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THREAD: Let's talk about "electability": Electability is a word that the establishment uses to attempt to dictate messaging about which candidates are viable, and thereby control who voters ultimately decide to support. The first time I remember hearing the word used was in the
run-up to the 2004 election. Pundits at the time were saying that Howard Dean, who at the time was very vocally anti-Iraq War and was considered to be anti-establishment by many (he has since become a *part* of the establishment), just wasn't electable. Instead, John Kerry, the
long-serving senator and war vet was considered to be eminently electable. In 2008, I heard this same rhetoric used for Hillary Clinton. She was electable, while Obama was not (what usually went unspoken was that this was because he is black). And of course, any of us who were
paying attention in 2016, remember that this was one of the primary arguments that were made against Bernie Sanders (despite most polls at the time consistently showing that he would beat Trump by a much higher margin than Clinton). You may notice that all 3 elections have
something in common. For one, in every case, this argument was used against the more progressive candidate. The more conservative candidate was considered the safe bet. But the more notable commonality is that in each case, the more "electable" candidate FUCKING LOST. In my
lifetime, Bill Clinton is the only Dem candidate who has explicitly run as a centrist and won. This was in the wake of Reagan's back-to-back wins with massive popularity, and then George HW Bush's additional win after Reagan. Dems were worried that Carter and Mondale had been too
far to the left and that the country was shifting right (no idea what their excuse for Dukakis was), so Third Way Democrats (of which Clinton was one) decided they needed to move to the right, and began spouting right-wing talking points about crime and the economy, and ceding
ground to the Republicans on others, such as abortion (remember the whole "safe, legal, and rare" bullshit? It's already an incredibly safe procedure, of course it should always be legal, and who cares whether it's rare or not? Wanting it to be rare presupposes there's something
wrong with it AND THERE ISN'T). It's true that Clinton won back-to-back terms, whether or not that had anything to do with this shift, but as noted above, this strategy HAS NOT WORKED ONCE SINCE THEN. This points to the fact that the idea of "electability" will never work outside
of a vacuum because the political landscape is always changing. E.g. calling oneself a socialist in 2004 would've been a death knell for a Democratic candidate. So even if Bill Clinton was right to right as a conservative Democrat, that doesn't say anything about how Dem
candidates should run now, almost 3 decades later. And one last thing: you would think that the fact that Trump won in 2016 would have put this argument to rest. By most people's standards, Trump was the epitome of unelectable, and most mainstream pundits dismissed his candidacy.
And yet nevertheless he won. Of course, those with worm-addled brains will yell about Russia or Comey or Jill Stein, but the fact that the race was even close at all is enough to show what a farce the electability argument is. This is not at all to suggest that certain candidates
can't legitimately be more electable than others, but more just that the word is almost always used disingenuously by the establishment to gaslight voters and attempt to limit their choices to their preferred candidate/s.
right to *run* as a conservative Democrat
