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At Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, the candidates bickered and battled over health care policy; over Michael Bloomberg’s record and his right to represent a party that he only recently rejoined; over the possible dangers of nominating a democratic socialist.
But in a way, it all seemed like just window dressing around one big question: Who has the best chance in November? Every policy critique seemed to lead inexorably back to this issue of electability.
In his very first comments at the debate, Mr. Bloomberg didn’t just criticize Senator Bernie Sanders’s plan to create a single-payer health care system — he said it would cause Democrats to lose the general election.
“I don’t think there’s any chance of the senator beating President Trump,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “You don’t start out by saying I’ve got 160 million people, I’m going to take away the insurance plan that they love.”
Mr. Sanders shot back, arguing that Mr. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, was “a billionaire saying that we should not raise the minimum wage or that we should cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”
“If that’s a way to beat Donald Trump, wow, I would be very surprised,” Mr. Sanders said.
A wide majority of Democratic primary voters have said in poll after poll that they care about finding someone who can win the general election more than finding a candidate who agrees with them on the issues.
But who is that candidate? It’s far from clear.
Until recently, Democratic voters tended to see former Vice President Joe Biden as the strongest option. But after he failed to place in the top three in either Iowa or New Hampshire, he lost any veneer of invincibility. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released Wednesday showed that for the first time in the race, Democrats are most likely to name Mr. Sanders as the candidate with the best chance to beat Mr. Trump.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s approval rating has risen, most likely lifted by the strength of the economy and his acquittal in the Senate’s impeachment trial. His Gallup approval rating hit 49 percent this month — the highest number of his presidency. So while a majority of Americans still disapprove of him, he has the potential to win at least as much support as he did in 2016, when he lost the popular vote but pulled off a decisive win in the Electoral College.
The ABC/Washington Post poll showed that in head-to-head matchups with all six of the candidates onstage at the debate, Mr. Trump would earn between 45 and 47 percent of the vote nationwide. The Democrats’ shares varied from 49 to 52 percent. The differences between each Democrat were all within the poll’s margin of error.
This suggests that, despite Mr. Sanders’s claim that a “political revolution” would be needed to drive turnout, and in spite of his more moderate rivals’ argument that his left-wing proposals would alienate a huge swath of voters, any Democratic nominee would probably have a good chance of winning the popular vote.
But Republicans have won the Electoral College three times this century, even though they have won the popular vote only once. So what really matters is who can beat Mr. Trump in a handful of key swing states.
That’s why Quinnipiac University asked voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — three states that Mr. Trump narrowly flipped in 2016, giving him an Electoral College win — to choose between the president and each of the six leading Democratic candidates.
The data from those polls suggests that Mr. Trump is in a very strong position to win Wisconsin, a heavily white state that was once solidly blue but has trended conservative over the past 10 years. None of the six leading Democratic candidates finished ahead of Mr. Trump there.
Conversely, in Michigan and Pennsylvania, he didn’t have a lead against any of them. Mr. Biden beat Mr. Trump by eight percentage points in Pennsylvania — where he was born — and by four points in Michigan. Mr. Sanders was up by five points against the president in Michigan, and by four points in Pennsylvania. Mr. Bloomberg led Mr. Trump by six points in Pennsylvania, and by five points in Michigan.
The other three candidates included in the poll — Senator Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and Senator Elizabeth Warren — generally fared a little less strongly, though Ms. Klobuchar had a strong, seven-point lead over Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania, and none of them were behind him there or in Michigan.
A University of North Florida poll released this week found meaningful differences between the candidates’ chances in that state. Mr. Bloomberg beat Mr. Trump by six points among registered Florida voters, thanks in part to the strength of his support among voters with college degrees, according to the poll. Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Klobuchar, both hobbled by relatively weak support from black and Latino voters, each finished four points behind the president.
Mr. Sanders and Mr. Biden both ran neck-and-neck with Mr. Trump.
Like all surveys, head-to-head polls are not actually able to predict the future. They simply show what might happen if the election were held today. A lot will change over the course of the campaign.
Still, what happens in these bellwether states will determine the election — so you can expect these kinds of head-to-head polls to be more common as the primary season rambles on, and as Democrats continue to fret over their chances to take down Mr. Trump.
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From Opinion: The trickiness of electability
In this new weekly feature, our colleagues from The New York Times’s Opinion section will share expert analysis and perspectives from across the political spectrum. In today’s installment, there’s more to read about why electability is so unpredictable.
There is a home base that all the conversation about the Democratic presidential primary comes back to in the end: Primary voters prioritize, above all, someone who can defeat President Trump.
In any election that features an incumbent president, the main goal of the out-of-power party is to nominate a candidate well-suited to defeating the incumbent. That’s why both Republican Party elites and less enthusiastic conservative voters got behind Mitt Romney after a series of polls in 2011 showed he was the only Republican beating President Barack Obama in head-to-head matchups.
This year, Democrats’ desire to replace the incumbent has reached a fever pitch, arguably higher than it’s ever been for either party. But paradigm-shifting presidents have complicated the idea of electability, as Adam Jentleson, a former deputy chief of staff for Senator Harry Reid, pointed out this week in an Op-Ed.
Mr. Obama won his first election despite being a “black man who had admitted to using cocaine, who was caught on tape calling working-class whites ‘bitter’ people who ‘cling to guns and religion,’ and who sat in the pews with a pastor who declared, ‘God damn America’,” Mr. Jentleson said.
Mr. Romney, the Republicans’ supposed safe bet, lost despite running against the sluggish economy under Mr. Obama.
And Hillary Clinton, another supposed safe bet, lost to Donald J. Trump.
So does anyone know what electability even means anymore? Our columnist Bret Stephens believes that “of course Bernie can win,” but also thinks that the current front-runner’s democratic socialist vision may be disqualifying for many voters: “For some of us, none-of-the-above is a viable option. For far too many others,” he writes, Trump will “be the devil they know.”
— Talmon Joseph Smith
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