"Reporters travel with the candidates and see the campaign as it is waged on the road. They always interpret the outcome as a matter of skill and strategy. The winning side has it; the losers don’t. This is so automatic, it is as if it were a fixed law of journalism.

Losers are always portrayed as inept, people who don’t know how to campaign effectively, following dumb strategies, always. Even Al Gore who won the 2000 popular vote—and by a margin three times larger than Kennedy’s 1960 victory—was portrayed as an inept campaigner who didn’t know how to run a campaign."– Professor Stimson


If just once winners were portrayed as inept or losers as astute, these stories might have some meaning. But it never happens.