, the courts and the planet, and reversing the unrepentant cruelty, corruption and carelessness that define the current administration, you have a duty to at least consider the candidacy of the most popular senator in America, the top fundraiser in the Democratic primaries, and the man who has generally beaten Trump in head-to-head polls for five years now…Sure, you can’t ignore a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that shows “socialism” — half of Sanders’ “democratic socialist” brand — about as unpopular as capitalism is popular. Conventional wisdom suggests Republicans would love to run against a socialist as the stock market continually hits new highs, raising all boats that happen to float on a sea of 401(k)s…

“Establishment Democrats seem to live in terror of reliving the 1972 presidential election, when a triangulating Richard Nixon crushed lefty George McGovern,” writes Sattler. “But two much more recent nightmares — 2000 and 2016 — are far more instructive. When Democrats fail to bring their left-most flank into the fold, Republicans are able to swipe elections…Beyond his ability to woo the party’s most reluctant supporters, the best case for the strength of Sanders’ candidacy is that pretty much every argument against him ends up pointing to why he might be uniquely electable…Claims that “nobody likes him” in Washington, or that he can’t overcome his socialist branding, ignore what sets him apart from others. Brian Fallon, former spokesperson for the Hillary Clinton campaign, calls it an “authenticity factor.” …Bernie may be a lot of things, but he’s no one’s idea of a Capitol Hill slick…Yes, Sanders is not a Democrat. Neither are most voters. Independent is the most popular party affiliation in America by far.”

But Sanders is in 4th place in the largest swing state, as indicated by a recent Florida poll. As Max Greenwood reports at The Hill, “Michael Bloomberg is leading the pack of Democratic presidential hopefuls in Florida, according to a new survey from St. Pete Polls, a sign that the former New York City mayor has picked up traction in a crucial swing state before most of his rivals have even started to campaign there…The poll shows Bloomberg with 27.3 percent support in the Sunshine State, up 10 points from a similar poll released late last month. Biden, meanwhile, has seen his support in Florida plummet, falling from more than 41 percent in January to 25.9 percent this month…Former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are jockeying for third place in the state, notching 10.5 percent and 10.4 percent respectively, while Sen. Amy Klobuchar sits in fifth with 8.6 percent support.”

At Vox Recode, Theodore Schleifer reports that “Furious Oracle employees are demanding that Larry Ellison cancel his Trump fundraiser,” and writes, “Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison’s decision to host a fundraiser for Donald Trump next week has awoken the usually passive workforce at his company, angering some employees who are going public with their disgust over Ellison’s actions…Ellison, the fifth-richest person in the US, surprised the tech industry on Wednesday when news broke that he would host Trump for a golf-filled fundraiser at his estate in California’s Coachella Valley next week. The event is, by far, the most significant public display of support for Trump 2020 by a tech titan…It is not as though Ellison’s support for Republicans is a total shock. Oracle has been one of the Silicon Valley giants that has worked hardest to cultivate ties to the Trump administration. Other tech giants have tried to keep at least some distance from the administration, but Oracle CEO Safra Catz has reportedly been under consideration to take senior roles within the White House, and she has hired several former senior Trump aides at Oracle.” The company’s products include database software and technology, cloud engineered systems, and enterprise software.

Ryan Fan’s medium.com post “How to Make Trump Supporters Change Their Minds” has some painfully-satirical ‘instructions’ for Democrats, which amplify James Carville’s recent comment about too many Dems emitting superiority “vapors.” Here’s a sample: “First, make sure to let Trump supporters know how stupid they are. Pull up a study that says educated people, like yourself, are less likely to support Trump to prove your point. Then, flaunt how much smarter you are than they are. Let them know they’re deplorables, and that if they lost their jobs or are going to lose their healthcare, they deserve it — especially the white working class…Let them know, verbatim, what John Oliver said last night, and then pat yourself in the back for being so funny and original. Ridicule them — that’s always the best tactic. Make sure to destroy them for reading fake news like Breitbart and Fox News, and then brag about how you read credible sources like The Huffington Post. Make sure to show them articles from The Borowitz Report, and then say “look at how ridiculous your President is.”…Let them know they’re on the wrong side of history. If they say something remotely racist, make sure to announce it to the world so no one can forget how much they deserve to be shunned. Attack anyone else that dares defend them as racist as well, and smirk at what a phenomenal debater you are.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Matt Yglesias, who I’ve long suspected was the closet political realist among the Vox crowd, has a nice piece up on the case for Klobuchar. Well worth reading after Tuesday’s result in NH.

“Klobuchar…is a Sanders alternative who offers a genuine trade-off — she’s running on a less ambitious agenda, but that consists almost entirely of being careful to avoid politically unpopular positions. She’s for taking action on climate change, but not for a fracking ban. She’s for a public option and price curbs on prescription drugs rather than an expensive Medicare-for-all program. She’d do a better job than Sanders of appealing to swing voters, and Sanders would need to try to make it up by pulling in third-party supporters or new voters.