According to a new poll, Democratic voters are more interested in a candidate who can assuredly beat Donald Trump than in one who aligns with all of their values. It's a narrow majority, 54 percent, but it's a majority nonetheless. Per NBC News:

The poll from Monmouth University found that an unusually large number of Democratic voters are prioritizing "electability" over values as they begin to think about whom to support in their 2020 presidential primary.

"In prior elections, voters from both parties consistently prioritized shared values over electability when selecting a nominee," said Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. "It looks like Democrats may be willing to flip that equation in 2020 because of their desire to defeat Trump. This is something to pay close attention to when primary voters really start tuning into the campaign."

In a sense, this isn't surprising. As long as Trump has the White House set up as a gigantic Fox & Friends viewing room, Democrats have no chance of enacting any elements of a liberal or progressive agenda into law. And most Americans, regardless of partisan preference, are probably at the point where they'd vote for an already-opened jar of Nutella if it meant that jar would lead the country instead of Trump. But what exactly makes someone "electable"? As Alex Seitz-Wald at NBC News pointed out, Hillary Clinton was supposed to be the pragmatic, moderate, safe candidate in 2016, and she lost to the least "electable" Republican nominee imaginable.

Meanwhile, former Missouri senator Claire McCaskill—who has rapidly morphed into the party's chief anti-left-wing curmudgeon since losing her seat in 2018—shared a related statistic for her Democratic ex-colleagues vying to be president: In another poll, slightly more than than half of Democratic voters want the party to be "more moderate" rather than "more liberal."

But things are muddier than this stat makes them seem. The same Pew poll McCaskill cites also shows that an overwhelming majority of Republican voters want their party to become more conservative. From these results, you might reasonably conclude that the savviest Democratic candidates will spend the next 18 months trying to convince voters that they are best positioned to keep moderate Democrats in the tent, while also coaxing those few Republican voters who want their party to be "more moderate" to come inside, too.

Polling policy preferences, however, tells a different story than polling political inclinations. While self-proclaimed centrist Howard Schultz is out here calling a 70 percent marginal tax rate on income over $10 million a "far left" idea, polling data shows more Americans support it than oppose it (45 percent versus 32 percent). Elizabeth Warren's "wealth tax" on households worth more than $50 million—a concrete proposal to enact such a proposal into law—is even more popular: 61 percent of all voters, 74 percent of Democrats, and even 50 percent of Republicans are in favor. Only 21 percent of people polled oppose it.

What McCaskill misses is that all these terms are relative. At this point, raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans is a centrist, moderate position. So is climate change, about which Americans across the political spectrum are worried by a 2-to-1 margin. Another poll finds that a majority of Americans support raising the minimum wage. Still another found that 70 percent support Medicare for All. A whopping 80 percent of voters would support something like the Green New Deal. The notion of remaking the American economy over the next ten years is definitely ambitious, but it is not fringe.

Rather than fretting over which political and ideological boxes voters put both candidates and themselves into, a much better and less-maddening strategy seems to be "run on substantive issues, dammit." Figuring out beforehand whether those issues are sufficiently "moderate" or too "liberal" is a ridiculous guessing game that says more about the person guessing than it does about what voters actually want and value.