On Monday Politico writer Edward Dovere published a piece where he accused Bernie Sander’s political organization Our Revolution of being “in disarray”. Worse yet, he’s accused it of being ineffective.

It’s another in a long line of thinly concealed hit pieces aimed at Sander’s, those associated with him or leftists in general. As with other pieces in the genre it takes the barest anecdotal evidence and tries to spin it into a trend (see this Vox piece alleging misogyny on the left where they’re clearly scrapping the bottom of the barrel). The end result of this being to create a self perpetuating atmosphere of failure to deter would be supporters.

Unconvincing as they are these sorts of pieces can get passed around a lot to the point where they become conventional wisdom. And regrettably the narrative from this one was pretty quickly picked up by the New Republic and political writers like Matt Yglesias. And, as noted, these sort things can be damaging.

So It bears pointing out exactly what’s wrong with the piece.

Nothing Is Sourced, Everything Is Anecdotal And There’s No Context To Put Anything In

A lot of the issues with the article have already been noted elsewhere. People have noted that Dovere has a record of sandbagging Sanders, and his stories since the article have largely just confirmed this. The article’s not well sourced, we don’t know who some of the most damning comments are coming from or if they’re people who should be treated as any sort of authority on the issue.

To that I’d add that really nothing is put in context. Episodes are cited, but we’re not given any sense of their scope or whether or not they represent a trend in the organization.

For example, the article notes that founding member Erika Andiola left over outreach to Latino voters and use this to imply staff demoralization and sharp divisions on strategy. But does it? People leave positions due to differences on strategy all the time, even well run organizations. The important thing isn’t that it happens, but the rate it’s happening. We don’t say the Trump Administration is running the State Department into the ground because one diplomat left, we say it because 16% of senior staff have left and almost a quarter of diplomatic posts are empty. We get no such perspective from the piece.

THIS is what a dysfunction organization rocked by defections looks like

Even if you accept all the criticisms of the article as true it doesn’t really add up to much. I don’t know if Our Revolution is any sort of model organization, but nobody is raiding the coffers for their own personal enrichment or using the organization as a way to employ their consultant friends. Nobody is cynically exploiting the cause for nothing more than branding. There are no deep ideological divisions tearing it apart. Nobody is hiring bullying psychopaths because they’re bullying psychopaths. These are all really common things that happen in nascent political organizations. Everything Dovere points to is chump change by comparison.

The Article Has A Narrow Definition Of Success, Doesn’t Provide Meaningful Comparisons And Frames The Whole Issue Wrong

Really the only major point where the article anything gets grounded into any sort of relative context is when it notes the performance of candidates endorsed by candidates. According to the article, only 45% of them have won, and this is treated as being self evidently a bad performance.

This bit of decontextualized number dropping really irritates me more than anything else. Whatever Dovere’s failings as a journalist, he’s an awful political analyst and he’s doing a disservice to his readers and is spinning a narrative which is, regrettably, starting to find traction among writer like Matt Yglesias who have their own record of indirectly sniping at anything Sanders related.

So I’m going to go over the reasons why the Politico story got this terribly wrong:

There are a lot of potential measures for the success of a political movement beyond immediate electoral success

This is frequently noted by people, particularly on the left. You can lose an election and still come out ahead politically. Failed campaigns can help with long term capacity building, establishing networks, relationships and mechanisms for campaigns. They can frame political discourse and force opponents into accepting their positions.

This can perhaps take decades, but the payoffs can be worth it. My own personal favorite example of this would be the turn of the century populist and the political career of William Jennings Bryan. Their efforts were constantly frustrated in the 1890s and 1900s, but in the long run they were instrumental in passing two constitutional amendments, getting a series of progressive reforms passed in the Wilson Administration and ultimately paving the way for the New Deal.

And that’s pretty obviously been the game Sanders and his supporters have been playing since the beginning. And all things considered, he’s doing it pretty well. His campaign essentially went from being a novelty to being a large scale and influential political organization operating at multiple levels across the country. Ideas like single payer healthcare closer to implementation than they’ve ever been.

“Well, that may be,” you may be thinking, “but at the end of the day you actually have to win elections.” Yes they do, so let’s get on to the other problems with what the article is doing.

A 45% rate of wins to endorsements is actually pretty high when you look at comparable groups

So we’re given this figure that about 45% of the people Our Revolution has supported have gotten their nomination. Is that good or bad? We don’t know, because we’re not given a reasonable standard to compare it to.

I mean, the implication here is that other players who are doing better who will truly inherit the party, right? Surely Dovere would have done the very easy task of looking at how other candidates endorse by other groups are doing?

Well he didn’t, but I have, and by most appearances 45% is a perfectly reasonable rate of success for an insurgent political organization, or really any political organization. Some haven’t done as well, like the Justice Democrats who have seen about 26% of the candidates they’ve endorsed earn their nominations so far (though note, they did really well on Tuesday). Some have done better, like the DSA which won 21 out of 32 races they contested in 2017. As much as the Tea Party gets hailed as the quintessential political success story of the modern era, only 32% of candidates who were associated with the movement actually got elected in 2010. Nor do more established political organizations necessarily do better. Of the top 10 candidates Emily’s List supported in 2016, only 4 were elected, and that’s a pretty typical performance.

Hiding it in plain site, apparently

And for the most part, Our Revolution is doing about the same as it’s always done. Of the 175 candidates they supported in their first year, 75 won, which is pretty consistent. This was all known and acknowledged, and even celebrated. So for Dovere to come in and arbitrarily proclaim it to be a bad rate is a bit strange.

The point isn’t that these organizations are all ineffective, clearly a lot of them (like the Tea Party) are highly successful. But it should be obvious that picking candidates to endorse tends to have a high rate of failure, and that’s entirely normal. You want all the candidates you endorse to win, naturally, but it’s usually a pretty reasonable expectation that less than half actually will.

There’s no absolute standard for what a good rate of wins to endorsements. A 45% rate may be impressive for some and dismal for others

In sales it’s generally accepted that it’s more difficult to get a new customer than it is to keep an old one. In politics it’s largely the same. There are a lot of institutional advantages to being the presumed favorite. You can take advantage of all the pre-existing mechanisms for fundraising and voter mobilization. You can also pressure people into supporting you with the tacit threat that if they don’t they’ll be shut out after you “inevitably” win.

By contrast, all of these things are working against insurgents trying to break into the system. They don’t get default votes, they have to specifically appeal to everyone who supports. But on the other hand, since they’re starting from nothing every win they get is one that deepens their bench a little bit and makes their job a little bit easier in the future.

Pretty much all the candidates who Our Revolution supports are a net gain as far as they’re concerned.

If your goal is to shift things on the margins then having a high rate of endorsements to elections is neither expected nor necessarily desirable

I’m going to blow your mind and say that, if you had a 100% rate of endorsements to elections, that would actually indicate you’re a terrible electoral strategist.

It’s not difficult to see a high percentage of the candidates you endorse get elected, all you have to do is pick people who are shoe ins. But if your strategy is actually to affect some sort of change that’s obviously a bad strategy, which is why no political organization actually does that.

Instead what they do is work around the margins, trying to get wins where you otherwise wouldn’t expect them. The more aggressively you do this the more likely it is the candidate you back will fail, but the more change you’ll be able to effect if they win. So the key isn’t to pick races you’ll win per say, but rather to strike the right balance of candidates you’re backing.

If you’re getting it down to a point where there’s a 50-50 chance any given race will go your way, that may actually indicate you’re doing that well.

And let’s be clear that Our Revolution is running a pretty aggressive strategy. As much as the political press played up the loss of Laura Moser as a referendum on the establishment vs. grass roots insurgents, it’s worth remembering that the race was always a long shot. So was Swearengin West Virginia. So is Cynthia Nixon’s run for the Governor of New York, or the various candidates running against Diane Feinstein. These races, and many others, are known stretch goals and it’s not a sign of terminal failure if Our Revolution doesn’t win all, or even most of them.

Conclusion

The point of this isn’t that someone said something bad about an organization I generally like and now I feel the need to defend it. If you spend enough time on the left you tend to expect the worst and develop a stiff upper lip. I don’t think there are many would be activists who are

Certainly, I don’t expect Sanders or Our Revolution to be flawless, nor do I think they can’t do be improved. If they need to do better on Latino outreach they should. If they’ve taken on a problematic consultant they should take care of it (which they did). If they’re not doing a good job organizing they need to improve. And so far, when faced with criticism, even bad faith criticism, Sander’s and his organizations tend to take them to heart and try to improve.

But these stories are tedious and obnoxious. I’m sick of sites like Politico lobbing unfair and obviously biased criticism and posing it as neutral reporting. I’m tired of hearing people dismiss left wing political activists as these frivolous idealists and never acknowledging their accomplishments (by contrast, they invariably treat right wing populists as these unstoppable juggernauts). I certainly can’t accept what’s just lousy analysis on their part. I don’t expect much from Politico to begin with, but yeesh, they can do better than this.