Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

‘I don’t want an exciting president’

On Saturday afternoon, at Joe Biden’s official campaign kickoff rally in Philadelphia, I asked every attendee I met why they were supporting, or at least considering supporting, the former vice president. Often, they mentioned other people whom they thought Biden might appeal to. Again and again, they said they cared about beating President Donald Trump above all else.

“On my list of 10 things, 1 to 10 is beat Donald,” said Shyvette Brown, 63. “Health care is 11. And everything else comes after that.” Brown said she likes Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, but 2016 made her think that Americans aren’t ready to elect a woman. “I don’t like it,” she said. “I don’t think it’s fair.” But given the stakes, she wants the surest possible bet. “We can’t play. This is all or nothing. This is the endgame right here.”

I agree with Brown’s priorities. Nothing is more important than voting Trump out next year, and I suspect that Biden is surging in the polls in part because, rather than pretend that the election is about so-called kitchen table issues, he’s taking on Trump’s desecration of the presidency directly. What worries me about Biden — above and beyond policy disagreements — is that, in contemporary politics, the quest to find an electable candidate hasn’t resulted in candidates that actually win. Voters don’t do themselves any favors when they try to think like pundits.

“My heart still belongs to Howard Dean because of his passion, but my head says Kerry is the one who can get elected,” a voter told The New York Times in 2004, when Democrats were desperate to unseat George W. Bush. Many Democrats thought that John Kerry, a war hero, could puncture the puffed-up commander-in-chief aura that surrounded Bush, who had kept himself out of Vietnam. It didn’t work out that way.

Four years later, Democrats decided to follow their hearts and nominate Barack Obama, who spoke to their most sublime hopes for their country. Republicans, meanwhile, went with John McCain, who had often infuriated the party’s base, but whose campaign emphasized his general election viability. A poll in January 2008 showed that he was seen as the most electable of the Republican candidates, and one of his advertisements claimed that he could “rally the conservative Reagan coalition while appealing to independent voters to win in November.” He picked the risible Sarah Palin as a running mate to whip up energy on the right, but still lost.

By the time of the next presidential cycle, Republicans were even more obsessed with besting Obama, leading them to once again put a premium on electability. “The only reason I’m supporting Romney is because he can win the election,” a conservative voter in Iowa told The Washington Post in 2011. Romney, of course, couldn’t win the election.

It wasn’t until 2016 that a plurality of Republican voters defied the electoral wisdom of party elites, nominating a clownish demagogue who channeled the id of the far right and was supposed to have no chance of victory. We all know what happened next.

Democrats are now in a complicated spot as they make their electoral calculations. If what you care about most is a candidate’s chances next November, then pretending otherwise is an artificial exercise, particularly if it’s just in the service of making a better judgment about electability. And some enthusiasm for Biden is genuine, if not passionate; often, when people I spoke to at the rally described him as “safe,” they meant both as a candidate and as a potential leader. “I don’t want an exciting president,” said Sue Kane, a 58-year-old commercial real estate appraiser. “We have a lot of excitement right now, in a bad way.”

Fair enough. For many voters, what Biden is promising — a rebuke of Trump and a return to normalcy — is what they want more than anything else, and it makes sense for them to back him. What’s counterproductive is when voters try to think past their own desires.

“There’s two parts of me,” said Shelby Ferguson, 22, who just graduated from Temple University. “The political science major part of me that is trying to be as rational as possible,” and figure out who can rally Middle America to beat Trump, she said. “That part of me is saying Joe.” But she’s also someone who just left school and is worried about student loans and health care, and that side of her thrills to Warren and Bernie Sanders.

I hope voters like Ferguson go with the candidates who rouse them, because it’s often the best way to figure out who will rouse others. Given the existential stakes in 2020, it’s temping for Democrats to put their own preferences aside and strike mental bargains with groups of people they may have never met. But being attentive to how candidates make us feel gives us valuable information.

Intensity — the thing that turns a campaign into a movement, that leads people to donate more than they can afford, host house parties and spend their free time knocking on the doors of strangers’ houses — matters. That’s especially true in a country as polarized as ours, where turnout is as important as persuasion. Ultimately, the paradox of primaries is that it’s most strategic to ignore the experts and follow your emotions.

Michelle Goldberg is a columnist for The New York Times.