Come on do you seriously believe the outcome of the Nicaraguan election was not already predetermined?

Yes. The FSLN is popular for good reason, and the only sense in which the outcome was predetermined was that they were obviously going to win.

The fact that half the opposition was plotting with the United States to illegally undermine or overthrow them just points to how fraudulent they (the opposition) are as a political force. But there was still an opposition that was fully capable of campaigning, and with the backing of private capital giving them the same undemocratic advantages that every other bourgeois party in the world gets. They just got owned, owing in large part to the fact that so many of them were paid stooges of the Amerikkkan empire who overplayed their hands and got caught (and arrested like every threat to the state in every country would be, except in Venezuela I guess). I'm not really interested in entertaining the imperialist narrative that every country where socialist forces are popular and in power is de facto "authoritarian", corrupt, undemocratic, etc., and I flat-out disbelieve anything that the imperialist media says about these countries as a default, so.

I mean there's a million other angles to criticize this narrative from, from the unbelievable atrocities the forces behind the opposition committed for decades (which should make everyone highly suspicious of them because they are very obviously up to no good and very obviously don't give a shit about anything like democracy), to the fact that the Sandinistas have lost elections before and conceded, but my overarching point is that the fact that there are two opposing factions saying opposite things does not mean that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. We don't have to half-believe that the reactionaries are right.