How to Evaluate a US Presidential Candidate

I see a lot of people making claims about how left wing or progressive various Democratic candidates or potential candidates are. Most of the time, I think these claims are flimsy. Commentators like to judge candidates on three core metrics:

  1. The rhetoric they use–whether the candidate talks in a way that makes the commentator feel good.
  2. The policies they claim to support–whether the candidate has gotten behind particular policies, like Medicare For All, Green New Deal, Abolish ICE, or whatever floats your boat.
  3. Their identity–whether the candidate is a person of color and/or a woman and/or LGBTQIA+

I want to argue that these metrics are largely useless. Instead, I want to give you a much better toolkit for assessing candidates–one that most journalists don’t know how to use.

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