There have been many occasions when one or another of my children has considered applying to something, or entering an essay or drawing contest to win something, and he or she has waffled over whether or not to bother. The thinking tends to go like this: “A lot of people will be applying, so I don’t have a chance.” OR “I’m not really what they’re looking for, so I’m not going to spend the time and energy doing this.”
And because, at many and various points in my life, I have won admission and opportunities that still surprise me (and that in some cases changed the course of my life), I argue the importance of trying. This has become one of my chestnuts: If you mention in my vicinity that you are interested in applying for something or other, but you don’t think “they” will want you because of X or Y, I will reliably say something like this: “Padawan, you, in fact, have no idea what ‘they’ want. Something about you, some unique quirk of your biography that you no longer register because it’s so much a part of who you are, may absolutely spark the interest of whoever it is that will decide who wins the prize.”
So I ALWAYS emphasize the importance of trying. Let “them” say No to you; don’t you decide—before you even apply—that the answer is No. Because you never know.
Choosing a candidate based on the idea of “electability” seems kin, in that it also involves putting the cart way ahead of the horse and assuming that unknowable things are known. In the case of Electability, I’m supposed to shelve policies and ideas that are important to me, maybe central to my understanding of right and wrong, and vote for someone that “they” have decided possesses this quality of Electability.
Can we agree that Electability is decided by Unseen Others? Maybe it’s 23 major corporate donors with a checkbook in one hand and a pen in the other who determine Electability years before we even learn who will be on the ballot. Maybe it’s simply the Party Machinery. Maybe it’s the media, though they seem to goosestep to whatever Big Money and the Party Machinery decide.
I do think the media play a big role in shoving the idea of Electability down voters’ throats. Once a decision has been made about who is electable, who possesses Electability, the media drive it home from every op-ed page and cable network, from every TV news show and major magazine article. We The People have to dig hard to find information outside of the highly curated and very narrow range of “news” we get fed daily.
Back to Electability. Why would I not vote for the candidate who most closely matches my priorities and who champions programs that I believe are important? Why would I forsake a candidate like that because an unseen, unknown someone else—or an unseen, unknown group of someones—tells me I need to back the candidate deemed electable?
Didn’t Trump’s candidacy and tenure as POTUS blow up this idea of Electability? By any traditional calculus, Trump was nobody’s idea of electable; pundits were falling all over themselves making fun of him; Jeb Bush had been crowned with the Electable tiara in the 2016 Republican nominee race. He had donor money, the full support of Republican party heavyweights, and the oligarchic imprimatur of Bushness--being part of a family that had already had two of its own in the White House.
Trump lost the Iowa caucus, and despite his Inelectability, he won the Republican nomination and the presidency.
Bizarro world, yes. But I understand it to mean that the American electorate is tired of being told what to think, what to choose. Which would punch some holes into the Electability idea because it completely rests on voters being told, “This one’s electable; vote for it,” and acting accordingly. Noncompliance shoots the project to hell.
We can’t know who is Electable because who gets elected—and to some extent, why—is unknowable. Unless you have secret Xray glasses that allow you to see into the hearts and minds of every voter in the country.
Nearly half of eligible voters didn’t vote in the 2016 presidential election. Maybe some of those people were just too tired after a day of work or caring for their families to get to a polling place (we could help out there by making Election Day a national holiday); maybe some didn’t feel that the elections had relevance to their lives; and maybe some people just didn’t like their options.
I’ve written about this before—I hate multiple choice questions, particularly when all the options are lousy. That’s why I favor sortition, and I give to the Sortition Foundation instead of donating to a political campaign.
My point is this: We have so little opportunity in the U.S. to really experience direct democracy, and we have even less opportunity to influence representational democracy. We should vote for whomever we choose, free of the bullying by media and political talking heads that want us to buy into the Electability fairy tale.