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If you want to vote for Bernie Sanders because you feel good about his program, because you don't like the banks on Wall Street or you don't like pharmaceuticals, that's completely legitimate.

But understand that. If you voting for him because you think he'll win the election because you'll galvanize here to four sleepy parts of the electorate, then politically you're a fool.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Weeds on the Box Media Podcast Network. I'm Matthew Eglaceus, joined today by Ezra Klein.

This is part of we are going to be doing the Weeds on Saturday, at least through the election campaign, alternate weeks. You'll hear me and Ezra talking about campaign 2020 and the election season.

And that's going to be switching with interviews by Jane Kostin with some of the thinkers and actors, movers and shakers in the conservative world. So we are trying to do more weeds.

All weeds, everything related to that. I do want to make a quick job announcement, which is not specifically weeds, but is a weedish set of topics. So we are hiring for a politics reporter and a race reporter at Vox or some other jobs up as well, but those are specifically ones I want to push to the weeds audience.

Those jobs will only be open for applications for another week or two, depending. So go to Vox media.com such careers or just go to Vox media.com and find the careers tab and you'll see them again. We're hired for a politics or a race reporter.

We are opening people from non traditional backgrounds. We want people from diverse backgrounds. So if you have been interpreting these issues somehow, if you're a political scientist or an academic and you want to make a jump to journalism, we do need experience in the fields, but that does not need to be specifically journalistic experience.

So go check out Vox media.com such careers, whether you have the journals experience something else. We just want somebody who's going to be great at figuring out what are some of the central topics in American life.

All right. So one to talk today about the primary about the Bernie Sanders panic. And one thing that's interesting to me is you might have thought that people would be panicking that Bernie Sanders is a woolly socialist who will wreck the country with his socialism.

And of course, Republicans will say that. But when I talk to Democrats around town or you hear the takes on the internet that is not really what people are saying about him. Instead, they are very concerned that he will lose the election to Donald Trump. And then this electability conversation.

I feel like winds up getting structured around excessive absolutes of language. So you'll have some people you see like James Carville who's being very entertaining about this. He's like absolute guaranteeing that Bernie Sanders can't win an election.

Or then I read Jamel Booy making the case for Sanders in the New York Times. And he has a line where he says, you know, some people say Bernie is unelectable, but that's wrong. He can win.

And I think, you know, the beginning of wisdom on this is that Bernie Sanders definitely can win. There's nobody who is unelectable in the strong sense of the word where like it is inconceivable that they would win a presidential election.

As a you have a good book about polarization. There is a lot of polarization. And because of that polarization, anyone who wins a major party nomination, like really might win, right?

Let me talk about this for a minute, because I think one thing we want to do here is use the Bernie Sanders electability conversation to talk about electability and how it's changing and what we actually know about it for a bit. So it's important to recognize that this conversation happens in the shadow of 20th century.

American politics. And one thing that happened a couple of different times in 20th century American politics is the parties nominated somebody who is understood to be quite far relative to their normal candidates to the left or the right in that person got wiped out.

So famously it happened to Republicans with very goldwater in 1964. And remember, they didn't just lose the presidency that year. They had a down ballot massacre where they lost a huge number of state legislatures, house seats, Senate seats.

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