by Glenn Greenwald
Many Democrats will tell
you that there has rarely, if ever, been a more menacing or evil
presidential candidate than Donald Trump. “Trump is the most dangerous major
candidate for president in memory,” pronounced
Vox‘s Ezra Klein two weeks ago. With a consensus now emerging that the real
estate mogul is the likely GOP nominee, it would stand to reason that the most
important factor for many Democrats in choosing their own nominee is electability:
meaning, who has the best chance of defeating the GOP Satan in the general
election? In light of that, can Democrats really afford to take such a risky
gamble by nominating Hillary Clinton?
In virtually
every poll, her rival, Bernie Sanders, does better, often much better, in
head-to-head match-ups against every possible GOP candidate. Here, for
instance, is a compilation of how Clinton does against Ted Cruz in recent
polls: she trails the Texas Senator in all but one poll, and in the one poll
she leads, it is by a paltry 2 points:
By stark contrast, Sanders
leads Cruz in every poll, including by substantial margins in some:
A similar story is seen in
their match-ups against Trump. Although they both end up ahead in most polls,
Sanders’ margin over Trump is generally very comfortable, while Clinton’s
is smaller. Clinton’s average
lead over Trump is just 2.8%, while Sanders’
lead is a full 6 points:
Then there’s the data about
how each candidate is perceived. Put simply, Hillary Clinton is an extremely unpopular
political figure. By contrast, even after enduring months of attacks from the
Clinton camp and its large number of media surrogates, Sanders remains a
popular figure.
A Gallup poll
released this week reported that “29% of Americans offer a positive
observation about Clinton while 51% express something negative.” As Gallup
rather starkly put it:
“Unfortunately for Clinton,
the negative associations currently outnumber the positive ones by a sizable
margin, and even among Democrats, the negatives are fairly high.”
Sanders is, of course, a more unknown quantity, but “the public’s comments
about Sanders can be summarized as 26% positive and 20% negative, with the rest
categorized as neutral, other or no opinion.”
In fact, the more the public
gets to see of both candidates, the more popular Sanders becomes, and the more
unpopular Clinton becomes. Here’s Quinnipiac explaining
that dynamic in one graph just a few days ago:
This Huffington Post chart,
compiling recent polls, shows not only that Clinton is deeply unpopular among
the electorate, but becomes increasingly unpopular the more the public is
exposed to her during this campaign:
Or look at the same metric for
critical states. In
Ohio, for example, Sanders’ favorability rating is +3 (44-41%), while
Clinton’s is negative 20 (37-57%).
Then there’s the particular
climate of the electorate. While it’s undoubtedly true that racism and
ethno-nationalism are significant factors in Trump’s appeal, also quite
significant is a pervasive, long-standing contempt for the political
establishment, combined with enduring rage at Wall Street and corporate America
which – along with the bipartisan agenda of globalization and free trade – has
spawned intense economic suffering and deprivation among a huge number of
Americans. This
article by the conservative writer Michael Brendan Dougherty is the best
I’ve read explaining the sustained success of Trump’s candidacy, and it very
convincingly documents those factors: “There are a number of Americans who are
losers from a process of economic globalization that enriches a transnational
global elite.”
In this type of climate, why
would anyone assume that a candidate who is the very embodiment of Globalist
Establishment Power (see her new, shiny
endorsement from Tony Blair), who is virtually drowning both
personally and politically in Wall Street cash, has “electability” in her
favor? Maybe one can find reasons to support a candidate like that. But in this
environment, “electability” is most certainly not one of them. Has anyone made
a convincing case why someone with those attributes would be a strong
candidate in 2016?
Despite this mountain of data,
the pundit consensus – which has been wrong about essentially everything – is
that Hillary Clinton is electable and Bernie Sanders is not. There’s virtually
no data to support this assertion. All of the relevant data compels the
opposite conclusion. Rather than data, the assertion relies on highly
speculative, evidence-free claims: Sanders will also become unpopular once
he’s the target of GOP attacks; nobody who self-identifies as a “socialist” can
win a national election; he’s too old or too ethnic to win, etc. The very same
supporters of Hillary Clinton were saying very similar things just eight years
ago about an unknown African-American first-term Senator with the name
Barack Hussein Obama.
Perhaps those claims are true
this time. But given the stakes we’re being told are at play if Trump is
nominated, wouldn’t one want to base one’s assessment in empirical evidence
rather than pundit assertions no matter how authoritative the tone used to
express them?
It’s possible to argue that
electability should not be the primary factor. That’s certainly reasonable:
elections often are and should be about aspirations, ideology, and
opinion-changing leaders. But given the lurking possibility of a Trump
presidency, is now really the time to gamble on such a risky General Election
candidate as Hillary Clinton?
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