Democratic voters want to know how this all ends. They’re fixated on electability, which is notoriously hard to gauge. You have to guess what other people will think several months in the future, with no idea what will happen in between. Prioritizing electability in presidential elections led Democrats to nominate John Kerry, while ignoring it led them to nominate Barack Obama. “Voters are not very good at predicting electability,” summed up pollster Patrick Murray. But despite this obsession, Democrats are whistling past one enormous threat to the electability of the Democratic nominee: a long and divisive primary.

Giving your opponent a big head start, during which he can spend his effectively unlimited sums of money while wielding the power of incumbency and the bully pulpit of the presidency, is bad for electability. Trump doesn’t need to know who his opponent is to start running ads promoting himself and building the grassroots infrastructure he needs in swing states. He has already started, prompting Dan Pfeiffer, a senior strategist on President Obama’s 2012 re-election race, to raise the alarm. Pfeiffer would know, since the Obama campaign did to Romney what Trump is doing to Democrats now. “The Obama campaign ran its first reelection television ad in January 2012. Trump has been running digital ads for months,” Pfeiffer warned, back in April 2019. “This has given him extraordinary running room to strengthen his standing with both his base and his persuasion universe.”

Even in 2008, John McCain had a months-long head start, winning the nomination in March and taking the lead over Obama in polls, while it took Obama until June to beat Hillary Clinton. Put simply, there’s just not much evidence that long primaries are ever good, and a lot of evidence that they’re bad—potentially, very bad: a 2016 study found that long primary races cost the eventual nominee 6 to 9 points in the November election and reduced their odds of winning by 21 percent.

And yet, a long primary is exactly where electability-obsessed Democrats are headed. It’s a case of paralysis by analysis on a mass scale, a slow-motion indecision that is leaving voters polarized between the progressive candidates they love and the moderate ones they think they have to accept in order to beat Trump. “Usually in the primary I vote for whoever I like the most, but this one I will put in electability,” a New Hampshire carpenter told the New York Times.

But while the moderates are selling themselves as the safe choices, they’re far more likely than the progressives to lead Democrats down the risky road of a long, divisive primary. This isn’t 1996—we’re not dancing the Macarena at the convention and the moderates aren’t the unity candidates—the progressives are. The party has shifted leftward, with self-identified liberals making up the largest share of the party in seventeen years. All the energy, enthusiasm, and grassroots support lies with the progressives, who can raise ungodly sums of money without attending a single fundraiser. To borrow Chris Rock’s analysis, they are the “of the moment” candidates, not the “it’s my turn” ones—and the of the moment candidates win. The sooner Democrats realize that, the faster they can unify the party and turn their attention to beating Donald Trump.

The road to perdition starts by wishing away what happened in the last presidential election. On April 30, 2015, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy on the grassy field on the east side of the Capitol Building, nicknamed the Swamp. I was working in the Senate at the time and walked by to check it out. Hundreds of reporters were sitting in the press galleries inside, just a few dozen steps away, but only a handful bothered to come outside to cover his announcement. Within a few months, everything had changed: he rocketed to international prominence on the strength of his message, sparking a grassroots movement to challenge the establishment attempt to anoint former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the nominee.