It is clear that for Democratic voters the number one priority is defeating Donald Trump in this November’s general election. A great deal of analysis, anxiety, and argument has been devoted to the topic of which candidate has the best odds of achieving that goal. It is naturally a stressful proposition. There are no test runs, no objective measurements that can answer the question ahead of time. There will be one and only one election and the Democratic candidate will either win the required electoral votes or they will fail. People who insist a particular person is the only one that can win the election are engaged at the very least of motivated reasoning, finding the arguments and evidence that produced a desired result versus any sort of analysis that might produce an answer contrary to their already preferred outcome.
The 2016 election turned on less than 100,000 votes in just three states. The Democratic candidate gathered nearly three million more votes from the electorate but only the archaic electoral college decides the victory. If Hillary Clinton with 30 years of political baggage can outperform Trump when he was still principally an unknown, then any of the leading candidates in this cycle can win the White House. Trump has not enlarged his voting coalition and has no grown in the public’s approval. This election may turn on a relative handful of voters in a few key states. It is also possible that the election will not be close, between many people’s distrust of Hillary Clinton and the unwarranted opinion that her victory was a certainty the last elect may have well been lost by the voters who did not bother and who this year may not repeat that error.
I do have an opinion as two which two Democratic candidates are most likely to lose if it is a close election, the two polar opposites, Sanders and Bloomberg.
Sanders as the candidate runs the risk to activating the negative partisanship of Republican voters who are apathetic to Trump but still live in the cold war with its terror of Socialism. Sanders has repeatedly put forth the argument that his candidacy will energize new voters and expand the electorate but so far the numbers do not bear out that point of view. He is doing well but he is not crushing it. There are those who are certain that a Socialist candidate will go down to a crushing defeat, but I think partisanship is a more powerful force and example number one if the Presidency of Trump. Side note: The GOP since the 80s has decried every Democratic candidate and president as a ‘Socialist,’ and now that a self-described one has a real shot at winning the White House their overuse of that attack has blunted that particular sword.
Bloomberg presents the exact opposite danger from Sanders. The Democratic electorate has no taste for billionaires buying the election. With Bloomberg at the head of the ticket there is a very real chance that Democratic enthusiasm will be suppressed with voters staying home or writing in candidates out of protest. If the swing states are close those few voters could, as they did in 2016, by their inaction give the victory to Trump. The unresolved question here is which is the stronger force, the hatred of Trump or Bloomberg.
