If you’re working in electoral politics, you’re probably trying to do two things at the same time: First, you’re trying to do the thing that you do to help win elections. Second, you’re trying to show other people that your work is valuable and good and that you and your team are talented.
I spend a lot of time on both things, and they’re both legitimately important. Showing people you’re competent isn’t just about ego or fundraising – it’s about ensuring good work is appreciated, valued, and invested in. And that helps us win.
So, anyway, there’s an unspoken assumption that a lot of people make in this business: that the smartest people in this space are going to express that smartness to others via a superhuman ability to read the trends and the environment and predict what is going to happen. And, the assumption goes, if you can seem to be like that, then you too can be seen as one of the smartest people in the space.
But it’s just not true. Politics is too big, too chaotic, and too noisy. If you want to be a pundit, you’ll have to resort to pundit tricks (like never revisiting your predictions rigorously), to seem smart. Not the end of the world, but it’s not particularly useful when it comes time to make good strategic decisions next time.
Human beings are storytelling machines, and politics is a narrative-driven business. But when it comes to making good decisions, I’m skeptical of the exercise of, after a prediction was wrong, going back and re-framing all the facts to tell a story that fits what actually happened. Just because something is a coherent story, doesn’t mean it’s true. And it especially doesn’t mean it will be true next time.
Some things are simply not predictable before they happen with a particular degree of certainty, and ultimately learning to live with that ambiguity leads to better outcomes. Living with ambiguity forces you to deal with uncertainty directly, rather than committing yourself fully to a thesis that seems right.
In my opposition research shop, the place we run into this issue most is in deciding where to commit resources during a republican primary. It’d be a hell of a lot easier if we just knew who was going to win. But we’ve all been surprised enough times to know to hedge our bets – to spread our oppo around across the range of possibilities, to be prepared for eventualities that may be less likely but are still extremely possible. If we expected ourselves to KNOW, we’d be less prepared in the aggregate. Think about Michigan Gov in 2022 or the PA-SEN primary. It’s a chaotic universe out there.
If we had lost big in 2022, the same people telling the stories about why our victories were inevitable would be telling equally compelling stories about why our losses were inevitable. So, being good at politics, in my view, has very little to do with being some kind of sage who knows what’s going to happen. It’s about being someone who can see the spectrum of possibility and push things in the direction you want them to go, using the tools and power that are available to you. It’s really hard, iterative, frustrating, and incremental.