It's a tautology?

Am I crazy? Someone tell me if I'm going crazy. Isn't that how causality works? Is there some fundamental fact about reality I'm missing?

It matters a lot if a plan was mistaken, or unlucky, or simply faced insurmountable obstacles.

I don't buy that when we're talking about Donald Trump, a man who is a fucking moron.

Okay, so you concede it’s not a tautology.

Maybe it's a fundamental disagreement. I think when you lose a contest against an opponent, it's because you made a mistake and your opponent played better. It doesn't matter how good you played up to losing. You lost.

This is fairly obviously disprovable in politics. There are no set of things a Dem candidate can do that could have them win in, say, Idaho.

There’s always fraud, not that I condone that or anything

This may be a useful attitude (my brother’s a big fan; he considers it a corrective to the temptation to rationalize errors) but taken categorically it’s simply analytically false.

As a toy example, you should always switch in Monty Hall. One third of the time you get the goat. That doesn’t mean it was a mistake to switch!

Do you think that the last election was held in a bell jar, utterly devoid of outside influences like global inflation or media slant?

If Picard lost against those Ferengi, I would think he probably did something wrong to lose.

Picard, notably, did not lose against the Ferengi.

Yeah but the election was rigged when it was decided that a coup attempt was not enough to disqualify a candidate

Rigged by who? Did Biden rig the election against himself by appointing a timid AG? Or did Trump bribe his way out of it? And if so, who did he bribe? It's too easy to say it's rigged - but the follow up questions matter just as much.

I mean, the Democrats not treating it seriously enough themselves are absolutely to blame. It’s just that by the time there was an election campaign at all it was already too late.

Most of Trump’s high ranking 2020 campaign staff should have been in prison with treason sentences before there was even another election to speak of

Nope. They’re garbage and belong in prison but not for treason.

They literally tried to overturn an election by lynching half of Congress

They literally tried to do a coup, just because they were too inept for that doesn’t exonerate them

Everybody who spoke at his Jan 6th rally should have spent the rest of their natural lives in Gitmo.

Not to even mention the 2016 ones that were left off the hook after colluding with Russia

This exactly. The bipartisan permission slip given for only having tried desultorily to overthrow the government.

There is a certain hard wisdom in the traditional response to a coup attempt.

In theory (although it's hard to say this about the Trump campaign), if you have two parties competing against each other, the loser can do an objectively fine job & still lose. Consider an Olympic speed race. You wouldn't say the Silver medal winner did a bad job.

Those races aren't binary contests, though. Elections are.

The opposition doesn't get a medal and a share of the prize money, they get frozen out while the majority does whatever sick shit they can think of.

This is true but I do not believe it changes my point about the loser's campaign not being necessarily "bad." This is a point often made to baby lawyers: when you go into court, one of you is going to lose. Period. Even if both of you present the most amazing legal case ever seen in this court.

By definition, doesn't that mean your case wasn't as good as you thought? It's either that, or some mitigating factor (in Ukraine, for example, you could say the judge is corrupt.) But election fraud has widely been ruled out. So what's the mitigating factor? He bribed half the electorate?

If you thought you had a good case but it was close, w/ good arguments on either side? If the facts were on your side, but the jury got confused because it was highly technical or they just didn't like what the law said?

But in those situations, who's judging whether you had a good case? Yourself? Opposing counsel? I imagine clients are generally upset when they lose, perhaps even when they're told that their lawyer presented a good case on their behalf.

Could be all your fellow attorneys who watched your performance... Another scenario that happens is a lawyer doing a very good job with an objectively bad case (happens in criminal defense a lot), but mission anyway. This might be analogous to Kamala fighting pervasive anti-incumbency sentiment. 1/

I mean, the biggest mistake was not putting Trump in prison immediately

Yeah the fail state was allowing people to vote for Trump period, or to let him be a free man after 1/6 (at least). The man launched an attempted coup, then was allowed to leave office & continue his activities for the next four years & even ignore his final explicit criminal convictions.

Like that's three quarters of the ballgame right there, a fatal arrogance. Crimes are not up for electoral dispute! Treason is disqualifying!

For all their faults, Peru and South Korea at least are sufficiently functional democracies to put their criminal ex-presidents behind bars

And that's on the judiciary which for varying reasons protected Trump from facing any consequences for his criminal behavior despite numerous and repeated attempts by Democrats to bring some.

The system was absolutely corrupted against that outcome

So with the note that I don’t think Kamala ran a particularly strong campaign, a lot acts on the outcome of a political campaign that the campaign itself has little control over.

2024 was a strongly anti-incumbent environment and Trump benefitted from an enormous amount of media whitewashing of both his allies and his own decline.

This is bad thinking. It's "outcome bias". the decision you make should be evaluated based on the information you had at the time and their overall chance of success. e.g. surgery with 1/100000 death rate to treat fatal disease, not "tautologically bad choice" in rare case where person dies

Sports also are full of outcome bias. Sometimes you generate a wide open 3 for a great shooter and it misses---does that mean that you made the wrong choice to shoot the wide open 3? No, you trust the process and generate it again next time you get the chance.

In sports the winners usually don't get the opportunity to form death squads and hunt you down in your own house. That changes the fundamental dynamic.

Really depends on the sport

Yes, but it also still means that you cannot judge the quality of a decision made under uncertainty from a single outcome. Maybe the Harris campaign wins 99% of the time and was nearly the best possible campaign, and we're in the 1% of universes where it doesn't win

You can try to dissect it a bit because we in fact have smaller scale experiments (e.g. swing in each district, where maybe different campaign choices were made), but ultimately it's very hard if not impossible to do a postmortem on a single campaign.

Not saying we shouldn't try to dissect it, but when we look at stuff, we need to have the epistemic humility to say "this is very fucking hard and it's really hard to know what will work next time".

Something like looking at individual House races is probably the better place to dissect strategies, but then the dynamics of a house race are hyper local whereas the dynamics of a presidential race are nationalized (but also restricted to just a few swing states). So not quite apples to apples.

I sincerely hope that all the smart and motivated people that work in presidential campaigns for the party I voted for is capable of doing at least some basic introspection on their actions and present an honest accounting, taking into account the unfolding events

Your binary is mistaken, I would argue. Look at Goldwater, or Farage. Often the goal isn't to win, it's to swing opinion and influence policy choices. And you also assume that every vote is winnable. Harris was trying to win, but I'm not certain that enough votes were winnable.

Okay, so it was fate?

History isn't fate. A population that's fueled by resentment, some justified some not, and a media landscape that's divided up the country as much as gerrymandering isn't fate. Perhaps Harris could have won. I'm not convinced she could. And the reason isn't magic, it's generational social trends.

That's fate. I'm sorry, but if a person running for power loses and is not responsible for that loss, then accountability does not exist. Everything matters, but at the end of the day, one person won and one lost and we are reaping the results of that failure.

Harris and the Democratic Party could have made better decisions to win the 2024 election. They made poor ones that lost the election. We know that because she lost and see the US transforming into a fascist hellscape.

Trump is responsible for winning the election. Harris is responsible for losing it. Or. It's fate. Destiny. Kismet. Whatever.

Is Jill Stein responsible for losing the election? Is Chase Oliver? Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Or is it only and exclusively the person who comes in second who is responsible?

They're all responsible for their own losses, assuming they were sincerely attempting to win? Just like Harris is responsible for hers, who I presume was sincerely attempting to win.

The party could have, definitely. Harris possibly could have. Harris was a flawed candidate in a sexist, racist country, shackled to an unpopular president who was maligned by a biased propaganda machine. That's not fate, that's the outcome of decades of policy choices.

Yes. I agree, absolutely. I believe she should have run a more radically antifascist campaign and promised prosections. I don't know if that would have worked. But I consider her choices instead to do other things instead to be a factor in why she lost. A bad decision, that among others, equals now.

Again, I'm not convinced she couldn't have won in the electoral college. It was very close. But within your hypothetical, which I believe you framed as being detached from Harris, the binary simply isn't how the choice to run for office is made.

By that logic, Jill Stein has a shot at being president. But we both know she doesn't, because there's more to an election than an equal fight in the public square.

The buried assumption is that the democratic candidate’s choices of messaging were the primary drivers in the outcome.

Sorry, might clarify - that might be Will's assumption, but I was addressing generally 'campaign choices', which I take to mean generally the choices her campaign made during the race.

Sure, I mean, same thing then. Buried assumption is that those choices are the driver of the outcome. Did John McCain only lose in 2008 because his campaign made the wrong choices?

Yes. I feel like that's how human choices work. If you attempt to win a contest, and lose against your opponent, your opponent either cheated or played a better game than you. If your opponent (and recall we're talking about Donald Trump) beats you, you did something wrong and need to improve.

Maybe that'll take some radical changes - maybe that is a signal that radical changes are needed. Either way it must prompt at least a little introspection of the choices made.

This is called "results oriented thinking" in game theory, and is considered a fallacy and barrier to critical self improvement. Your argument is true for, like, chess. Where you have one opponent, and the piece always goes where you put it. But, it's inapplicable when there's randomness involved.

No, I don't agree when it comes to contests of real power. Results are all that matters because the alternative is we're going to be dead soon. That, as we plainly see, are the results of power.

Winning power means identifying mistakes. A process that is not helped by a nihilistic insistence that losing means everything was a wrong choice. Is the contra true? Trump won, therefore his campaign was perfect? Kamala should've turned more rallies into awkward Ave Maria dance parties?

And this stuff is largely non-deterministic and stochastic! You make decisions based on what has had the best likelihood of working in the past, not because you have a view into the future and know that it *will* work this time.

It is bad poker to shove all in on a pair of two's. That a person can sometimes get lucky and win like that does not retroactively make that a good poker play or them the better poker player. Decisions can be judged as good or bad based on info available and alternative choices at the time.

Okay, maybe this is confusing, but contests are an analogy. Politics is about real power. This is a fundamental difference, when losing is nonexistence.

If the stakes are existential, it behooves you all the more to be able to understand and discuss what tight decision making looks like.

Sure but the same analysis applies, especially regarding what you could know about what was a good decision at the time.

I really genuinely do not understand the reasoning here. So like if I challenge Simone Biles to a gymnastics contest and she wins, then it’s just because of my choices, not the underlying facts of the contest, the playing field, etc?

I could do the best gymnastics of my life, 10x better than I ever thought myself capable of, and I’m still losing that contest.

Yes. You lost because you were under prepared, you aren't a trained gymnast, you don't have her advantages - those are all reasons why you lost, and that you didn't factor them in when competing means you made a bad decision during the competition.

I feel really lost on what's not following here

this seems relevant, but i DO NOT recommend playing League

No, what you’re saying is that I made a bad decision *entering* that competition because I didn’t have a chance to win it once competing. I could do the best job I could possibly do and still lose.

let me guess, you're one of those "I could take a set off Serena Williams" guys, aren't you

Don't forget the judges who hate you.

Not to say they made no mistakes but

Losing would objectively mean you made bad choices if winning was clearly possible. Given how incumbents got wrecked around the world, it may not have been.

It's a fallacy.

I'd counter that given the prevailing attitudes we have seen emerge (Trump 1 was fine, I want the Trump economy back, inflation high) - I am not entirely sure how she (or anybody) could win against that level of willful reality distortion.

You’re poorer than Elon Musk. Objectively he made better decisions than you have. If they had been good you would have more

I'm not competing in a wealth contest with Musk, and if I were, I would know and expect to lose?

The race is not given to the swift. Harris did better than every incumbent last year across all democracies. It's not her fault the electorate is still not over covid.

There are so many more factors at play than that.

LOL that’s not how that works.