The Economist crunched data from various studies and found that a moderate would be the party’s best chance to defeat Donald Trump in November.

Via The Economist:

This research suggests, then, that Mr Biden could perform better than his competitors against Mr Trump. He is more moderate than Mr Sanders, so both more likely to attract swing voters and less likely to motivate Republicans to vote against him. His strength with both black and racially conservative white voters could make a big difference in swing states. Recent polling from the New York Times and Siena College suggests that 6% of the electorate would vote for Mr Biden—but not for Elizabeth Warren—against Mr Trump.

His advantage is evident in polls. According to The Economist’s analysis of publicly released polling data, Mr Biden performs better against Mr Trump than his competitors, nationwide and in swing states. Although polls of the general election conducted this early before a contest are not perfect, they are still helpful.

Mr Biden is not faultless. He is uninspiring on the stump and in debates. His Washington ties may inspire resentment from voters skeptical of elites. His candidacy would also represent a safety-first strategy for the Democrats at a time when many in the party desperately want to push a much more progressive economic, racial and social agenda. Yet for all that he still appears to be the Democrats’ best option in a contest against Mr Trump.

Trump is attacking Biden because he is the Democrat who poses the biggest threat
Joe Biden is the example used in the article, but the same principle applies to all of the moderate Democrat. Trump is extreme. The formula for beating a political extremist isn’t to navigate to the opposite extreme.

Trump has abandoned the political middle, and it would be a foolish mistake for Democrats to believe that they could nominate any of their candidates and beat Trump. If Trump runs against someone on the far left, he will wrap himself in patriotism, and paint his opponent as the extremist.

Election Day turnout will be smaller because people in the middle will stay home instead of choosing between a candidate on the right, and a candidate on the left. A base election helps Trump and the Republican Party.

A moderate can beat Trump with a promise to end the crazy and bring the presidency and the nation back to normal. Beating an incumbent president is difficult, but according to the research, a moderate gives Democrats their best chance to win in 2020.

One factor in Sanders’s success is how little scrutiny he has faced from rivals on the campaign trail and the debate stage. Media accounts that catalogue Sanders’s atypical history and decades-old comments are easy to find for anyone who cares to look. But no one knows how Sanders will fare when Democratic or Republican rivals attack him in a high-profile fashion, which to this point no one has seriously done.

Democrats face a classic collective-action problem. The party has a strong interest in publicly vetting Sanders before he becomes its nominee, but no candidate wants to be the one to go negative on him. Instead, as with Donald Trump’s Republican opponents in 2016, other Democratic candidates are seemingly hoping to pick off Sanders voters during the primary season, or at least attract their support in November, without doing the dirty work of criticizing his record. Attacks that appear to echo potential Republican talking points are especially likely to go unsaid. As a result, large numbers of voters may not learn about Sanders’s vulnerabilities and how they might be exploited in a general election until much later in the race.

The lack of scrutiny of Sanders dates back to 2016. Despite his long career in politics, Sanders was a little-known outsider before his presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton. His unexpectedly strong showing in that race made him a national figure with an unusually positive public image. Why? Few politicians ever criticized him. Sanders never seriously threatened Clinton’s hold on the nomination, so she mostly held her fire, preferring to try to keep his voters in the fold for November. Republicans largely withheld criticism as well, presumably appreciating his refusal to withdraw from the race and hoping to run against him rather than Clinton in the general election.

These attacks will come, however, if Sanders is the Democratic nominee. Any candidate will face attacks, of course, but for contenders like Sanders who have been insulated from previous criticism, the potential for damage is especially great.,,,,

Moreover, though Democratic candidates don’t want to make this point in the primary race, attacks on Sanders’s praise of socialist and communist governments are likely to be especially damaging when paired with criticism of his policy proposals as big-government socialism. Even Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who once assiduously sought to prevent Sanders from getting to her left, has realized the risks of Sanders’s plan to move all health care to a single-payer system and has started to edge away from the idea. Only 20 percent of voters — and just 37 percent of Democrats — say they would be enthusiastic about voting for a socialist for president.

Labels like “socialist” are abstract and poorly understood by most voters, of course; some of Sanders’s policies are indeed popular. But the penalty for extremism is real. When ideologically extreme candidates narrowly defeat moderates for a party nomination, the political scientists Andrew Hall and Daniel Thompson find, they perform more poorly in the general election, in part because they inspire the other party’s base more than their own. For instance, former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, a hard-right conservative, barely beat the Republican governor in the 2018 gubernatorial primary before losing the general election to a Democrat by five percentage points.

Trump might seem to be a counterexample, but Sanders will struggle to replicate his success. It’s true that Trump won the White House despite having unusually high unfavorable ratings and a personal background that many voters considered disqualifying. Like Trump, Sanders would surely benefit from the strong pull of party loyalty, which can help counter the doubts of some potential supporters. But Trump had a key advantage: Voters in 2016 saw him as unusually moderate, which helped him overcome those record unfavorable numbers. Though the public now sees Trump as more conservative than in the last election, it views Sanders as even more distant from the center.

Besides his socialist positions, Sanders also has a long paper trail of writings and statements about sex, gender and race that have received relatively little attention but are likely to provoke far more controversy if he wins the nomination. In one 1969 essay, for instance, Sanders wrote that the “manner in which you bring up your daughter with regard to sexual attitudes may very well determine whether or not she will develop breast cancer, among other things.” And does his diverse coalition of young supporters know he once compared workers in Vermont to slaves?