It’s the summer, and fewer people read blogs over the summer. It’s true, and that means my traffic is down a bit. Fine. It happens. I promise I won’t pander or write fluff, but maybe things will get a bit more casual between now and August.
Truth be told, I’ve been thinking about which Democratic candidate is the worst. For awhile, it seemed to me it’s obviously Joe Biden. But let’s try to be more systematic about this.
Three Factors
It’s not just a matter of figuring out which candidate has the worst platform. For one, we have to figure out how those platforms translate into social impact. We might think about this, especially when we don’t think highly of the slate of candidate, in terms of reducing harm or being the ‘lesser evil‘. And so, the first factor I’m looking at is the candidate’s platform and how it would translate into impacting the world.
The second factor is something called ‘sincerity’. But I’m not entirely happy with that label for it. It’s a bit of a loaded term, and it’s not a perfect description. The basic idea is this. Candidates talk a good game, but will they work hard to achieve what they say they will? Do they really value the things they say they do, or will they compromise their vision or abandon it for something else?
And there’s a third factor here that’s easy to overlook. How good a chance does the candidate have of winning the nomination? For candidates like Mike Gravel or Wayne Messam, it doesn’t really matter how they score on the first two factors. They have literally zero chance of winning the nomination. And for that reason alone, they simply can’t be the worst candidate. You can’t harm the world as president if there’s no chance you’ll be president.
The Scale
I’m rating each candidate from 1 to 5 on the three factors above. ‘1’ is the best score, and ‘5’ is the worst score. Furthermore, I’m not going to just add the numbers up. Instead, I’ll multiply them. These three factors function more as intensifiers than as merely cumulative. They feed off each other, and I want scores that reflect this fact.
On to the interpretations…
Platform and Impact
1 = Positive. Candidates who would leave the world a better place than they found it.
2 = Neutral. Candidates who may work hard and have good intentions, but have enough negatives that they’d probably leave the world about as they found it.
3 = Mildly Negative. Candidates who would continue some Trump/W. Bush style policies and oppose others. Most generic liberal Democrats land here.
4 = Negative. Candidates who would actively leave the world worse off. Most generic moderate Democrats land here.
5 = Ruinous. Candidates who would cause harm on the scale of a George W. Bush or Donald Trump.
Sincerity
1 = Totally Committed. Candidates who hold to their principles more or less no matter what. No one is going to score here.
2 = Committed. Candidates who have a consistent platform across time and hold to their principles in the vast majority of cases.
3 = Generic Politician. Candidates who sometimes grandstand for the crowd or issue disingenuous statements, but are usually straightforward about where they stand.
4 = Frequently Disingenuous. Candidates who very significantly and/or frequently change their views to match those of interest groups, donors, and/or changing constituencies.
5 = Pants on Fire. Candidates who engage in Donald Trump-esque levels of dishonesty, flip-flopping, and/or bullshitting. No one is going to score here.
Chance of Winning the Nomination
0 = Effectively Zero. There’s no remotely plausible scenario where this person wins the nomination. Since zero multiplied by anything is zero, I drop these candidates from the results. If you look at the results below and your candidate is missing, that’s why.
1 = Very Low. Candidates who aren’t competitive, but who could become competitive in a not totally implausible future.
2 = Low. Candidates who could make a strong run, but probably won’t.
3 = Competitive. Candidates who are seriously competitive for the nomination, but still have some work to do.
4 = Very Competitive. Candidates who could win the nomination and no one should be at all surprised.
5 = Strong Frontrunner. Candidates who are the strong favorite to win the nomination.
Results
Okay, so who wins? Let’s take a look.
And the worst Democratic candidate is…Joe Biden!
Okay, so the result is exactly who we expected. Sometimes that happens. Why is Joe the worst? As with other Democratic moderates, he has a bad platform that would leave the world worse off than it is now. But I rated him as a bit less disingenuous than Booker, Buttigieg, Gillibrand, and O’Rourke.
Why? Because Biden pretty explicitly places himself in the moderate Democratic camp. Sure, he spouts bullshit from time to time, as most politicians do. But at the end of the day, he tells the voters directly that he’s running on a nostalgic anti-Trump platform. The candidates who scored worse on ‘sincerity’ than Biden routinely and explicitly pretend to be further to the left than their political histories suggest.
What puts Biden over the top as the worst candidate is the fact that he’s in a decent position to win the nomination. A candidate with a bad platform and a good chance at winning the nomination is much worse than one with a bad platform and little chance at the nomination (e.g., Klobuchar, Hickenlooper).
“Is Elizabeth Warren really worse than Hickenlooper?”
One funny implication is that it looks as though Warren comes out worse than people like Hickenlooper or Klobuchar. The only reason for this is that Warren might be the nominee, whereas those others have little chance. A President Hickenlooper would be a very bad thing for the country. But it’s extremely unlikely to happen. A Warren presidency wouldn’t be actively bad for the country, but it wouldn’t be especially good, either.
Translation
You can translate all of this into sentences, and I think those sentences are pretty descriptive.
For example, here’s the description of Kirsten Gillibrand: Gillibrand is a mildly negative, frequently disingenuous politician with a very low chance of winning the nomination. Here’s the one for Julián Castro: Julián Castro is a neutral, liberal Democratic politician with a very low chance of winning the nomination. And, finally, Kamala Harris: Kamala Harris is a mildly negative, liberal Democratic politician who’s competitive for the nomination.
I think that works pretty well. Perhaps not perfectly, but you can try it for the others, too.
Worse than Biden?
Based on these results, there’s one candidate who has the potential to be worse than Biden. And that’s Pete Buttigieg. Buttigieg is running on a platform that’s about as conservative as Biden’s. But the difference is that he’s more disingenuous than Biden. In particular, he’s very effective at convincing people he’s some kind of ‘progressive’, even though he clearly isn’t one.
All this means he’d be a very bad candidate if he were to jump to the lead in the polls. But while he has done surprisingly well in the polls for the mayor of a small city, he has a very low ceiling. His voter base is even more white than Elizabeth Warren’s. And he appeals almost entirely to people who are both highly educated and wealthy.
That’s not a recipe for winning the Democratic nomination. Because of this, I gave Buttigieg the same chance I gave to Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke. They’re two candidates who poll worse than Buttigieg, but they have more potential to gain new votes.
