Lots of liberals and Democrats are coming to the realization that defeating the most-hated president since George W. Bush isn’t going to be easy, and just as with W, might not happen at all. Most of them have identified the wrong reasons for that. It’s not the split in the Democratic Party, it’s not the Electoral College. It’s human psychology.
Researchers have known for some time now that when people are confronted with too many choices, they have great difficulty making a decision. For example, marketers have found that consumers can only process seven possible choices at a time. A greater number than that leads to indecision, unhappiness, and even suppresses purchases — some people cope by making no choice at all.
It’s not hard to see how that translates to the Democratic primary field. Some commenters have in the past few days mentioned the lack of enthusiasm for any of the dozen-plus contenders — exactly what researchers learned by studying the cereal and soft drink aisles in your grocery store.
As behavioral scientist Lilly Kofler pointed out in a Politico piece today, the situation is likely to lead to lower voter turnout.
We saw a demonstration of this so-called “cereal aisle effect” in the Chicago mayoral race, where a crowded, diverse, and qualified field of 14 candidates without prohibitive frontrunners coincided with almost the lowest turnout in city history at 33.4 percent. … An abundance of marginal candidates will make it harder for Democratic primary voters to comfortably evaluate the candidates with realistic chances of winning—and paradoxically that will reduce enthusiasm for the party’s eventual nominee.
She doesn’t bring it up, but I would argue that too many choices among similar candidates is why Donald Trump was able to vanquish the 16 actual politicians he ran against for the Republican nomination in 2016.