Against the Early Election Post-Mortem

a sea of half-assed premature theories on how specific politicians lost specific elections

Kamala Harris recently lost the US Presidential election and so every Tom, Dick and Harry has come up with their theory of why she lost. Many of the pundits who do this for a living have already posted their early election post-mortems via article or tweet. I suspect that some have already secured a book deal with a few draft chapters talking about why Harris lost. These early election post-mortems tend to suck.

The early post-mortem is built on bad counterfactual reasoning. The standard process is to blame the loss on some specific thing and then suggest that the candidate would’ve won if that thing didn’t happen. No one is really interested in evaluating these counterfactuals. It is very difficult to figure out whether “If my preferred candidate didn’t adopt this policy then they would’ve won” is true. Their enemies could’ve figured out a way to respond to this change that would’ve mitigated, negated or even amplified its electoral impact. Perhaps voters would’ve found some other reason to vote against your preferred candidate. This isn’t to say that you can’t make some educated guesses based on surveys and voter behaviour, but we usually don’t have enough information immediately following an election to confidently claim that we know why the winner won and the loser lost. Doing a serious election post-mortem is harder than figuring out whether your bedroom window would’ve cracked if you threw a rock at it 5 minutes ago.

Looking back at the the early post-mortems from previous elections, you can see some amusingly bad theories. When Donald Trump won in 2016, all everyone could talk about was how Trump had used populist magic to activate the disengaged, non-voting white working class and win without persuading former Obama voters. This popular narrative persists despite the fact that there was no grand mobilisation of white working class non-voters. Even the more plausible-sounding theory that Trump had the unique ability to persuade white workers that voted for Obama is probably false. Likewise Bill Shorten’s loss in the 2019 Australian federal election is popularly attributed to bold and unpopular tax proposals even though his party’s own post-mortem report suggests they only played a minor role in his defeat.

I’ve provided a list, which is by no means exhaustive, of popular explanations. The simplest approach is to pick one and dismiss all the others as irrelevant. The smarter move is to focus on one while conceding that some of the others might’ve played some minor role. This way they can pretend like they’ve considered all the possible factors while zeroing in on their favourite.

It doesn’t really matter which explanation gets picked. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. It simply needs to sound plausible and satisfying to the writer’s audience. It often conveniently ends up satisfies their own pre-existing beliefs. This is why I’m suspicious of early election post-mortems.

External Factors

A common move by those who liked the losing candidate and their campaign is to blame external factors. It was the media, it was the macroeconomy, the winning campaign was backed by the right people, or maybe it was a global shift among voters that they were powerless to combat. Perhaps the voters are just dumb and evil. This move can be as straightforward as saying “the vibes were off, man.”

Proponents are often allergic to the suggestion that the loser could or should have mitigated the external factor. For example, those who claim that Kamala Harris lost because American voters are misogynistic are not interested in entertaining the idea that the Democrats should’ve nominated a man and won. Hostile news coverage is treated as an inevitability rather than something that can be mitigated by adopting different policies or running a different candidate.

Those who reject this explanation, whether it’s about Harris in 2024 or Corbyn in 2019, claim that this is avoiding responsibility and refusing to learn from defeat. But in all honesty, it could be true that external factors stopped the candidate from winning. It’s just as convenient for opponents of Harris’ moderate turn and Corbynism to dismiss external factors as it is for supporters to play them up. It does not automatically follow that because someone lost an election they should’ve done things differently. Though I will say that it’s worth thinking this through carefully instead of spitting the dummy the moment the result gets announced.

The Pundit’s Fallacy

Another approach is to claim that the losing candidate lost because they didn’t do what you wanted them to do. Pundits know how to win elections. Of course they’ve never done it themselves, but if they were running a major candidate’s campaign and they wrote their policy platform then they’re confident that the candidate would win. It’s the standard Pundit’s Fallacy.

A common way to develop this theory is to cite the popularity or unpopularity of a candidate’s stance on some particular policy. One doesn’t actually need to provide strong evidence of the policy’s popularity. Nor does one need to demonstrate how this proves that the rest of your policy platform is popular. All that matters is that it sounds somewhat plausible that the losing candidate could’ve done better by being more like you and your audience.

Too Negative or Too Positive

A related explanation is that the candidate lost because their campaign was ‘too negative’. The loser was too fixated on demonising their opponent and didn’t present a sufficiently substantive policy platform of their own. Often this is a sneakier form of the previous explanation where ‘substantive policy platform’ really means ‘my preferred policies’, but it isn’t always. In Australian politics you will inevitably encounter the view that political campaigns are too negative these days and that our politicians need a vision of their own.

At first glance this seems plausible. Famous political leaders have always had some big ideas and bold policy platforms. Franklin D. Roosevelt had the New Deal. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had neoliberalism. Every big leader did a bunch of bold, though not necessarily good, things. No one remembers the lame ducks that did and said nothing more than “Vote for me because I’m the lesser of two evils”.

But those leaders didn’t necessarily rise to power because they promised to make sweeping changes. John Howard was the Australian Prime Minister for 11 years and was able to push through a big agenda, but he won his first term in 1996 off the back of a negative ‘small target’ campaign. His predecessor in the previous federal election, John Hewson, infamously lost the ‘unlosable election’ in part because of his overambitious policy platform. The Australian Labor Party won the last federal election in 2022 while following Howard’s playbook. So you could go the other way and claim that candidates lose because their campaigns are too positive.

Personally, I’m wary of saying too much about the value of positive and negative campaigns per se. Harris lost while running a negative campaign, would she have done better with a more positive campaign? Maybe? Bill Shorten losing the Australian federal election in 2019 is often attributed to his overly ambitious policy agenda, but I could imagine Labor winning that one with a different leader or with a few small tweaks.

It’s Hard to Know Why Things Happen

Needless to say, I’m not a fan of the rush to provide a quick and easy explanation straight after an election. Elections are a complicated affair. It’s hard to evaluate the relative causes of a defeat. It’s hard enough to figure out why your favourite sports team lost a game. Coaches need to make quick judgements because their team needs to play again next week. You don’t need to rush your election analysis, partly because you’re not a real player in that game and partly because you’ve got time before the next election.