The Predictable, Ineluctable, Intractable ‘Electability’ Argument
And how much does social media savvy matter?
NATHAN SAGE KNEW A FEW WEEKS AGO that his campaign for U.S. Senate was likely coming to an end. The 41-year-old Iowa Democrat was struggling to raise money. He wasn’t breaking through the crowded three-way race. And Democratic leaders in the state were starting to get nervous.
“People would call me and be like, ‘We’re gonna be left with fucking Zach Wahls,’” Sage told me, referring to the 34-year-old state senator who is one of the two remaining candidates in the Democratic primary now that Sage has dropped out. Wahls gained national attention when he was a teenager, after he delivered a viral speech in 2011 to the Iowa House of Representatives about his experience being raised by a lesbian couple. He is also, as Sage noted, from “the most blue area of the entire state.” And for that reason, “a lot of people across the Iowa Democratic Party know Zach is good where he’s at. He’s good in the [Iowa] Senate. . . . They don’t see him winning across the state, or connecting to voters across the state,” as he would have to do to win a U.S. Senate seat in the general election in November.
Sage, an Army and Marine Corps veteran who pitched himself as a working-class populist and political newcomer in the race, ultimately ended his primary campaign on Sunday. A day later, he endorsed Joshua Turek, a 46-year-old Paralympic gold medalist and state representative. Sage didn’t hold back his disdain for Wahls’s candidacy—telling me that although Wahls appealed to a national donor base, Iowa voters would ultimately see him as a “plastic human being and fake and artificial.”
In a statement, Wahls said that he was “disappointed that the Turek campaign feels the need to go so negative in this primary. . . . They know we’re winning and because we’re the only campaign that is truly a product of Iowa—for Iowa—and not manufactured by Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, or the D.C. establishment.”
If there is a hint of desperation in the way Sage and Wahls are talking about the race, that’s by design. Across Iowa, and even among national Democrats, there is a belief that nominating Wahls might mean forfeiting the party’s already challenging shot at flipping the seat. In August, state Rep. J.D. Scholten dropped out of the same U.S. Senate race and endorsed Turek. “I did not want to take away votes. I did not want to split things,” Scholten explained to me this week. “I’m so adamant about Turek, because he’s our best chance.”
ANXIETY OVER GETTING the most “electable” candidates across the finish line in primaries is not limited to Iowa. Although Democrats have cleared the field in a handful of top-tier Senate races—including Ohio, North Carolina, and Alaska—the contests in Texas, Iowa, Michigan, and Maine continue to be wild cards. In several cases, the candidates are pitching themselves as the most electable in the race. The issue facing the party—the one that is causing the current uneasiness—is due to the fact that no one can seem to agree on what that actually means in the second Trump administration.
The debate over electability within the Democratic political class has animated a months-long X feud and Substack argument among nerdy data analysts, who have invented a whole new online language—perhaps, most famously the term “WINS ABOVE REPLACEMENT,” also known as WAR, borrowed from sabermetrics—to talk about candidates’ electability. The debate has also inspired operatives to spend countless hours carefully dissecting social media clips and reading through TikTok comments to determine whether online vibes really can win over voters.
So what matters most to electability? What’s the best indicator? Is it the ability to raise small-dollar donations? Is it a mastery of social media and the attention economy? Is it a set of policy issues and a resume of votes that can appeal to a cross section of voters? Does it require backing electoral overperformers who’ve won in Trump districts?
Ideally, it would be all of the above. But that’s often not an option. And Democrats are now left trying to work through the tradeoffs—with the result that electability is often discussed like it’s one of those difficult-to-define, you’ll-know-it-when-you-see-it, je ne sais quoi sorts of thing.
“In a way that, really, we haven’t seen before, there’s such a gap between what ‘electable’ means to people now,” progressive Democratic strategist Joel Payne told me. Caitlin Legacki, another party strategist who is working with candidates including Rep. Haley Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary, said that there was a “shifting definition of what is electability that is very situational and depends mostly on which candidate you support in a given race.”
In many ways, the internal debate about electability is a product of political desperation. Many Democrats view winning control of at least one chamber of Congress as an imperative to protecting American democracy. And they’ve expanded their battleground map into red congressional districts and GOP-held Senate seats in hopes to give them the best chance of coming out on top. In 2006, there was a similar consternation within the party as Rahm Emanuel, then the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, recruited unconventional candidates to run in red districts around the country. But a key difference now is the prevalence of social media, which has a huge effect on how voters get their information.
In my conversations with party strategists, one of the biggest disagreements that kept coming up about what made someone “electable” was how much being good at social media actually matters. While the party has been focused on beefing up its social media presence and recruiting candidates who are naturals at direct-to-camera videos, some officials I spoke with thought that too much emphasis had been placed on this skillset—and that, ultimately, the voters Democrats need to activate are independents and soft-Trump backers, not newbies to politics. They worried that too many candidates were being deemed electable based on their ability to go viral, with no guarantee that the clicks and views would translate into general election votes.
Sage, for example, told me that voters in northwest Iowa weren’t spending their days scrolling through TikTok. Garry Jones of Lone Star Rising PAC, which is supporting state Rep. James Talarico in the Texas Senate primary, also said that some Democratic campaigns (read: Jasmine Crockett) were putting too much stock into getting online influencers to back them, noting that Democratic primary voters tended to be older and less online.
A lot of this back-and-forth is just operatives putting their finger on the scale for their own candidates (the people who say online vibes don’t matter are often the ones whose clients happen to be really bad at social media). But there’s something to be said for the Democratic party’s reputation for overlearning the lessons of the last election and fighting the last war. What matters in the end is being the right candidate for the moment and connecting with voters in a certain state—and that’s not always the same as being relevant on the internet.
“Part of authenticity is actually believing in things and having a clear narrative,” said Democratic strategist Jesse Lehrich, who recently argued in his newsletter that Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff’s strong candidacy demonstrated that not everyone needs to try to go viral all the time. “There’s something to be said for knowing who you are and not trying to be everywhere all at once.”
🫏 Donkey Business:
— Democratic officials are planning to boycott Donald Trump’s State of the Union address next Tuesday and will instead attend a rally on the National Mall. The boycott is an attempt to have more organized counterprogramming than last year, when Democrats were mocked for their silent protests of Trump’s speech (remember those pink blazers?). The rally is being coordinated by MoveOn and MeidasTouch and will feature lawmakers including Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy and Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen.
— Andy Beshear is publishing his first book this fall, the latest sign that the Kentucky governor is inching toward a 2028 presidential run. According to the Washington Post, the book, which comes out on September 22, will focus on Beshear’s faith.
My open tabs:
— Against thoughtless moderation
— The Disappointment of Young Trump Voters
— What’s it like to have two grandchildren in the Winter Olympics? Let John Irving tell you
When I listen to the way that Trump is trying to steal the election in November, it is absolutely ridiculous that we’re wasting money with two Democrats fighting each other in individual states. We are in a goddamn emergency.
It's almost like having primaries has been a terrible thing ever since we introduced them in the 1960s. If parties are worried about electability, then they shouldn't be putting their faith in primary voters.
Because deep down, this isn't about parties or about leaders. It's about the fact that primaries are about primary voters. And voters regularly choose candidates that lots of other people find unpalatable.
The core problem with primaries is that they're almost always only open to voters of that party. In essence you're asking those voters to choose who is most likely to win over people who aren't allowed to vote for whoever is going to be picked.
Much like how the GOP regularly nominates wingnuts, Democrats are going to nominate people they prefer. If you don't like that, don't have primaries. Asking primary voters to vote for who they think will win over people who aren't in their party makes no sense. Why ask voters to pick a candidate if you're just going to go 'no, you're supposed to pick the other one!'
In reality, primaries were a mistake and have always been a mistake; our best presidents were all the product of those smokey back rooms. But given we have a primary system, we need to face the facts that if you ask primary voters, who are always the most partisan, who they want representing them, then they're going to pick the ones that align with them the most.
Why have a primary at all, I ask again, if you're just going 'look, it's not about YOUR representative, you need to think about what people in swing states think about your choices.' At that point, stop having primaries.