Thread by @RachelBitecofer

1. Watching this rally footage from progressive Ds, who are rightly asking/pushing for Biden to stay committed to the issues/platform he ran on. The ideologically liberal part of the Dem base grew disaffected w @BarackObama when he failed to deliver on his promises. And the

2. crucial mistake that mainstream Democrats make is the assumption that rank-and-file Ds and liberals (bc often, the most active elements of the party's grassroots orgs are people who ID as Indies (left-leaning!) who are far more liberal than your average Dem. This is 1 of the

3. ways that Indies are most misunderstood (other than how few of them are actually "persuadable" or "swing" voters- about 12% of the overall electorate) the most misunderstood aspect of Indies is they are all moderates. That moderation makes one Indie. Often, people dealign from

4. their party bc they see it as too moderate ("Establishment" & are FAR more ideologically extreme than the party they align with is (Sanders, for example). Political scientist @leedrutman explains this here. fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-m…

5. Ideological heterogeneity is one of the driving mechanisms behind the "turnout swing" of Indies in my theory (and recall- neg partisanship driving more ideologically liberal, Dem-leaning Indies out to vote in '18 & '20 are imp mechanisms behind my forecasts. Although some

6. Indies (pure Is) voted in both '16 & '20 & voted Trump in '16 & Biden in '20 providing a "persuasion" swing, we also have a group of voters who did not vote in '16, but did vote in '12, for Obama, & came back into the electorate in '20 (and '18) to vote for Biden. Turnout

7. swingers- motivated to vote by negative partisanship. A lot of them didn't vote in 2016 bc they were pissed off at Obama, and congressional Ds. They were being told that Ds were in a dominant position to make @HillaryClinton the 1st female prez. Some of them DID vote, but

8. voted 3rd party, or wrote-in Sanders, convinced that the Dem Party had done something nefarious to elect HRC in the primary (they had not, and if you still think so I want you to take a second to appreciate then, how it is that Trump voters can be made to think that actually,

9. the man that they love, the man they pin their hopes on, got screwed over by those shifty Ds. That there were suspicious activities going on in ______. That a report came out from a professor at _____ university & his analysis suggests something is off about the ballot count

10. MI. It is very, very easy to make people doubt the integrity of their elections system if one is so inclined and in the 2016 cycle, though we didn't know it then, the Russians were very inclined because somehow, they understood the way that party primaries worked well enough

11. to know that they are very divisive and tend to heighten ideological divisions and intraparty fighting. Indeed, the specific fake articles, fake posts, and fake memes they made and posted indicated a sophisticated understanding of the progressive/mainstream divide in the Dem

12. Party, one that its hard to believe they developed w/o an American briefing them on it (cough, cough, Paul Manafort). They also launched a strategy you saw the GOP pick up and expand on this cycle, which was to run digital ads social media sites like youtube and facebook

13. that looked organic, like they came from legitimately frustrated Black Americans, that advised Black citizens not to trust Democrats bc they "take Black voters for granted" and also framed the 2020 vote decision around the 1994 Crime Bill- around Joe Biden's vote on it, and

14. getting Black voters to disqualify voting for Biden to reduce his support. As strategy I suspected could work specifically on YOUNG Black voters and IF Dems did not invest on Black voter turnout which is, of course, something they should be doing but believe it or not, often

15. DON'T do bc their electioneering class is strategically inept (though this is changing and some people are now using the "new" electioneering methods. But I'm not kidding, Ds run entire campaigns and ignore their own voters. All Pascale did w Black & Latino voters is exploit

16. this vacuum and fill the empty space with aggressive attacks on Democrats (disqualifying Ds is as good as convincing Ds to vote GOP). And the Ds, of course, committed mass malpractice in not spending the 4 years building Latino and Black voter infrastructure (thank God for

17. @staceyabrams!) and also were inept at dealing with the accusations that they were socialists (should have answered this by aggressively painting the GOP as a party of extremists- Trump as a fascist). Like usual, the D's limp dick messaging killed them, luckily for most of

18. 40 frontliners, college-educated voters surge so much naturally, they couldn't help but win. Anyone who's been following my research saw the prez election play out exactly as predicted, with Dem Coalition turnout surges in the 'burbs (which are diverse!) providing Biden's win

19. BC it is college-educated people who are most sensitive to the Trump Threat Effect. I'm sure when I analyze the voter file I'll find the same thing I found in 2018 in the 40 House districts: the biggest turnout surge effect among college edu voters, esp women, & in terms

20. of racial subgroups, the largest surge group is actually Asian voters (but this may be a function of education, I need to look at this), followed by Latino voters, followed by Black voters. But they ALL had a turnout increase in 2018 and I expect to see a turnout increase in

21. too. But like I said, the DNC has the Ds using strategy invented by people who are running as if it's 1992 & the game is cribbage. So one reason turnout isn't as big for voters of color is they get starved for investment- the investment has to come from @fairfightaction-

22. which is dumb- bc high turnout of your own partisans is a MUST HAVE in the polarized era. AND here's one thing you should know. These dudes writing up analyses trying to take away from the AMAZING achievement of @staceyabrams & @fairfightaction for freakin FLIPPING GA?! They

23. are the same people who are constantly pushing people to stick to investment strategies that devalue the role of turnout of voters of color. So they encourage poor investment in that and then point at turnout and say "see! not enough turnout!!" That seems odd to me @tbonier

24. What I want to drive home though is that I assume McConnell intends to do to Biden what he did to Obama, & perhaps, considerably worse (perhaps denying him a perfectly qualified S of S like @AmbassadorRice. That's why the GA senate seats are so critical, if the Dem Party

25. flip both these seats and get a governing trifecta, the most likely outcome is that they will get nothing, and I mean literally nothing done. I sincerely hope Biden's right and that he can use his personal relationships w the old schoolers in the senate- but the senate of

26. 2008 is NOT the one of 2020 and the differences are profound. The senate of 2008 wasn't capable of acquitting a president of trying to extort a foreign leader for help trying to sabotage the campaign of his potential opponent. Am I calling Biden naive? I'll tell you, if he

27. genuinely believe the things he's saying then he is naive. There is strategic value to saying & doing what he says & does. But, after seeing the Dem Party DIDN'T invest in Latino infrastructure after 2016- that they were completely surprised that GOP turnout went up in '20?

28. I think from this point on I am going to assume total ignorance and ineptness and then make them show me otherwise. So, unless these two GA seats flip Biden, and America, will be held hostage by McConnell. Certainly plan to give Biden his space/time to try his charm offensive

29. But unlike 2009, once it becomes clear what McConnell is doing, if he's doing the total obstruction gambit again, this time, shit's going to be different. Its going to be different bc this time, we'll be there to stop him. Well, at least to fuck w him back. We will exact

30. costs for Mitch's little games. He won't be expecting that. And he sure as hell won't like it, and that's what's going to make it so much fun. He's going to need Tums. He's going to learn to= be anxious when his phone chirps, bc it might be another issue from the Left's c

31. that chirp from the Left's new counteroffensive, this one dropping just in time to fuck up his dinner.

He's going to start to hate those chirps & beeps bc the cycle, the 2022 Midterm cycle, is supposed to be a cake walk for the GOP. They're set to clean it up as the Dem

32. Coalition moves on to other things- and BOY do they need a break! The Trump Show has been exhausting. A live-action reality show, w elements of a rom-com combined w a futuristic sci-fi, but mostly topically focused on current events.

33. But it's America, so current events can get pretty esoteric. I mean, throw D.T. into the American presidency & shit's going to get weird, VERY weird. And dangerous. And scary. It's certainly NOT been a slow or dry 4 years. Like most people keeping up w this shit , I'm

34. limping to the finish line of the presidency stage of this shit show. The GOP is often talked about as victims of Trump- they're not. The media & campaign systems created the conditions that bind them to him, that made it hard for them to "kill Frankenstein" and it's true

35. that operating singularly, uncoordinated, no one survived going after Trump, bc the Rep base LIKED what he was doing, they liked the rudeness, the uncouthness, the "you can't shame me, I'm shamelessness" of Donald Trump. They liked that he was incapable of shame. Why? BC

36. after more than 10 yrs of intensive messaging on right-wing media & campaign propaganda, a decade that saw moderates replaced with conservatives, then conservatives replaced w even MORE conservative conservatives, the party's center of gravity was so far askew that voters

34. were mistook anything short of fire-breathing as centrism- or even, liberalism! So now we have a Republican Party that quite likely is going to come into a winter session and see their main mission as that of destroying @JoeBiden, NOT passing legislation to ease the financial

35. strains of the COVID19 economic collapse. If the GOP controls the senate, I wouldn't be surprised to see the party's position as "no aid." Certainly, at leat a 30 of McConnell's caucus were of the "no aid" position in the late summer. And that's for something the country

36. needs incontrovertibly. In terms of Biden's agenda, where the work is all green energy investments, paid family leave, minimum wage increases, student loan reforms, etc; all of that stuff (and yes, I agree, it is critical, it's critical for me personally as well as it being

37. smart fiscal investment) I think McConnell will present an immovable wall. And if Biden doesn't find a way to make The Squad & voters in that camp understand that the opposition is blocking the agenda, NOT that he's failing to push for it, the Ds will get hammered in the 2022

38. Midterms- which is, of course, McConnell's entire purpose of blocking the legislation in the 1st place. He'll block these laws and then run ads on Indiesthat argue Biden is breaking his promises by not passing them and will micro-target progressives with ads that come from

39. fake progressives that talk about how Biden has sold them out and look at how he's failed to follow through on his promises. He'll do the same w Black voters on criminal justice reform, and the same with Latino voters and immigration reform. That was the Obama playbook &

40 much more sophisticated at it now.

BUT, this time, they're going to encounter a little hitch in their subterfuge plans. Tell y'all about THAT soon.