Thread by @RachelBitecofer

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

https://twitter.com/SuellenFlynn11/status/1355582567521669120

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

4. certainly not advocating ignoring the middle of the voter file, I am advocating something is really radical but broadly speaking, it involves shaping the electorate in such a way that your "coalition" simply overwhelms, in turnout, the other sides. This, I argue, is necessary

5. bc few voters in the middle of the voter file are truly persuadable, although they might play a good game in a focus group setting or at a door in convo w a canvasser. And the reason I argue THAT is based on years and thousands of cycle's outcome data, esp over the last 10 yrs

6. which consistently shows us that partisans cast ballots for their own party more than 90% of the time, even if the nominee is MTG or Roy Moore- a known child molester or Trump, a completely horrible person. Even more imp, is this point & its not a novel one from me but rather

7. a very old & well-established finding from poli sci: that supposedly giant swath of independents in America that decide elections? Most of them are actually NOT independents. That's right! Most of them as secret party voters! BC the parties have bad brands, many partisans

8. prefer to call themselves indies, but they are not indies. To their credit, when pollsters try to smoke them out they are actually very forthcoming about the fact that they are secretly partisans and most freely admit they "lean" to the Rs or Ds. And the data don't lie!

9. These leaners ARE partisans. They vote like them. They hold policy positions similar to moderate or "weak" partisans. As I showed in this gold star @DemocracyFund data, even way back in July, Indie leaners were never up for grabs in 2020- although Trump was so awful w the

10. pandemic there was an observable underperformance among indie R leaners, I think, compared to what we might normally expect. This has changed over time. It didn't use to be like that. Weak partisans & indie leaners used to be more fluid. But now they're not. I assume that's

11. why the GOP doesn't build their campaigns around this model anymore. Nor should we! There are some misunderstandings of elections under hyperpartisanship that form the justifications for current campaign strategies being deployed in our contests & my thesis is it causes us to

12. underperform electorally. In 2020, I think the PRIMARY explanation for why Ds lost House seats & state leg seats was the suspension of their in-person field. That decision was based on best-practices public health guidelines & against a sane opposition party, in a sane

13. country, this wouldn't have been a problem bc the GOP would have done the same. But the GOP DIDN't do the same. They ran the RNC's full, top notch field & targeting program. Of course, we TEST this. We won't ever know. But, I'm inclined to believe that Ds underperformed

14. what they would have turned in otherwise in the House & state leg IF they'd have done field. I should add, they partially based those decisions on data that showed that text banking outreach was going to be just as effective in terms of turning out the vote. And when I was

15. freaking out in Sept & Oct and begging the party to reinstate their in-person field for Congress, I was informed repeatedly about the robustness of these studies and that anyway, mass contact, by virtue of reach so many more voters at once was better. But I have not seen

16. or been privy to any election post-ops that quantify this stuff. However, after suspending it for way too long, Team Biden DID reinstate it in the final weeks (too late for FL). I also understand that some congressional races funded indie in-person field (and assuming that

17. is true it obvs presents a wonderful natural field experiment. Again, I'm still way too much of an outsider to the electioneering world to have been read into this stuff, if its been measured/tested & the academic versions will take a forever to publish. I think Biden likely

18. was pressured heavily to "so safe" on his running mate choice & deserves mad props for picking a liberal D (FROM CA!!!) who is also a female of color given that there is sizable wing of the party's campaign consultant class that spent the last 4 yrs arguing the pathway back

19. to salvation for the party HAD to flow through Obama-to-Trump voters (partially correct, pure Is, who swung to the Rs in 2016 were going to have to swing back to the Ds in 2020 but the good news is 4 or 5% of these people just do that every cycle, or so it seems anyway, bc

20. they had the status quo, whoever that is the time. But the Obama-to-Trump voter argument presented by this group was not these "change voters" as I call them in my work, they are the dealigners- white, non-college edu voters who voted for Obama, yes, then Trump but will

21. probs not come back to Ds and will vote for the GOP nominee in 2024 as well (at least if @richthau's @axios focus groups are any indicator). That's bc these folks are party of the dealignment/realignment population that is sorting/resorting between the parties: w non-college

22. whites sorting to Rs, college whites moving to the Ds (those so much less discussed Romney to Clinton to Biden voters). Anyway, the people who don't understand this think that Ds should try to be a appealing to non-college whites as possible, which would be one thing if these

23. voters were actually 'gettable" & motivated by normal policy appeals. They are not. They are MTG types: they are marinated in conspiracies and think Ds run pedo rings. You can't win a persuasion war, in the context of an election anyway, against that. Instead @JoeBiden went

24. the other way, the modern way, a path had Clinton took we might have avoided this whole national nightmare. he deserves mad props for that- as does his manager @jomalleydillon which in the great tradition of women achieving really remarkable shit, is being under celebrated

25. I think these two things: leaning into being a "proud" Dem and then running a campaign that tapped into that instead of hoping Republicans would somehow do the right thing if only the entire campaign was made FOR THEM were pivotal (along w the party chairs of WI, PA, & MI)