It’s tough to digest an election loss. Throwing blame and pointing fingers may feel like a nice release, but it isn’t usually all that helpful — especially a time when it’s still too early for anyone to have really compiled and digested all the relevant information. And losing a campaign doesn’t mean everything you did was wrong, just like losing a football game doesn’t mean every play you called was wrong. That said, when you lose, you lose, and there are obviously things you could have done better… since you did lose when you wanted to win. 

So it’s pretty remarkable to watch this compilation of Democratic political consultants shooting their shot on TV in defense of the idea that, in fact, the party's presidential campaign was perfectly run. Despite the stakes, this year’s election, you see, just could not be won, so it’s not their fault, and nothing needs to change. It’s certainly a self-serving point of view for them and their friends… but it’s also just completely inexplicable. If you’re in the 99.9% of people who are not political consultants, it’s quite obvious that the point of a presidential campaign is to win the election… so if you don’t win, it couldn't possibly be perfect. And yet, these are the communications experts whose job is to win elections?

Make it make sense.

As the saying goes, “elections have consequences” — and that’s true for companies, as well as for individual human beings. And sometimes looking at how those consequences are being anticipated can be quite revealing.

While the last Trump term in office was undeniably chaotic and destructive, nobody really knows quite what the next Trump Administration is going to prioritize or accomplish. Markets certainly don’t always get this stuff right, but it’s notable that one of the big post-Election Day stock market winners has been Geo Group, the most prominent private owner and operator of private prisons, with a particular focus on immigration detention facilities. Check out the chart below showing a spike in share price the day after the election, and you can see that despite the massive number of political unknowns, investors are currently confident that more people are going to be locked up in the next few years.

The two weeks since the election have produced an unrelenting torrent of think-pieces on the results. Plenty of interesting arguments have been made, and notable data points have been raised, but many of these quick takes  just assert the position that whatever the author thought before the election was proven by the results of the election... regardless of whether the author in question saw those results coming.

So it’s a welcome antidote to dig into something highly distinct, but still relevant: a recent quick piece from economist Viri Riós, who explores how Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum was elected earlier this year as a center-left candidate, building on the success of incumbent Andrés Manuel López Obrador and becoming the first female head of state in North America. They were able to defy the international mood against incumbent parties by focusing on reducing poverty, improving public spaces, and advancing the living standards of workers in the most visible, salient way possible: “among the poorest 10% of the working population,” Riós explains, “wages increased by 99% over the past six years”. None of the lessons are directly about the US Presidential race, and yet it’s a lot more relevant to thinking about how to advance middle-out economic policy than reading 2,000 words from every political consultant who ever worked on a Presidential campaign.

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