Pretending to Know Things You Don’t Know Is Not A Sound Basis For Action

To follow up on my post yesterday, Ygelsias has an excellent post on why the DCCC should both stay out of primaries and shouldn’t bail on races it otherwise thinks is winnable because the “wrong” candidate wins the primary:

That attacks on Moser backfired is a reminder that the political judgment of the pros in Washington is flawed, and both narrative history and broad quantitative research shows that their ability to accurately identify which races are winnable and which candidates are worth backing is sharply limited.

Back on June 12, 2006, Stu Rothenberg wrote an update for the then-authoritative Inside Elections website about “surprising good” news for Republicans out of California primaries. What news? Well, “in the 11th district, Democrats nominated Jerry McNerney over the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s preferred candidate, airline pilot Steve Filson.” Rothenberg allowed that “McNerney is a nice man, and he deserves a lot of credit for defeating Filson, who had the backing of powerful state and national Democratic insiders” but explained that realistically, “McNerney is simply too far to the left to knock off Pombo in this district, and he doesn’t project the kind of persona that a challenger needs to win against an incumbent.”

The DCCC walked away from the race, but McNerney won anyway. Then he won again in 2008, won narrowly — this time with enthusiastic DCCC support as a frontliner — in 2010, and is still serving in Congress today. And he wasn’t alone.

Carol Shea-Porter and John Hall, like McNerney, won their races despite being abandoned by the DCCC. Shea-Porter is stepping down from her seat next year, and Hall lost in the 2010 wave. Larry Kissell was abandoned by the DCCC, lost in 2006, but then won in 2008 (this time with DCCC support) and even survived the 2010 midterms, only to fall victim to redistricting in 2012.

Observers on the left of the Democratic Party tend to paint these turns of events in rather dark, sometimes conspiratorial terms (Ryan Grim at the Intercept is the most skilled and persuasive chronicler of this viewpoint).

A more generous interpretation would simply be that the DCCC pros just aren’t as smart as they like to think they are. That’s why even when their goals are clear, as they were in the TX-7 primary when the DCCC was trying to take Moser out but seems to have accomplished the reverse, they don’t reliably get the job done.

[…]

It’s easy to say the DCCC should have been more clairvoyant about these national trends. It’s also easy for people with factional concerns to cherry-pick specific races and argue that their favored brand of candidate would be winning everywhere.

The real truth, however, is that politics is hard to predict. Extensive empirical research shows that it matters less than you might think whether a party goes with an “electable” moderate.

[…]

This suggests primary voters should probably be inclined to vote for candidates who they think will be smart, hard-working advocates for causes they believe in rather than focusing too much on “electability” concerns.

It’s natural, in particular, for a national party committee whose work heavily features fundraising to be strongly biased toward candidates who are good at fundraising. But there’s very little evidence that this is genuinely the key to political success (Donald Trump, for example, was a terrible fundraiser in 2016), and overemphasis on donor-friendly candidates ends up putting a thumb on the ideological scale in an unseemly way.

The best approach is probably to relax a bit more, be more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, and back whoever the local process coughs up.

There are two related problems here. First, even in local races structural factors matter more and candidate quality and tactics matter less than both (self-interested) political consultants and pundits think. And second, even to the extent that candidate quality matters, there are many obvious difficulties with evaluating it both ex ante and ex post, despite the enormous and unjustified confidence people tend to place in their own judgments about both. Primary voters will certainly make mistakes, but so will party elites — democracy is the worst system except for all the others.