High-profile Clinton supporters arguing she's the most electable are going about it the wrong way

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with arguing that your preferred candidate in a primary has a better shot at winning the general election than another candidate. General election strength is just like any other attribute: Some candidates will have more of it, some will have less, and it’s more than reasonable to base your decision on whom to support on this quality.

In fact, many folks would say it’s a very important factor, which is why some prominent backers of Hillary Clinton are giving it renewed attention now that Bernie Sanders is looking like a legitimate threat to win the Iowa caucuses. But there are both good ways and bad ways to go about making an electability argument, and some of these Clinton supporters are not going about this smartly. Indeed, some of what they’re saying might just backfire.

A new piece in the New York Times focuses in on the chief electability issue that these Clinton surrogates are now trying to raise: socialism—particularly, the notion that Republicans will eagerly remind voters that Sanders, should he emerge as the Democratic nominee, has called himself a democratic socialist and will pillory him for it.

There’s good reason to believe that this would indeed be an effective attack, since polling shows socialism to be a very unpopular concept among most Americans. Indeed, an October YouGov poll found that just 25 percent have a positive view of socialism while 47 percent see it negatively. Other polls have issued similar findings. Gallup’s respondents, for instance, gave socialism a 36 percent positive/58 percent negative rating back in 2010; last June, meanwhile, only 47 percent said they’d vote for “a socialist” for president while 50 percent said they wouldn’t. That made it by far the least popular candidate descriptor among a group that included “Jewish,” “a woman,” “gay or lesbian,” and “an atheist” (all of which earned majority support).