Jonathan Chait: “The appeal of the electability argument, despite the absence of any solid evidence for it, is that it allows Trump skeptics to avoid making any moral case against Trump. It is probably a correct calculation that a party dominated by Trump admirers will not support a candidate who believes Trump has done anything worse than occasionally write a ‘mean tweet.’”
“But the single-minded focus on electability is not merely a communications strategy. It is also a way of establishing moral boundaries within the party. And the message sent by focusing on Trump’s electability is that the only problem with his behavior is that it reduces the party’s chances of obtaining power. If Trump does win the nomination, which now appears extremely likely, the electability argument leaves no room for abandoning him; to the contrary, it creates a permission structure for Trump skeptics to once again support him as the lesser evil.”
“‘Electability,’ even if it was factually persuasive, is a morally empty, de minimis critique of a nakedly authoritarian figure. The Republican calculation through every step of the Trump era has been to avoid the short-term cost of a party split and shrink its differences with his base to the smallest possible level. They couldn’t bear to break irrevocably with him after he won the 2016 nomination, or at any time during his crime spree of a presidency, or even after the insurrection. And now he has obtained total mastery of the party.”
