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Nov 19

🧵STATS You Should Know:
The Midterm Effect is Coming

Folks, if you’ve been wondering whether the “midterm effect” is actually lining up behind all the blue wins we just had, the answer from the data is: yes.

Three fresh national polls — Marist (for NPR/PBS), AP-NORC, and Reuters/Ipsos — are all telling the same basic story:

The environment is turning hostile for Trump and the GOP.

The public is screaming “prices, prices, prices” as the top issue.

Trump’s grip on Republicans is still strong but no longer ironclad.

And yet, voters still don’t trust the parties or institutions, and they’re perfectly willing to blame Democrats for pain they experience, even in a Trump-engineered crisis.

Let’s walk through what these polls collectively tell us.

The Generic Ballot: This Is 2018-Level Energy, But Earlier

Start with the headline: in the new NPR/PBS/Marist poll, Democrats lead the 2026 generic House ballot 55/41 among registered voters — a D+14 advantage. That’s the biggest Marist has shown for Democrats since 2017 and a massive swing from a 48–48 tie in November 2024.

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@RachelBitecofer

Nov 11

🧵Reality Bites:
Trump’s Voters Have Just Found Out They’re on the Menu

When the government reopened, cable pundits called it a cave. Twitter called it surrender. I called it a win—because from where I sit, Democrats didn’t lose the shutdown fight, they won the long game and gave the ACA its only chance of survival.

The point was never to “hold out” for an Affordable Care Act subsidy extension that Republicans were never going to give in the shutdown. The point was to force them to take ownership of killing it. That’s exactly what just happened.

Now, as December premiums land in mailboxes across America, voters will have one party to blame for the sticker shock. One man, really—Donald J. Trump—and the Republican Party that spent fifteen years promising to repeal and replace the ACA without ever producing a plan that wasn’t a dumpster fire. They voted to gut it once to end the shutdown, and they’ll have to do it again in the glare of public outrage. That’s not losing; that’s setting a trap.

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@RachelBitecofer

Oct 19

🧵They Thought They Could Control Him:

They Wanted to Save Germany. Instead They Destroyed It

When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, it wasn’t because he seized power. It was because Germany’s conservatives gave it to him.

He didn’t storm the Reichstag. He walked through the front door — ushered in by aristocrats, generals, and businessmen who thought they could use him to save themselves from democracy.

They weren’t Nazis. They were the respectable men in suits, the “adults in the room.” President Paul von Hindenburg, the aging field marshal who still dreamed of empire. Franz von Papen, the slick conservative politician who fancied himself a kingmaker. Alfred Hugenberg, the media tycoon who used his newspapers to rehabilitate the far right. They were Germany’s establishment — men of property, pedigree, and power.

And they were terrified.

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@RachelBitecofer

Oct 15

🚨🧵Why We Can't Panic
Humans Are Designed to Keep Calm and Carry On

Ten months into Trump’s return to power, America feels like its full of pod people (you youngsters can go ahead and Google that one).

The FBI and DOJ have been purged and now serve as Trump’s personal revenge machine.

The so-called “Countering Domestic Terrorism” memorandum re-brands nearly half the country—anyone left of MAGA—as a potential extremist threat.

Kristi Noem is on airport TVs blaming “radical liberal Democrats” for the shutdown. The law doesn’t matter. The Hatch Act doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. And the public reaction is… nothing. I used to think the problem was information—that if people knew, they’d act. I’m not so sure I believe that anymore.

Here’s why:

The Diary in the Dark

When I first started studying the Third Reich, I kept circling back to a single line from a Warsaw Ghetto diary.

The writer had already lost his home, his livelihood, and most of his family. He was starving in a room shared with five other families, living inside walls his own people were forced to build. Rumors were spreading that deportations east meant death, and he wrote something along the lines of

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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Oct 13

Shut is moving fast now: You really should read 👇

Coordination the American Way:
Inside Trump’s Plan to Turn the U.S. Government into a Weapon Against Us

When historians describe how Nazi Germany became a dictatorship, they don’t start with the camps. They start with coordination — Gleichschaltung — the process by which every institution in Germany “aligned” itself with the will of the regime.

No orders had to be barked. People, fearing irrelevance or punishment and watching colleagues be purged, simply did what was expected. Courts, newspapers, universities, police — each coordinated.

Now, a century later, we are watching the American version unfold in real time.

Reuters just pulled the curtain back on a chilling plan inside Trump’s second administration: a coordinated effort among the FBI, the Justice Department, the IRS, the Treasury Department, and the Department of Homeland Security to investigate, harass, and potentially prosecute liberal and Democratic-aligned organizations.

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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Oct 1

🧵We're Deep in the Shit Now
The Only Way to Win the Shutdown Was Not to Play

The Shutdown Power Grab

The government is shut down. That alone is bad enough, but here’s the kicker: Trump and his people have already said out loud that they’re going to redefine what “essential” means. Under normal shutdown rules, the basics keep going: Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control, border patrol, some law enforcement. Everyone else gets furloughed. It’s disruptive, but it’s not supposed to be apocalyptic.

But this isn’t a normal shutdown. Trump isn’t Ted Cruz throwing a tantrum in 2013 or the Freedom Caucus in 2018 trying to leverage a short-term crisis. He doesn’t want the government back open. He wants it broken. And a shutdown is the perfect crowbar.

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