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The victorious candidate was the best candidate, their campaign manager the best campaign manager and their campaign tactics the best tactics. The loser was worse, had an inferior team with a poor plan and bad tactics.
This sort of logic pervades analyses of political campaigning, even when the margin of victory is razor thin. The perceived genius of Karl Rove and perceived incompetence of Al Gore rested on a wafer-thin margin in Florida in 2000. A tiny movement of votes -- or legal opinion -- and the post-2000 verdicts would have been very different.
It is only rarely that the loser who actually got many things right, or the winner who really rather messed up, manages to be recognized through the alluring simplicity of 'they won, so they're the best'.
The question of whether the winner was really that good, or the loser really that bad, rests at the heart of Sasha Issenberg's The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns . It is unasked by the author, but should be repeatedly asked by the thoughtful reader, for one of the book's main themes is the way that randomized controlled trials -- of the sort common in scientific research and increasingly so in marketing, too -- are spreading to politics. Yet, the political poster boy for this trend was also a disastrous loser when it came to his big political chance.
Issenberg provides a very entertaining and well-researched history of how political scientists and political campaigners have splutteringly moved towards much more rigorous research into what works in political campaigns. Aside from one or two pioneering efforts early in the 20th century, this is really a tale of the late-20th century onwards, as people have started splitting the electorate into different test groups and then seeing what difference it makes to try out different campaign tactics on them. Does sending one group of voters a letter encouraging them to vote have more or less of an impact than giving a different group of people a phone call, for example?
The appeal of such testing is that it puts political campaigning -- and the marketing side of it in particular -- on a much firmer base than the reliance on the gut feel of experience...