Don’t vote for Biden as the most electable candidate. He isn’t.

Joe Biden has serious electability problems. Lau and Redlawsk’s How Voters Decide: Information Processing in Election Campaigns is one of the most important, and hardest to understand, books dealing with elections. One of the authors’ major thesis is that voters chose on two criteria, the ideology of the candidate and the net number of positive memories a voter has towards a candidate.

This chart is hard to understand but very important. It shows regression estimates for each ideology. D1 is a left-left Democrat (Bernie Sanders), D4 is a Republican lite Democrat (Bloomberg) and R4 is an authoritarian Republican (Trump). It shows the natural level of support ideological support against a candidate that is just a random name on the ballot.

The single most potent ideological alignment in the West is rightwing authoritarianism. The most powerful ideology on the left is the center-left, to the left of the party platform. The establishment left is the third most effective, trailing both the left-left and center-left. This is enough to eak out a close victory over most conservative candidates but gets absolutely shredded by authoritarianism.

The best candidate, from an ideology generates votes perspective, would be either Biden or Warren.

Right now, what is going on with Biden is the other half of this equation. Democrats have a large number of net positive memories of him as Obama’s VP. Net positive memories will not survive the Republican media machine. We already have the problem of Biden’s son serving on the board of a foreign corporation. Politico is reporting that his brother was in a questionable land deal with a lobbyist. Given the Republicans two datapoints like that and they will rip him apart as corrupt.

Further, Biden is not going to do well with swing voters. For ideological reasons, the establishment center of the party has defined a swing voter as somebody who is socially liberal and fiscally conservative. A study of the 2016 electorate found that the critical swing voter is socially conservative and fiscally liberal — in other words a racist who can be bought off.

Swing voters are not nice people. If their politics were likable, they would already be part of the Democratic coalition. We need a candidate that is going to faceup to the hard truth that we have had a White Nationalist revolution in America. If we don’t want to make concessions on civil rights (and we should not) we must accept who today’s swing voters have to be reached on an economic dimension. If you try to appeal to these folks as socially liberal but don’t offer to give them anything economic to make up for it, they are going to go for Trump.

From everything I have seen, Biden ran a very poor campaign in the first three states. He created video of himself telling voters to go vote for Trump. You can bet the Trump campaign is going to have that on constant replay should Biden become the nominee. Any candidate that would set himself up for something like that has deep problems with his electoral skills.

I would seriously recommend voting for somebody other than Biden in the primary.