2. that controls D electioneering strategy now refused to allow this. Which again, is why I'm building @StrikePac
bc that should NEVER HAVE HAPPENED.
Most frustrating part?! The counter message is OBVIOUS. You hit back the GOP w the fact that they were actively & literally
3. defunding the police EVERY SINGLE DAY of the fall cycle by holding the state & local funding hostage in the HEROES ACT- a piece of legislation Ds might have wanted to make the cornerstone of their argument for why voters should flip control of the Senate to them instead of the
4. feckless, decentralized, and pre-packaged a year before the election messaging they ran on healthcare reform- an issue salient in the LAST cycle.
1. Though part of what I'm calling "The GA Model" (in several parts, also the @staceyabrams' model- esp the part I'm about to highlight) is to micro-invest the up to now completely ignore rural black vote as a means of depressing the GOP vote margin in rural areas w black pops
2. Its a shrewd, strategically brilliant strategy, a game of subtraction via addition (but not evil, bc it subtracts POWER not the ability to participate in democracy w is the GOP's modus operandi. White rural voters still get to vote. Hell, the reforms @FairFight & others
3. fight for help all voters access the ballot box easier, and socio-economic barriers cross all races. The crap the GOP does to target minority voters & young voters hurts their own base & a great irony will be as their party becomes more heavily reliant on non-college ed voters
Yes! I didn't get to talk about this much over the cycle. Too much daily triage stuff coming every 5 secs w President Shit Show. But I have to say, @JoeBiden as a general election candidate did DAMN FINE JOB. He leaned INTO being a Dem. He no doubt received really shitty
2. advice from the campaign world "status quo" (a mentality- not people!) I'm building @StrikePac (which, BTW isn't meant to be merely an ad cutting firm, its meant to build an org that will help redesign how Ds do their electioneering STRATEGY, including how it approaches
3. the entire concept of a competitive race. The traditional Dem model involves identifying voters who vote regularly and are "persuadable" and building your campaign around reaching, persuading, and ultimately bringing to the polls as many of these people as possible. Why I am
I want to let you know when I made the decision to launch @StrikePac & directly get into electioneering I realized I wasn't going to continue issuing "race ratings" & "forecasts" each cycle- OBV that's a conflict of interest!
The hostility & sexism of
2. that world, I have to be honest, makes it very easy to walk away- the misogyny in the top tier of the election analysis community outside of @Center4Politics folks who are awesome & also more accurate than anyone else is intolerable. I'll still analyze politics, political
3. events, issue commentary, write articles, run the pod, go on TV, and generally succeed in ways that drive those men nuts but no, I won't be putting out ratings or "forecasts" anymore. Now, lots of people are asking me "what's going to happen in 2022?" The Midterm Effect, the
2. disaffected conservative whites in the South, who were fleeing the Democratic Party in droves over civil rights- ending the New Deal Coalition which had allowed Ds to domination Congress for 40 years, the GOP understood they could fast-track political power. The trade off was
3. adapting Atwater's "Southern Strategy" & opening their arms to "quiet" racism. Southern whites knew they could no longer be overtly racist, but were appeased by Rep pols who, via dog whistle politics indicated or signaled to them that their "dominance" would be maintained.
If I can rouse up 10K I'm going to poll MTG's district to show that she isn't all that more radical than the Republicans she represents there & see how popular she still is
I want to add on to this thread- I am a top notch pollster. I did the polling for the Wason Center for 4 years, and nailed all 4 election cycles, including the 2017 cycle that others missed (bc anticipated the surge) and our 2016 VA poll was spot on. This will be quality shit.
Update, launched late on a Friday night & we are 1/10 of the way already. We might really be able to do this! Even if you can't donate, if you can send a tweet out w a pitch, that's huge, esp if you are a blue check.
Again, I'm a good pollster, this will be quality work
1. Here's a handy @pewresearch graphic w overall turnout by state in 2020, but also, each state's improvement in turnout over 2016. In places where Ds took control (CA, CO, VA, WA) they've been (small l) liberalizing voting access & you really see the + effect its having on
2. participation. For years political scientists have wondered if competition was more imp than institutional design or vice versa & its really looking like institutions MATTER which makes the systematic targeting of voting institutions to suppress turnout by the GOP in states
3. where they have the power to do so (and as my friend @marceelias will tell you & talk about when he's on the show) they're coming HARD after GA's system now. And this data tells me that if they're successful in chipping away at the institutions, it will matter. Fun fact, not