Is Abdul El-Sayed going to lose Michigan?
The Democratic nominee is running behind expectations, and everyone thinks they know why. But it's early — and I think we all know a lot less than we think.
Michigan’s Senate race is closer than the national environment says it should be. Many analysts have settled on a simple explanation: Abdul El-Sayed is too progressive.
Writing for the New York Times last weekend, Nate Cohn argues “It can be hard to predict exactly which progressive candidates are liable to underperform, but Dr. El-Sayed has a lot of the hallmarks of the kind of progressive who has underperformed in the past.” I discuss this piece at length below the fold.
Because of columns from Cohn and others, most Democratic elites have adopted the belief that progressives always underperform moderates. Readers would not be blamed for believing that as well.
But I’m not here today to argue against the idea that moderates do better than progressives (despite the real evidence otherwise). Instead, I’m arguing for uncertainty — for even just a dose of epistemic humility from DC practitioners and media pundits about why voters are voting the way they are. If you take a look at the research on this subject, it becomes clear that we all know much less than the conventional wisdom asserts. And more than that, we know a lot less than pundits say about how voters will behave in the future.
So this piece is partly about El-Sayed in Michigan, and partly about how confident any of us should be in the new conventional wisdom about “electability” and moderation. The evidence on whether ideology costs a candidate votes is thin, contested, and importantly constantly shifting. As Cohn notes accurately in his piece, there is even debate about what counts as “progressive” anymore. As he shows in his examples, it has increasingly little to do with policy preferences.
Putting our Bayesian hats on, the honest accounting of all the evidence is that we can’t be sure of a penalty for ideological “extremism” in any one isolated race — and almost nobody in this argument is accepting that uncertainty.
But before we get into all that, it’s worth taking stock of the current and past polling in the Michigan Senate race. What do they say now about El-Sayed? What did the polls say about Stevens, an unabashed moderate — would she have fared any better?
Then, I dive into Cohn’s big example for how to be a progressive and not appear as one: Tammy Baldwin. The problem here, unfortunately for Cohn, is that Baldwin is seen as the second most liberal Democratic Senator. Ouch.
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