Dem Voters Have One Weird Obsession: Winning
The party’s primary voters this cycle keep showing they care less about ideological purity than beating Republicans.
A FEW DAYS AGO, as conventional wisdom held that Francesca Hong would comfortably win the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin—even if by a narrower margin than the 20 points polls suggested—one Democratic operative put his reputation on the line predicting just the opposite. Hong’s rival, David Crowley, would emerge victorious, argued Pat Dennis, the president of the Democratic opposition-research firm American Bridge 21st Century. And he’d win for one reason only.
“Electability is such a real and persistent motivator in Dem primaries in the Trump era,” Dennis tweeted on Monday. “I’ll take a real risk of looking stupid and say Hong loses.”
A day later, Crowley did, indeed, pull out a win. And Dennis doesn’t look stupid. In fact, his reasoning for making that prediction looks to be one of the more sage—and underappreciated—insights into the current id of the Democratic electorate. To borrow the phrase coined by the late Al Davis, the party just wants to win, baby. And its primary voters are making judgments based on their perceptions about which candidate gives them the best chance of doing so in November.
“There’s a really lazy desire to map everything happening in Democratic primaries onto a mirror image of the Tea Party movement or the MAGA movement,” Dennis explained to me in an interview this Wednesday. But, he added, Democratic primary voters are “fundamentally different people than Republican primary voters.”
“Democratic primary voters care a lot about the continuation of their institutions, the governing legacy of somebody like [Wisconsin] Gov. [Tony] Evers, and are relatively plugged in and totally open to persuasion on the issue of Is this person electable?,” said Dennis.
The “electability” question is the key element of this political season. It’s popped up time and again, in race after race: from Democratic voters siding with James Talarico over Jasmine Crockett in Texas, to establishment figures eventually forcing out Graham Platner in Maine. But rarely has it been on such vivid display as in Wisconsin on Tuesday night.
After briefly suspending his campaign amid a candidate shakeup last month, Crowley jumped back in the race by making the Midwestern-nice version of the case that voters needed to consider November when casting their ballots in August. He emphasized what was at stake: the chance of GOP Rep. Tom Tiffany, a committed election denier, sitting in the governor’s mansion during the 2028 presidential year. And Crowley reminded voters that Republicans were running ads boosting Hong’s campaign in the hopes of having an easier general election matchup.
But what insiders say was the biggest factor in pushing the electability argument was
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