A smarter person would listen to people who have real experience moving the political levers. Historians and “political scientists” arent those people.
You know who one of those people is? George Clooney. He has gotten democrats elected to office. He’s done the job of picking winners and losers. You are kind-of an idiot to ignore first-order people involved-in-the process people and to weight third-order armchair opinions more heavily.
Clooney will actually move people to support or not support a candidate. Physically. He will go knock on their doors and ask them to run. He’ll give them the funds they need to do so.
(If political scientists are actual fucking scientists show me how they use falsifiability for hypothesis testing and then tell me which of their hypothesis have withstood the rigor of reproducibility)