The Dumb Argument Driving the Michigan Senate Democratic Primary

Having candidates spend primaries implying their rivals are electoral losers is a great way … to lose general elections.

Representative Haley Stevens’s chief argument in her U.S. Senate run in Michigan is, “I beat Republicans.” As she told The Associated Press recently, “I win tough races. I have had Republicans throw everything at me and still managed to win.” Meanwhile her Democratic primary opponent, doctor and public health expert Abdul El-Sayed, says actually that he’s a surer bet than Stevens to win a general election. “It’s risky to put up a candidate who does not actually have clear positions on most of the issues that everybody wants.… It’s risky to tell people that the best thing we can do with our tax dollars is send them abroad to drop bombs on other people rather than to invest here,” he told The Wall Street Journal. Each candidate’s supporters are also making confident claims that their candidate would fare better against the likely Republican nominee, former Representative Mike Rogers.

I get why Democratic candidates and their backers talk like this. Democratic voters are desperate to restrain today’s radical, antidemocratic Republican Party, and winning elections is obviously an essential part of beating MAGA. But while debating electability seems savvy and pragmatic, it’s actually futile and counterproductive. We can’t reliably predict which candidate will do best in a general election. And having candidates spend primaries implying their rivals are electoral losers is a great way … to lose general elections. Democrats need to stop having primaries about electability and start having primaries where candidates prove their electability by wooing voters on the basis of things beyond electoral wishcasting.

In theory, electability is a useful metric on which to compare candidates. If I were 100 percent certain one Democratic candidate in a primary would go on to win the general election in a swing state and 100 percent sure that the other candidate would lose the general election, I would almost certainly back the former, no matter their policy positions. Even if these numbers were 75 percent likely to win and 75 percent likely to lose, I would choose the candidate with the higher chances. But in the overwhelming majority of primaries, including the El-Sayed/Stevens contest, there is no polling or other data showing that one nominee will clearly lose the general election and the other will clearly lose it. Most polls show Stevens and El-Sayed effectively tied in polls against Rogers.

That polling parity isn’t an accident. Politics today is much more partisan and nationalized than a few decades ago, when Bill Clinton flipped several Southern states. So the tactics, strategies, and........

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