Thread by @RachelBitecofer

1. Elected Rs are divided into 3 groups right now:

You've got the Crazy Caucus & they hail from these R+27 districts, or in the Senate from ID or TX & all of their behavior is dictated by the only election that affects them- the Rep Primary. Rem. Cruz, in effect, pushed out

2. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a mod conservative Rep Sen in TX- but NOT a crazy one, certainly not one who would lead an insurrection against her own gov't. Technically, she wasn't "primaried" bc instead of subjecting herself to the humiliation of seeing her long service to the Rep

3. Party besmirched & insulted by @tedcruz, she did what poli scientists call "strategically retire"- which is what you do when you think it is likely you will lose either the primary or the general. I also wanted to show you what happens, ideologically when something like this

4. happens in the Senate (& this is a preview of the article I'm writing (which I plan to publish in my own outlet, @The__Cycle, but would be happy to talk about putting fin yours!) The NOMINATE scores measure policy-extremism & there is gulf between K.B.H. & someone like Cruz

5. and the decade of the 2010s saw many K.B.H.'s wiped out & replaced with Cruz's. But also, people who compared to Cruz ARE moderates so we call them that but compared to old moderates like K.B.H. are NOT moderates, they are conservatives-so when they don't act like mods media

6. is continually surprised. A great ex of people like this is @marcorubio who is a CONSERVATIVE- NOT a moderate. Here I am showing you Rubio's ideology relative to Cruz's (Cruz is in blue). Now, you might be tempted to look at Rubio & think, "well he is kind of in the middle of

7. the GOP pack in the senate!" But the problem is that's bc the "middle of the GOP pack" is no longer bell shaped with the bulk of the senator's ideological scores towards the middle. Instead the "center" of their distribution as been pulled significantly over to the right- &

8. and more than what has happened to the Ds on their side (BTW: House is much worse bc of gerrymandering). So what looks like, to the eye, a distribution that has Rubio mixed in the center is one that is distorted bc the "center" is pulled further to the Right, something you

9. can see much more plainly when you compared the Senate now to the Senate right when the polarized era began

10. This work is also part of academic work I'm doing that contributes to a conversation that attempts to explain what causes polarization. When things 1st began to polarize, political scientists put out A LOT of research on it. The early stuff focused on Are We Polarized? BC of

11. the amazing tool I just showed you, the debate about what we call political elites (elected officials) got settled quick. It took a decade of fighting between really talented political scientists as to whether regular people were polarized, and this time period overlapped my

13. time in grad school. From day 1 I was in "yes they are" camp w @AlanIAbramowitz even though I was a sad grad student who he didn't know at all. The thing is, I knew he was right but that the evidence was lagging. In other words, he'd eventually be provided right. Esp bc the

14. the main "bible" used to "disprove" mass polarization wasn't well done in terms of its analysis (though not one person ever said that or complained about it or called this dude a charlatan- go figure). The good part though of the massive push back about the mass polarization

15. hypo/claim is it produced some of the best scholarship in the field, one of which looked at patterns going on in voter behavior and noticed something called "sorting." That although in the past, party & ideology were not uniform with each other, that was changing, and fast.

16. Liberal Republicans were "disappearing." They were changing their party ID to Indies (formally where there is party reg, informally elsewhere) and conservative Ds were doing the same to become Rs. Back in the 80s if I found out you were a Rep, I could not almost perfectly

17. predict your ideology, or your position on guns or abortion. And bc of that, I also couldn't be sure who you might vote for. If you were a liberal R in 1992 you might well cast a ballot for Bill Clinton. If you were a conservative D who was religious & uncomfortable about

18. abortion, even though you lived in Massachusetts & had been voting for Kennedy's non-stop for years, you voted for this charismatic Reagan guy w this bold economic plan (BTW: this has MASSIVE repercussions for how campaigns were run, something you'll have to read the actual

19. article to hear about). @m_levendusky's The Partisan Sort is one of the most imp political science insights ever, not bc it disproved mass polarization as some of the anti-polarizers at the time argued, but bc it provided the mechanism as to HOW polarization occurs. BC

20. Ideological homogeneity is a necessary, but not sufficient condition to polarization and it is the main reason that the polarization problem, the hyperpartisanship problem is significantly asymmetrical (this also something the article will dive deeply into quantifying). The

21. Right IS ideologically homogeneous. The Left isn't. Indeed, in another must read book, Asymmetric Politics, @MattGrossmann &his co-author compellingly argue that the Rep Party is organized as an ideological movement while the Dem Party represented a bunch of separate,

22. organized interest groups (women's rights, the environment, unions, gay rights, gun reform groups, you get the point) who are all focused on policy achievement & fighting for the party's scarce resources (also one of the most imp insights ever made). Incidentally, this is 1

23. of the reasons factionalism has been, & will forever, an issue on the left bc resource competition naturally breeds factionalism & most esp does in environments when no one is strategically working to mitigate it (which we can probably assume @DNC isn't- but perhaps, as part

24. of The Great Overhaul, this is something that can be done. There is A LOT about ideological homogeneity & polarization I have to teach you, but no more here!

Aside from the Crazy Caucus- which is SIZABLE, we're not talking a small group anymore folks,

25. we have Group 2: The Enablers. Now, you can makes an excuses for them all you want, but the fact is, The Enablers ARE THE PROBLEM. If they held a meeting today & decided to end the Crazy Caucus' Reign of Terror (& w the good strategic direction, monetary & logistic support)

25. we COULD end the Crazy Caucus @BillKristol & set the Rep Party on a redemption path TODAY. But, the GOP leadership, donor class, & other key principles have to accept a fairly high probability of 1 bad election cycle while Trump's 3rd party tries and fails to win.

26.effort plays out. That loss would be all 80% of support could withstand- I PROMISE you. And the 20% that stays w him is precisely the 20% you need to cut out of your coalition anyway. In any case, conservatives have a 6-3 majority on SCOTUS & the socialism stuff has always

27. been mere rhetorical red meat. Even if Ds passed Warren's 2% wealth tax & gave all the $ to free college, that's NOT socialism! Y'all will survive that a hell of a lot easier than forging on with the Crazy Caucus, who intend to dismantle democracy entirely (see Hungary for a

28. preview of their end game). I mean seriously Rs/conservatives. Unlike every European country & Canada- we don't even give women PAID maternity in the U.S.! The best we could come up was "here, for 6 weeks, your employer can't fire you!" A country like that is in NO

28. DANGER of turning into a socialist country.

Honestly, think about implementing the entirety of Bernie Sanders' platform. As offensive as you'd no doubt find this, as much as it would hurt your philosophy, or potentially cut into the number of hamburgers you eat???

29. (I'm still VERY skeptical that you would lose ANY hamburgers) go google socialism & tell me, would America be a socialist country?? NO- bc as it turns out, you have no f'ing idea what socialism is! BC its not universal healthcare. Or pre-school. Or even college! And back in

30. 40s and 50s we taxed the f out of the rich and guess what? We weren't socialist!! Bc that's not socialism either. Google that, google authoritarianism, and fascism and tell me which ism America seems closest to. Bot socialism. And the micro small people who say they ARE

31. socialists in polls or whatevs, there's actually A LOT LESS of these people now then there was decades ago. BC like communism, fascism, & the other isms, socialism has been shown to be a shitty system. So too can be capitalism once it stops being a monetary management system

32. And becomes a religion or a theology, like the bulk of the Rep Party has decided to make it. Anything, made dogmatic is an issue. Keep that in mind.