Democrats are trying really hard to lose this election

Should Bernie Sanders become the Democratic presidential nominee, expect the media to overuse these sprightly English expressions: ‘between a rock and a hard place’, ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea’, ‘on the horns of a dilemma’ and ‘Morton’s fork’. After all, you wouldn’t call a Trump vs Sanders race a ‘Hobson’s choice’, which means ‘no choice’. Centrist voters would confront two options, all right — both of them dreadful.

The past few weeks, the firebrand socialist from Vermont has pulled ahead in the polls in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, and a Sanders pick has become more plausible. But for never–Trumpers, the selection of an American Magic Grandpa has become no more intelligent. The most unpopular leader in the country’s history, Trump should also be the most beatable incumbent of all time. You’d think that to lose the upcoming election Democrats would have to try awfully hard. Give my fellow party members their due: they’re trying really, really hard.

I asked my American husband point-blank whom he would vote for in a Bernie vs Donald election, and I’ve rarely seen him so paralysed. His face looked like that queasy little colour wheel you get when Apple laptops freeze, which threatens to hypnotise you into a zombie until you force-quit. He finally sputtered something about how New York going Democratic was a foregone conclusion, so it wouldn’t matter whom he voted for: flagrant conversational cheating. That evasion of resolving which candidate is the lesser evil wouldn’t help swing-state electorates, whose votes couldn’t matter more. In constituencies where the Lib Dems weren’t contenders, sane Remainers confronted a similarly confounding quandary in December. It must have been a bastard to determine whether Boris or Corbyn seemed more horrific.

I’m not the first to observe that for Democrats to opt for a wokey hard-left nominee would court electoral suicide, nor the first to rank electability as the top qualification in this of all contests.