An incapacity to understand and choose to appeal to a disparate electorate.

From Gavin Newsom is very similar to Kamala Harris by Matthew Yglesias.  The subheading is Two San Francisco local elected officials who successfully ran statewide in CA. 

Not much of a fan of Yglesias but he has some interesting points every now and then.  He spends some time establishing the parallels between the political careers of Harris and Newsom.  But his point is this.

To get to the Super Bowl, you need to win several playoff games against the N.F.L. teams with the best records. To get to the playoffs, you need to win a lot of regular season games. To become an N.F.L. player, you need to beat opposing football teams in college.

This is a pretty normal tournament-type structure, one that we see pretty frequently in a variety of contexts. Because the playoffs are single elimination, there’s no guarantee that the Super Bowl will feature literally the two best teams. But in a broad sense, the Super Bowl is a football game, and you make it to the Super Bowl by demonstrating skill at winning football games.

You could imagine a world where politics is like that, where a Democratic Party presidential nominee is normally someone with a lot of demonstrated skill at beating Republicans in elections, and a Republican Party presidential nominee is normally someone with a lot of demonstrated skill at beating Democrats in elections.

For that to be the case, though, you would need to live in a world where the typical election was highly competitive. And that’s actually not the world we live in. The vast majority of House members and state legislators hold seats that aren’t remotely competitive in a D vs. R sense. Senate races and governor’s mansions aren’t as skewed, but there are still tons and tons of safe seats out there. As a result, a politician can achieve an extremely prominent role in American politics — like governor of the largest state in the country — without ever winning a hard race against a Republican.

Its one thing to win competitively among competitors who are also intramural.  Real winning is at the varsity level where the competition draws from the broadest range of talent.

My point, though, is that going from holding statewide office in California to running in a national election is not like the A.F.C. champion going to the Super Bowl.

It is hard to win these jobs, and getting them involves a real display of political skill. But that skill is not beating Republicans in elections. It’s catering to Democratic Party insiders and affiliated advocacy groups and generating media buzz and endorsements. And this environment is a bad training ground for developing politicians who are good at beating the opposition party. It’s as if you took the winning team from the Champions League and then sent those players to the N.B.A. Finals on the theory that they’re top-notch athletes. You’re selecting on the wrong thing. And it shows.

Yglesias frequently uses the language of beating the Republicans but edges around what is to me the central issue - the capacity to understand and choose to appeal to a disparate electorate.  

I have lived in a deep blue city for decades.  The leading politicians are barely competent and often with the odor of corruption about them.  Yet they are lionized within the Democratic Party as rising stars in the party.  Rising stars whose celestial glow fades once they emerge from the cocoon of intramural mono-party political jostling.  Some crash and burn with convictions, others simply fade away quietly on ill-gotten gains.  

I have long commented that the failure of local City and County governance is primarily because there is little to no real multiparty political competition.  And that is broadly true.  But Yglesias is hinting at what might be the greater point.  An incapacity to comprehend and respond to the full spectrum of electorate interests rather than the narrow band with which those politicians are familiar.