Mellman: Primary elections aren’t general elections

The national disaster that is Donald Trump has focused Democrats on finding a candidate who is electable, one who can defeat the president in November.

A recent poll from Monmouth University found 56 percent preferring a candidate who would be strong against Trump, even if respondents disagree with that candidate on most issues. Just a third are inclined to support a contender with whom they are aligned on the issues, if that person would have a hard time beating Trump.

According to poll director Patrick Murray, this is a first. “In prior elections, voters from both parties consistently prioritized shared values over electability. … It looks like Democrats may be willing to flip that equation in 2020 because of their desire to defeat Trump.”

Electability, however, is difficult to demonstrate definitively.

Each candidate puts forward a case for themselves. Some have won in red places, others promise to mobilize new voters, but all argue they are uniquely able to defeat Trump.

Now, with voters actually casting ballots, campaigns are trying to spin their primary victories into evidence of electability in the general.

Asked about the electability of his boss, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) communications director Mike Casca chuckled and replied, “Hard to think of a better measure of electability than winning the first two states.”

Casca is not the first to make such an argument, nor he will he be the last. However, history makes clear that, while tempting, such contentions are fundamentally flawed.

Being able to win a state in a primary or caucus has little to do with being able to win it in a general election.

American hero and anti-Vietnam War leader George McGovern won nomination contests in 21 states in 1972. In the general election, he lost 20 of those states.

Primaries’ inability to predict general election results has been evident more recently as well.

In the 2016 general election, Hillary Clinton lost half the states where she won primaries and caucuses.

2012’s general election found Mitt Romney losing 22 of the 39 states he won on his way to the nomination.

Primary results fail to foretell those in the general election quite regularly.

John Kerry began his 2004 march to the nomination with a come-from-behind victory in Iowa, only to lose the state to George W. Bush.

In 2000, the loser of New Hampshire’s Republican primary (Bush) beat the winner of the Democratic primary (Al Gore) in that state’s general election.

The evidence is overwhelming: Trying to predict general election outcomes from primary results is a fool’s errand.

Using primary results within demographic subgroups to project general election outcomes is equally faulty.

The most important political fact about anyone who votes in a primary is not his or her level of education, income or even party registration. Rather, the key point of differentiation is the very fact he or she chose to vote in a partisan primary.

Young people who voted in the Democratic primary are importantly different from young people who did not. Assuming that those who did not vote in the primary will behave like those who did, ignores their most salient difference.

In 2016, Clinton lost primary voters under 30 by a vast 44-point margin. Did that portend big trouble for her with young voters in the general election?

No. She won them handily.

By contrast, Clinton beat Sanders by 28 points among those who earned a high school diploma or less. Nevertheless, in the general, Trump defeated her in that segment.

Because Democrats desperately want to know who the strongest candidate will be, our desire to read tea leaves is insatiable—and so we read too much into each leaf we happen upon.

Sometimes, though, tea leaves are just shriveled foliage in the bottom of a cup, and nothing more.

Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has helped elect 30 U.S. senators, 12 governors and dozens of House members. Mellman served as pollster to Senate Democratic leaders for over 20 years, as president of the American Association of Political Consultants, and is president of Democratic Majority for Israel.