The whole idea muddles more than it clarifies. Consider the leaders of the 2020 field. The candidate most favored by voters who prioritize electability is Joe Biden: a moderate, appealing to middle of the road voters who want our partisan divisions bridged and political norms restored much more than they favor any particular policy program. He also has considerable baggage. Beyond whatever controversies Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine might bring to a general election, Biden can also expect intense scrutiny over his mental fitness and any gaffes he might make on the campaign trail. He could also face the same struggle to juice turnout among the Democratic base as his primary rivals.

Turnout, of course, is central to the electability case for Bernie Sanders, who believes the Democratic electorate can be expanded with disengaged voters, young people, and some Trump supporters, all drawn to his candidacy by ambitious policies like Medicare for All, which would materially benefit the working class. But it’s often said that Sanders’s leftism might turn off the middle-class suburbanites and moderate voters who were integral to Democrats taking the House in 2018. Elizabeth Warren, just to the right of Sanders on policy, does better with more affluent voters but is thought to be too progressive for some and is wrestling with the aforementioned worries about gender. Pete Buttigieg, a man and a moderate, isn’t, and has demonstrated real pull with the same sort of more affluent, educated voters with whom Warren is strong. His lack of experience, however, could fuel doubts about his competence, and he has struggled, moreover, to win black voters—a hurdle some have shakily tied to his sexual orientation. Those worried about this might be willing to consider another white, male moderate—a straight one, with more support among African American voters. This, naturally, brings us back to Joe Biden … and so on.

This is a discourse incapable of producing anything beyond recursive guesswork—hypotheticals within suppositions that send us pacing in circles over questions that no election can actually resolve. The victory or defeat of any given candidate does not foreclose the possibility that they might have performed differently under slightly different circumstances and cannot tell us conclusively whether another candidate might have done better or worse. The 2016 election race drew us close, but not close enough, to understanding this. Any politically engaged person today can rattle off a list of factors that might have tilted the race: Russian interference, irresponsible coverage of the Clinton email scandal, Trump’s omnipresence on cable television, James Comey’s eleventh-hour machinations, the Clinton campaign’s inattention to the Rust Belt. Yet the politically engaged have also taken to believing that electability is a stable and perhaps even measurable quality innate to the candidates themselves. This belief persists despite the victory, in that election, of a man who was widely considered one of the most unelectable candidates ever to seek the presidency. Now many of the sages who rendered that judgment have reconvened to tell us Donald Trump can only be beaten by someone matching a profile—white, male, moderate—that has not won Democrats the presidency in 24 years.

It might work this time around. It also might not. All we can be reasonably sure of is the persistence of a dynamic that Trump’s nomination and election brought into relief—given partisan polarization, and assuming the absence of a strong third-party challenge, just about any candidate from one of our two major political parties can reliably expect to win the support of about half the electorate. Different camps within the Democratic Party have put together plausible theories on what might put one candidate or another over the top in the states and regions necessary to prevail in the electoral college. But these are hermetic arguments that could run up against a variety of competing factors—from unforeseeable world events to the state of the economy to the competence of each campaign organization—once the general election leaves the world of abstraction. The extremely early relevant numbers that we have, the candidate favorability and head-to-head matchups, don’t tell us anything more than what we should already know: We are in for a close race, and the leading Democratic candidates are competitive with Trump.