Joe Biden’s successful entry into the 2020 presidential race has occasioned a great deal of discussion about what it means for a candidate to be “electable.” Many observers have pointed out that the label is being deployed in the Democratic primary as a weapon against female candidates or candidates of color—and that the results of the 2018 midterms and the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections suggest that the assumption that white men are the most electable candidates is erroneous.

These are valid criticisms of the concept of electability. On Monday, an Axios post about a focus group in Iowa illustrated a completely different one. To understand it, let’s first revisit the comments in Nancy Pelosi’s New York Times 2020-focused interview from last weekend about how Democrats must avoid alienating moderate voters, comments that mostly flew under the radar because the rest of the article was about impeachment:

“Own the center left, own the mainstream,” Ms. Pelosi, 79, said. “Our passions were for health care, bigger paychecks, cleaner government — a simple message,” Ms. Pelosi said of the 40-seat Democratic pickup last year that resulted in her second ascent to the speakership. “We did not engage in some of the other exuberances that exist in our party” — a reference to some of the most ambitious plans advocated by the left wing of her party and some 2020 candidates, including “Medicare for all” and the Green New Deal, which she has declined to support.

Pelosi, a woman who has helped many other women get elected, probably doesn’t think electability is about being a man. She frames it instead as a matter of not getting too far “left” on policy—something that allegedly risks losing swing voters in the moderate middle mainstream.

Now here’s Axios in Iowa:

A focus group of swing voters — all of whom voted for Trump in 2016 — strongly supported a student loan debt plan that would cancel up to $50,000 in student debt for people whose families make less than $100,000 per year. (That’s Elizabeth Warren’s proposal, though her name wasn’t mentioned in the question.)

The same voters were also enthusiastic about a hypothetical proposal to fund federal infrastructure spending by taxing big banks, which is not something Warren has specifically suggested but is definitely something I can imagine she would suggest.

In other words, actual swing state swing voters who went for Trump in 2016 seem to be OK with left economics—an anecdotal result that’s in line with years of polling that has found that durable majorities of voters support fiscally liberal ideas like increasing taxes on high earners, creating a “public option” health-insurance program, and significantly raising the minimum wage. (Sometimes you’ll hear the necessity of appealing to “moderates” brought up in reference to suburbs rather than the Rust Belt, but lefty economic ideas didn’t prevent Democrat Katie Porter, a consumer-advocacy expert and literal protege of Warren’s, from winning in 2018 in Orange County, California, home to what have long been thought of as some of the most liberalism-hostile suburbs in the country.)

There is, however, abundant evidence that one particular group of Democratic voters is turned off by soak-the-rich policies, and they’re clustered in the country’s top-earning zip codes. As a January Politico article, an April 16 CNBC.com article, and an April 28 New York magazine article have made clear, Democratic donors on Wall Street have a very firm opinion on which candidates are too ideologically extreme. “It can’t be Warren and it can’t be Sanders,” the CEO of a “giant bank” told Politico; the other pieces are similarly stocked with alarmed quotes from finance-types about the possibility of either becoming the nominee. A Variety article in March, meanwhile, noted that “populist rhetoric” espoused by some primary candidates “may not be music to the ears of entertainment executives,” citing the opinions of Disney CEO Bob Iger (who has a history with Bernie Sanders) and United Talent Agency co-president Jay Sures, who told the publication he was excited about the electoral potential of Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar because her positions on economic policy were “realistic” and “not pie in the sky.” (Klobuchar is currently pulling zero percent in some polls.)

Advocacy for left-leaning fiscal programs is clearly not the only thing that voters, even Democratic partisans, are looking for—if is was, Biden wouldn’t be leading the primary polls. But neither is there evidence that it’s a disqualifying turnoff to voters outside the very top income brackets. (And even some of those individuals, Politico and Variety have noted, take pride in being “’traitors’ to their class” and supporting candidates like Sanders and Warren.) It makes sense that Pelosi is worried about electability—beating Donald Trump is, you know, a worthwhile priority—and it is, in fact, true that campaigns require money, which has to come from somewhere. But especially in an era in which small-donor online fundraising can be hugely effective, it would be dubious to let “who bankers and entertainment CEOs feel comfortable with” define what electability means when there’s so much evidence that their interests aren’t actually that widely shared.