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@RachelBitecofer

Nov 18

🧵Why Democrats Failed to Save Democracy
Identity Politics and Microtargeting Killed The Party's Brand

Once upon a time the Democratic Party, with its regional base in the Southern U.S. was the party of slavery, and then of segregation.

If you spend much time on social media you already know this because of the many times Trump voters have told you, “but Democrats are the party of segregation!”

Back in the 1950s and 1960s during the Jim Crow Era, the Democratic Party had morphed into an unholy alliance merging a party of liberal Whites and racist White Southerners into one big coalition that by staying together, dominated Congress for decades.

By the 1960s, the activism of MLK. Jr and thousands of other largely unnamed civil rights activists finally forced the Democratic Party to choose: preserve their large coalition or end segregation. In part due to the assassination of JFK, then-President Lyndon Johnson sided with civil rights for Blacks signing both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and in doing so, set off the realignment that would lead to total domination of the South by the Republican Party just a few decades later.

Via Nixon’s Southern Strategy, shrewd GOP strategists like Lee Atwater and Roger Stone recognized that white Southern conservatives were there for the taking, and took them they did relying on various racist dog whistles such as the Willie Horton ad and Reagan’s 1980s Black welfare queen propaganda.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party began to absorb liberal Republicans, predominantly in the North East and West Coast. Ideological liberals became Democrats and ideological conservatives became Republicans through a process known as party sorting and the modern 270 Electoral College map with its handful of swing states became the norm of American presidential elections.

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@RachelBitecofer

Nov 10

Welcome to the Upside Down:
It's Gonna Be a Long, Strange Trip Into Autocracy

Folks, if you subscribe to the Cycle you know I like to give you reality straight, with no chaser. If you think your mental health isn’t up to that, please flee.

There will be little feel-good content coming from me. Instead, I plan on bringing you a weekly blow-by -blow documenting the decline of democracy loosely based on William Shirer’s work as a foreign correspondent reporting from Berlin in the early years of the Third Reich.

I’ll be calling this feature This is America, after Shirer’s (heavily censored) live radio show from the 1930s and I’ll be offering this service only to paid subscribers because I need to keep the lights on. In case you’re wondering how it’s going, I have no dental insurance so please consider converting your old newspaper subscription money into The Cycle and I will watch the decline of democracy so you don’t have to.

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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Nov 3

🚨 My final election analysis: who will win?

Dude, Where's My Man Wave?!

Its Starting to Look Like America Understands the Assignment

We’re humans, we like certainty.

In fact, we crave certainty of event outcomes that probabilistic models and horserace polling simply can’t give us.

Whether a single poll, many polls aggregated together, or many polls aggregated together and then combined with other important components of elections (forecasting “models” like 538, Silver Bullet, etc) statistics can only take us so far in predicting election outcomes.

Why?

Well, because even as Nate Silver would tell you, low probability events still occur (think Trump 2016) and because horserace election polling is constrained by unavoidable errors and biases even when done well, including the margin of error, that prevent us from being able to say with certainty which way a race that will be decided by 1 or 2% will end up actually breaking

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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Oct 21

🧵What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?

Like Hitler, Trump Has Made Clear His Plan is Dictatorship, Not Democracy

January 30th 1933 dawned cold and clear in Berlin as Adolph Hitler took his oath of office and promised Germans he would uphold the constitution. It would ultimately take him less than 30 days to dismantle it.

By March, Dachau concentration camp was opened with its inaugural prisoners: members of the Communist and Social Democrat parties and other prominent Hitler critics. including some members of the Reichstag which Hitler’s allies would join with the National Socialists to voluntarily dissolve to give Hitler near total power.

From the Holocaust Encyclopedia:

“Nazi persecution of political opponents exacted a terrible price in human suffering. Between 1933 and 1939, the criminal courts sentenced tens of thousands of Germans for "political crimes." If the police were confident of a conviction in court, the prisoner was turned over to the justice system for trial. If the police were unsatisfied with the outcome of criminal proceedings they would take the acquitted citizen or the citizen who was sentenced to a suspended sentence into protective detention and incarcerate him or her in a concentration camp.”

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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Oct 20

🧵General Election Update
Are the Polls Really Narrowing?

When we say Republicans are flooding the zone with partisan polls to set a narrative that Trump can win, the data above is what we mean.

Here I have highlighted the one poll in the past 3 days which comes from a reliable pollster and that is the one that still shows Harris +4 among likely voters. 👆

In addition to the Polls Narrowing Mirage, we have some good hard data points we can look at to get a sense of where the race is, and what we might expect in terms of its outcome. Record-shattering early vote data from both Georgia and North Carolina suggests Democrats are very motivated to vote, even more so than in 2020.

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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Oct 13

🧵24 Days to Go, I Wanna be Sedated:
As Election Day Nears, Race Remains a Toss Up

As the final 3 weeks begins, the race between Harris and Trump remains a toss up, with a modest Harris lead in the polling aggregation and within margin of error polling in most of the swing states.

There is nothing I can do to give you absolution, this is (and always has been) a race that will come down to a few thousand votes in states like Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona and will be much tighter than in 2020.

There are precisely two polls that show Trump winning and both are from partisan pollsters.

If you asked me which campaign I’d rather be in terms of being positioned to win, I’d still choose the Harris campaign who will not need to rely as heavily on Election Day voting. Trump’s lies about early/absentee voting is clearly still effecting Republican voter behavior with Republicans way underperforming the early vote aside from two notable exceptions: Arizona and Nevada, which is definitely a red flashing warning light for Democrats.

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