Nevertheless, I continue to have my doubts about his vaunted "electability," for the simple reason that if the Democrats who voted for him today have convinced themselves that Kerry is "electable" and that's why they've voted for him (because they -- and we -- want so desperately to defeat Bush) it's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. They think he's electable, so they all vote for him, so everyone thinks he's electable. Unfortunately, it's yet to be established that the public at large, as opposed to primary-voting Democrats, concur in this assessment. In short, it could well be something of a mass delusion.

And then, a few days later:

Incidentally, I've referred in another post to the possibility that the meme of Kerry's "electability", which seems, according to media reports, to be the strongest factor inducing people to vote for him, may well be a kind of mass illusion. People think Kerry is electable, so they vote for him, which makes other people think he's electable and so on. Which is all well and good, and would work perfectly for Kerry to get elected if Kerry's electability was any kind of factor in the general election, which it really can't be, by simple logic. (Those for whom the electability of the Democratic candidate is paramount are those who will vote for the Democratic candidate anyway, pretty much whoever it is and in spite of any lack of their "electability", but the election won't be decided by those votes, obviously.)

Now Slate's William Saletan echoes these comments in an article examining Kerry's supposed "electability":

Is Kerry the most electable Democrat?

It's a hard question to answer, because most of the evidence is circular. If people support Kerry because they think he's electable, he goes up in the polls, which makes him look more electable. The best way to filter out this distortion is to focus on the voters least likely to make their decisions in November based on electability. These happen to be the same voters who hold the balance of power in most elections: independents, conservative Democrats, and moderate Republicans. They aren't principally trying to figure out which Democratic candidate can beat Bush, because they don't necessarily want the Democratic nominee to beat Bush. They're trying to decide which Democratic candidate, if any, would be a better president than Bush.

How well has Kerry done among these voters? In absolute terms, well enough. But in relative terms, the numbers show a disconcerting pattern. By and large, the closer you move to the center and center-right of the electorate, where the presidential race will probably be decided, the worse Kerry does. The opposite is true of Edwards.

Saletan follows up with some state-by-state analysis of the exit polls, and it's worth taking a look at what he comes up with.

I don't necessarily think that Kerry is not "electable" (whatever the hell that really means), nor that he might not be the most "electable" of the various candidates available to us. Certainly there's no doubt that John Kerry will garner more votes as the Democratic candidate than would Al Sharpton or Dennis Kucinich, and it seems clearer every day that he'd outpoll Howard Dean as well, but the ground is a lot muddier when we look at Kerry against what Wesley Clark might have been (if he had entered earlier and had a better campaign) or what John Edwards can be (see my comparison of their negative affordances). Kerry might be the most "electable", the best candidate to beat Bush, but his primary wins and the votes he received in them don't necessarily to anything to prove that.

At this point, with Clark withdrawn, I'm hoping that Dean with see reason and also withdraw after Wisconsin, assuming that (as I think will be the case) he will neither win there nor do well enough to jumpstart his campaign. Then I think John Edwards should do his very best to test Kerry, not by going negative against him, but simply by forcing him to run the best possible campaign for as long as possible.

Josh Marshall has written about Kerry's tendency towards complacency, and it took the dramatic insurgency of the Dean campaign to put some spine into all the other Democrats, so the last thing we want is for Kerry to be annointed and then slip back into his old habits. That would result in Kerry sliding into a media black hole where Bush, as current resident of the Oval Office, has the upper hand.

Better that, as I argued a couple of days ago, we keep this thing going for as long as we can, garnering as much media attention as we can (and a tight race will assuredly do that; even one that's not so close will attract good coverage for a while), and keeping the attacks on Bush in as high a profile as possible. Then, when (or "if', in the event that Edwards campaign catches fire) Kerry clearly has things wrapped up, he'll have to resist the temptation to relax, and instead take the general election campaign to Bush immediately. He can start by doing it through proxies, if he's concerned about wearing out his welcome, but we really cannot afford to give Bush even a moment's respite from the pressure. We need to continue to capitalize on his descending numbers.