Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆 Profile picture
Nov 4, 2020 13 tweets 3 min read Read on X
1. The hot take that "D's need to learn to talk to the other side of the electorate" is absolutely the WRONG take.

I mean my god. Biden, Lincoln, the outside groups: they threw the best persuasion messaging in the history of persuasion campaigns at them.

What Ds need to do is
2. is come to terms that when it comes to the electorate, the very 1st thing that matters is party ID, and this includes Indie leaners. This data is from June, but last night's results make clear that it reflects the actual results as well. Right leaning Indies- which make up Image
3. a disproportionate share of the overall Indie pool, are closet Reps: they are not persuadable no matter how much you cater to them or whether or not Cindy McCain is on your side. The Biden campaign, all of the Senate Dems, and the House Dem candidates bet their candidacies
4. on a couple of assumptions most imp is that they should focus their arguments on issues & not on nationalized referendum campaigns, which is the way that the GOP runs their down-ballot races. Also, in case you haven't noticed, Trump lies directly to people bc he knows they are
5. stupid & will never find out. Did I state that plainly enough? You want to know why Rs are willing non-college voters? They tell them what they want to hear. The Ds talk to everyone like they have a master's degree. Trump talks to them as they are: Walmart shoppers. I realize
6. that sounds elitist and condensing- its meant to. Some 60+ million of them just cast ballots for Donald Fucking Trump & if you ask them why, probably 40 million of them will tell you reasons that are literally exact opposite truths like "he drains the swamp" or "he's a
7. "successful businessman" or my personal fave, "he's the only honest man in Washington." If Dems want to learn how to "reach voters on the other side" then they need to realize that these people would tell you "yes" they read news & then report "The National Enquirer" as their
8. as their paper of choice. Now, IDK if its just that I'm one of fewer academics that come from the real, unpolished, bottom 50% world, and not the romanticized bullshit painted by J.D. Vance of working-class America- the real one where people have 3 kids from 3 different women
9. and get angry when 1 of them is reticent to let them visit their kid when they get out jail. AGAIN. In THAT working class, sexism, racism, xenophobia, and bigotry run rampant: and not only are these "isms" prevalent, there is a belief that they shouldn't have had to be buried
10. (see how that relates back to their culture war champion?) That the old days were far superior bc they could just call someone a f&g or slap their female co-worker in the ass is they were in the mood. There was a hierarchy, a caste as @Isabelwilkerson notes, and they were at
11. the top of it. Everything else might be a shit sandwich, their job, their house, their marriage, their debt, but that hierarchy & their place at the top of it- as Wilkerson notes in her book, that shit was SOLID.
And now its gone.
And do you know who took it?
The Democrats
12. So, you're not appealing to that. Anyone looking at Maine senate, the state with the most Indies in the nation, but also an electorate that is predominately white and lower educated & thinks we just need a better argument is coming at this the wrong way.

Don't get me wrong-
13. you gotta change the voting behavior of these voters, but you're not going to do it via tweaking issues or talking about this and not that.

Its going to take a complete and total overall of the entire electioneering approach of the party.

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More from @RachelBitecofer

Sep 19
🧵From Goebbels to Google:
Shame Shit, Different Century

When people say “social media is destroying our society,” they act like we’ve never been here before. But we have. Exactly one hundred years ago, a new technology burst onto the scene, and within a decade, it had completely altered politics, democracy, and the way people understood reality.Image
That technology was radio, and the Nazis immediately understood its potential to warp minds.

The parallels to today’s social media crisis aren’t just striking—they’re terrifying.
The First Mass Medium of Intimacy

Before the 1920s, mass communication ran through newspapers, pamphlets, and journals. These had editors, fact-checkers, and some degree of accountability. But the radio was different. Suddenly, the most powerful voices in the world could beam directly into people’s living rooms. No mediation. No filter. Just a voice in your ear, in your home.
Read 19 tweets
Sep 17
🧵The Prices Are Too Damn High:
Trump's Tariffs are Hitting Americans Hard

Donald Trump loved to promise that other people would pay for his schemes. Mexico would pay for the wall. China would pay for the tariffs. Cute. Here’s the correction: other people don’t pay. You do. Image
Your kid. Your neighbor who works nights. The person at the hamburger joint sliding fries across the counter. Tariffs are a stealth sales tax — invisible, regressive, and perfectly designed to hurt people who can’t afford it.

This is Tax Scam 2.0. He calls it “tough on trade.” You call it “where did my paycheck go?”
How the Con Works (No Econ Class Required)

A retailer imports a $100 pair of work boots. The administration slaps a 20% tariff on them. The importer now owes $20. Who pays? Not the factory overseas. Not the CEO of the importing firm. You do — the price on the shelf goes up. That $100 pair becomes $120. Then your state charges sales tax on that $120. You just paid a tax on a tax. Congratulations. You’re in the art of the deal.
Read 15 tweets
Sep 15
🧵Fear Factory
Turning Point isn't a Debate Organization, its a Conflict Machine

Charlie Kirk didn’t invent conflict entrepreneurship, but he sure helped to perfect it. He is the prototype of a generation of right wing internet entrepreneurs who figured out that the surest way to build power, attention, and money otherwise off limits to them is not by governing, legislating, or even persuading—it’s by manufacturing outrage and monetizing it.Image
From the garage to the donor class

Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 at just 18 years old but he wasn’t some grassroots kid hustling alone. He had a mentor, Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery, and very quickly he had a benefactor: Foster Friess, a conservative megadonor who bankrolled much of the group’s early work. That early money mattered. It allowed TPUSA to scale fast—staff, merch, events, and a social media strategy that turned “triggering the libs” into a donor-driven business model.
By 2015, Kirk had what every young conservative hustler of the early digital age wanted: legitimacy with the Republican elite. He was on panels, quoted in political press, and standing on the floor of the Republican National Convention in 2016 being profiled as the future of conservatism.
Read 24 tweets
Sep 4
🧵A Blue Tsunami Is Headed for Virginia and New Jersey:

Out-Party Fundamentals Are About to Open a Can of Whoop Ass on the GOP

Sometimes life comes full circle.

Almost ten years ago, I was putting out a forecast in 2017 projecting a big win for Democrat Ralph Northam over his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie in the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial race.Image
That race was widely treated—by media and the conventional wisdom—as a knife-edge toss-up. Yet my polling with Quentin Kidd at the Wason Center at Christopher Newport University consistently tracked a Democratic lead of at least six points.
How were we so confident? Because fundamentals matter. Because in-party/out-party dynamics—specifically whether your party holds the White House—are a heavy anchor pulling against your performance in off-year races. Virginia, above all, is fertile ground for the midterm effect. Once a new party moves into the White House, Virginia tends to rebuff it, amplifying that national trending through local elections.
Read 20 tweets
Aug 13
🧵The Nazi War on “Asocials”

You Can't Cure Crime Without Crushing Freedom

When the Nazis sold themselves to Germany in the early 1930s, they didn’t just promise jobs, glory, and a return to greatness—they promised a national makeover. And like all authoritarians, their definition of “cleaning up” had less to do with fixing the economy and more to do with purging poor people.Image
The Reich was obsessed with visual order. Cities were to be spotless, streets safe, public behavior disciplined, and every human being was expected to conform to the Nazi ideal: healthy, hardworking, racially “pure,” and loyal to the state.
If you didn’t fit, you were labeled Asozial—“asocial.” This was not just a slur; it was a bureaucratic category, written into policy and enforced with police power. And it covered a broad swath of people the regime saw as “blight”: the homeless, the jobless, alcoholics, drug users, petty criminals, beggars, the mentally ill, sex workers, and even some single mothers and LGBTQ people.
Read 21 tweets
Aug 10
🧵🔥👇
Appeasement Didn’t Work Then.

It Won’t Work Now.

While he was in prison, the German version of Club Fed, for trying to execute a coup, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf — part autobiography, part revenge manifesto, part how-to guide for dismantling the post–World War I order. Image
It wasn’t subtle. He said, outright:

“The reunification of German-Austria with the Motherland… must be carried out.”

And he was clear the borders of Germany should expand:

“It is not the preservation of peace, but the expansion of the people’s living space that is the most pressing task of our time.”Image
That’s “living space” (Lebensraum) — for Germans only — at the expense of anyone already living there. In fact, you may not know this, but once they killed off all the Jews in Eastern Europe their next step was supposed to be turning the death camps onto the rest of Eastern European-another 40 million people who they saw as racially inferior.
Read 17 tweets

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