The Predictable, Ineluctable, Intractable ‘Electability’ Argument

NATHAN SAGE KNEW A FEW WEEKS AGO that his campaign for U.S. Senate was likely coming to an end. The 41-year-old Iowa Democrat was struggling to raise money. He wasn’t breaking through the crowded three-way race. And Democratic leaders in the state were starting to get nervous.

“People would call me and be like, ‘We’re gonna be left with fucking Zach Wahls,’” Sage told me, referring to the 34-year-old state senator who is one of the two remaining candidates in the Democratic primary now that Sage has dropped out. Wahls gained national attention when he was a teenager, after he delivered a viral speech in 2011 to the Iowa House of Representatives about his experience being raised by a lesbian couple. He is also, as Sage noted, from “the most blue area of the entire state.” And for that reason, “a lot of people across the Iowa Democratic Party know Zach is good where he’s at. He’s good in the [Iowa] Senate. . . . They don’t see him winning across the state, or connecting to voters across the state,” as he would have to do to win a U.S. Senate seat in the general election in November.

Sage, an Army and Marine Corps veteran who pitched himself as a working-class populist and political newcomer in the race, ultimately ended his primary campaign on Sunday. A day later, he endorsed Joshua Turek, a 46-year-old Paralympic gold medalist and state representative. Sage didn’t hold back his disdain for Wahls’s candidacy—telling me that although Wahls appealed to a national donor base, Iowa voters would ultimately see him as a “plastic human being and fake and artificial.”

In a statement, Wahls said that he was “disappointed that the Turek campaign feels the need to go so negative in this primary. . . . They know we’re winning and because we’re the only campaign that is truly a product of Iowa—for Iowa—and not manufactured by Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, or the D.C. establishment.”

If there is a hint of desperation in the way Sage and Wahls are talking about the race, that’s by design. Across Iowa, and even among national Democrats, there is a belief that nominating Wahls might mean forfeiting the party’s already challenging shot at flipping the seat. In August, state Rep. J.D. Scholten dropped out of the same U.S. Senate race and endorsed Turek. “I did not want to take away votes. I did not want to split things,” Scholten explained to me this week. “I’m so adamant about Turek, because he’s our best chance.”

ANXIETY OVER GETTING the most “electable” candidates across the finish line in primaries is not limited to Iowa. Although Democrats have cleared the field in a handful of top-tier Senate races—including Ohio, North Carolina, and Alaska—the contests in Texas, Iowa, Michigan, and Maine continue to be wild cards. In several cases, the candidates are pitching themselves as the most electable in the race. The issue facing the party—the one that is causing the current uneasiness—is due to the fact that no one can seem to agree on what that actually means in the second Trump administration.

The debate over electability within the Democratic political class has animated a months-long X feud and Substack argument among nerdy data analysts, who have invented a whole new online language—perhaps, most famously the term “WINS ABOVE REPLACEMENT,” also known as WAR, borrowed from sabermetrics—to talk about candidates’ electability. The debate has also inspired operatives to spend countless hours carefully dissecting social media clips and reading through TikTok comments to determine whether online vibes really can win over voters.

So what matters most to electability? What’s the best indicator? Is it the ability to raise small-dollar donations? Is it a mastery of social media and the attention economy? Is it a set of policy issues and a resume of votes that can appeal to a cross section of voters? Does it require backing electoral overperformers who’ve won in Trump districts?

Ideally, it would be all of the above. But that’s often not an option. And Democrats are now left trying to work through the tradeoffs—with the result that electability is often discussed like it’s one of those difficult-to-define, you’ll-know-it-when-you-see-it, je ne sais quoi sorts of thing.