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 personas of individual candidates are usually overwhelmed by factors such as the approval rating of the incumbent president, the popularity of the two parties, the state of the economy, and the partisan balance in a given state. In 2006, 2018, and 2020, most Democratic candidates across the country, progressive and centrist, did better than in other cycles. Same for Republicans in 2010, 2014, and 2024. So the most realistic scenario in Michigan is not that Stevens would lose the general election but El-Sayed would win, or vice versa, but that either nominee will win the general election because purple states like Michigan tend to go blue when there is a super-unpopular Republican president in office. Nearly every election across the country over the last year has featured high Democratic turnout, somewhat lower Republican turnout, and occasional and swing voters backing the Democrats. This is very likely what will happen in Michigan in November, no matter who Democrats nominate in this Senate race. Stevens’s supporters argue that El-Sayed’s prior positions, such as defunding the police, ensure he would lose some moderate and independent voters that she would win. But political science research from scholars Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach suggests that there are very few voters these days who back the most centrist candidate because of their policy positions and ideology. “Moderation used to help candidates in past decades, but in the Trump era, a candidate’s ideological moderation has no consistent, measurable effect on their vote share,” they wrote in an essay published in Boston Review earlier this year. Instead, Americans who aren’t consistent partisan voters and are therefore up for grabs (so those who swing between the two parties and those who vacillate between voting and not voting) are politically erratic and unpredictable. They might back Barack Obama and then Donald Trump; Trump and then Zohran Mamdani. They vote often on personality and vibes. Some of these voters are fairly conservative on some issues and fairly liberal on others. So it’s not clear that they would be more likely to back Stevens because she is more centrist than El-Sayed. At the same time, even though these voters are often deeply skeptical of corporations and elites, it’s not clear that they will back the more anti-elite, populist El-Sayed, either. A country (and state in Michigan) where Donald Trump twice won is not one that always prizes moderation. To put it simply, there are swing voters … but we don’t really know exactly why they swing, beyond their reliably swinging against whichever party controls the presidency. So that’s advantage Democrats, but not necessarily advantage Stevens or El-Sayed. So if there’s no way to prove which candidate will win a general election, why are the El-Sayed and Stevens camps so fixated on electability? That’s mostly the fault of Stevens and center-left Democrats, who are really leaning into that concept. Electability is the center-left’s best and in some ways only argument during Democratic primaries these days. On policy, the Democratic center-left has been largely discredited. Democratic Party voters don’t want to go back to the social conservatism of Clinton; the corporate-friendly, deficit-obsessed economic policies of Clinton and Obama; the bipartisanship and pro-Israel stances of Joe Biden; or the half-hearted opposition to Trump and rightward shift on immigration from congressional Democrats early last year. Stevens is trying to backtrack from her past fervent support of Israel; fellow centrist Senate candidate Angie Craig of Minnesota has apologized for her vote last year in favor of a Trump-backed immigration bill. But center-left Democrats, more often than progressives, have won in purple states. So that electoral history gives Stevens an advantage. In contrast, center-left candidates in reliably blue places like New York and Colorado can’t credibly claim a progressive hopeful would lose in the general election. These electability arguments often resonate with Democratic voters, who prioritize defeating Republicans over virtually anything else. Biden’s primary win in 2020 happened in part because Democratic voters viewed him as more likely to beat Trump than the female, minority, and/or more left-wing candidates that he ran against. So progressive and insurgent candidates such as El-Sayed and their supporters are emphasizing electability because they can’t win otherwise. Democratic voters in swing states aren’t going to listen to a candidate’s policy positions until they are convinced that candidate can win a general election. So even if their claims lack much evidence, center-left Democrats are smart to lean into electability in their battle with the left over control of the Democratic Party. I expect Stevens to win because the center-left Michigan Democratic establishment will loudly trumpet her electability and sow voters’ doubts about El-Sayed’s ability to win a general election in the run-up to the August 4 Michigan primary. (A Muslim man is particularly vulnerable to these electability doubts, so I wish centrist Democrats who claim to care about religious tolerance and equality kept that in mind.) Similarly, I would bet on Governor Josh Shapiro or another more center-left candidate defeating a progressive like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the 2028 presidential primary by leaning into electability. But this a bad tactic for the party overall. Democratic primaries don’t happen in some alternative universe separate from the general election. Swing and occasional voters are going to hear that Stevens thinks they won’t support El-Sayed and vice versa. In the general election, the media can use the quotes of the loser of the El-Sayed/Stevens contest suggesting that the Democratic nominee can’t connect with swing voters. Primaries often include harsh policy attacks from rival candidates. But on policy, Democratic candidates will be distinct from Republicans on nearly every issue. So that’s not a big problem in the general election. What’s more problematic is Democratic candidates spending primaries essentially saying other Democrats are weirdos whom swing voters won’t support.The other problem is that primaries fixated on electability aren’t good preparation for the general election. “I will win the general election” is a message that’s only for hardcore Democrats. That’s the electorate in a primary, obviously. But “I will fix your health care,” “I will make housing more affordable, “I will bring jobs to the state,” are messages that appeal to primary voters but also the broader electorate. Ideally, Democratic candidates are spending the entire cycle on such broader messages, not spending a year emphasizing their electability during the primary and having only the few months of the general election to say anything that might excite people who aren’t hardcore Democrats. I know I’m not going to stop the Democrats’ electability obsession. Centrist Democrats know it’s their path to power; progressives know it’s their biggest barrier; liberal voters desperately want to beat Republicans; and everyone, particularly journalists, thinks they are great at predicting which candidates are best. But unfortunately (or I would say fortunately), the only way you can tell if someone is electable … is to let them run in an election. And these days, the only way you can tell if a candidate appeals to voters who claim to be moderate … is to let them run in an election. Those voters might support Haley Stevens. Or Abdul El-Sayed. Or yes, unfortunately, Donald Trump.
