Stop using "Electability" as a Weapon

This weekend, I joined with Lillian’s List and EMILYs List to train some phenomenal women running for a variety of offices in North Carolina. I left inspired by these women, from red, blue and purple districts across the state, who were all running to make their communities better.

And then I read this story from Axios, with some top strategists arguing the best path to victory is for the party to nominate a straight, White, Christian man. And it reminded me why organizations like EMILYs List and Lillian’s List still have to exist. It’s not because the voters reject women candidates. It’s because the system wasn’t made for them and the so-called experts have concluded that that fact creates insurmountable challenges. And they won’t stop telling voters about it.

I am not naive. I am not dismissing the very real sexism women candidates face. Or the racism candidates of color have to overcome. The homophobia, the transphobia, the ableism, these are just a few of the ways we other candidates who don’t look like the standard issue, straight-out-of-central casting white guy in a suit.

These issues are real, and they matter. We should all be fighting to create a system that judges all candidates by the same metrics. We should all call out the sexist comments, the microaggressions, the othering that happens in our society. And we should notice that the people with the loudest and most powerful voices are mostly the same as the people we elect, but not the same as the people we represent.

But acknowledging these things is not the same as dooming these candidates as unelectable.

Here’s the thing: every candidate faces problems. Sometimes it’s their identity: people questioned whether America would elect a Catholic or a Black man president and American voters proved them wrong. Bill Clinton was too young and counted out repeatedly during his first primary. When Donald Trump entered the race, much of the media and political establishment failed to take a bigger-than-life reality TV host seriously and thought he would never win the primary, much less the White House. Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were too young and inexperienced to win, Laura Kelly and Andy Beshear were too Democratic to win re-election in their red states.

The truth is, we’re not great at predicting how our neighbors will vote in elections, especially not this far from the election. Early polls tend to be based on name ID–in early 2019, the two candidates who polled the best were the two who had run nationally before. Prior to that, horserace polls predicted Presidents Gary Hart and Bob Dole, among others. And too often, the political and media establishment takes those polls and tells us that those candidates are the electable ones, or even worse, tell us that other candidates are not electable.

We allow “experts” to tell us who can win, despite their incredibly flawed records. Candidates who fall outside of that “electable” category can face challenges getting media attention and raising money, creating a narrative and reality that makes it hard for them to win. We’ve made them unelectable. They didn’t start that way.

So rather than letting some Democratic pundits tell us who is electable, what if we take control? What if we picked candidates who were compelling, who had good stories they told well, who had the qualifications and lived experience to do the job? What if we supported candidates who provided good contrast to the other side, and who could run a good solid campaign? What if we recognized that the same ideas that got us here might not be the ones that get us out?

There are countless reasons campaigns win or lose. Flawed punditry should not be one of them.