Thread by @RachelBitecofer

🧵The GOP's 2024 Achilles Heel

Why Trump's Take Over of the RNC May Cost Republicans Big in 2024

When the news that the Trump family had turned the Republican National Committee into a Trump family business, I was ecstatic.

Why?

As my buddy @TheRickWilson would tell you, everything Trump touches dies, and I knew the RNC would be no different.

Despite dropping her real last name (Romney) and being willing to help Trump and his associates conspire to submit fake Electors as part of Trump’s broader plot to stay in power, Trump dumped then-RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel and handed the keys to the entire Republican Party’s kingdom to Lara Trump, whose only qualification for the post is that she is part of the Trump family’s crime cabal.

Now, I need to explain exactly why I was so happy that day, and to do that, I need to go into some brief nerd background.

In my area of political science we spend a lot of time, I mean A LOT, measuring campaign activities to see if they affect voter turnout and vote choice. As campaigns first evolved into the TV era, and then into the digital age, these empirical studies have subjected all kinds of hypotheses about voter turnout and vote choice to empirical and experimental scrutiny.

I won’t bore you with that research history aside from to tell you that by far the things that affects turnout and vote choice (persuasion) the most is in-person GOTV (Get Out The Vote) field programs.

I knew that in 2020 when Democrats made the decision to suspend virtually all of its in-person field work due to the pandemic, which is why I immediately panicked.

Now, don’t get me wrong, suspending in person events in the midst of a global pandemic makes absolute sense, especially because the demographic most susceptible to death from COVID, the elderly, are also the vast majority of people that volunteer to knock on strangers’ doors to get them to vote.

However, since the Republican Party was no longer a political party, and now a cult, Republicans decided that since COVID was a hoax and not something that could ever happen to them.

Anti-science Republican governors reopened their states at the height of the pandemic and in the process killed and sickened many Republicans, who believed their lies and thus left themselves intentionally vulnerable to dying.

While Democrats transitioned to less effective, virtual field operations like texting and phone banking, Republicans kept running full steam ahead. They even resumed Trump’s rallies, each of which became super spreader events.

As soon as I realized we were going to unilaterally suspend our in-person field, I got a sick feeling in my gut because I suspected it would hurt Democratic Party performance, especially down ballot where interest in elections are much, much lower. Indeed, I flew right into the belly of the COVID beast, Texas, BEFORE there was a vaccine so I could make a personal appeal to Texas House and state legislative candidates to find a way to conduct in-person field.

As I watched 19 districts break for Biden but elect Trump cronies to the House as well as the underperformance Democrats suffered in state legislative races I learned a big lesson about the tremendous importance of in-person field and especially the powerful advantages that can fall to one party when the other party’s field game is absent or inept.

That brings us back to the present.

There is something you should know about the Republican National Committee. Until recently, it was the primary organizer for the entire Republican Party’s largely effective in-person field operation. Indeed, the RNC was so good at field that in the 2016 cycle they entirely handicapped the under-funded and chaotic mess that was the Trump campaign that cycle, essentially handicapping Trump from the ineptness of his own operation.

Now, some people would have looked at the RNC’s field operation and think, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” but that is not what happened once Lara Trump took over.

Still reeling from the mistakes Trump forced onto the RNC in 2020 with his lies about early voting and mail-in voting, Ronna McDaniel knew she had a big hill to climb to fix Trump’s damage. The results of the 2022 midterms proved that Trump’s election lies were having durable effects on Republican voters, who continued to shift away from early and absentee voting and towards Election Day only voting.

The reason the Republican Party invented absentee and early voting was because relying on a largely apathetic electorate to vote on one special day is bad strategy that produces sub-optimal outcomes.

It took a long time for Democrats to copy Republicans and begin to push early and absentee voting hard in states where they had legislative powers to make electoral reforms.

The Trump takeover of the RNC does seem to have undermined the GOP’s 2024 cycle in-person field operation. 👇

As soon as the Republican National Committee became the Trump National Committee, Sheriff Lara, who again has 0 qualifications for her post other than slavish loyalty to her Orange Daddy, defunded two of the RNC’s key operations: early vote “harvesting” and minority outreach operations.

Instead of focusing on turning out the vote, the 2024 version of the RNC is mission focused on suppressing the vote, shifting both attention and resources to building infrastructure to contest the results off the 2024 cycle and building voter intimidation infrastructure, which they call their poll watchers program.

So, if the RNC has divested from in-person field organizing, who exactly is running the GOP’s field outreach this cycle?

The answer to that should fill you with glee because it is, apparently, Elon Musk’s superPAC and right wing grifter and Turning Point USA president Charlie Kirk.

Yes, Republicans have turned their once enviable organizing duties out to the private sector and to people with no experience with field organization, the most logistically complex elements of the modern campaign.

Meanwhile, over at the Democratic National Committee Chair Harrison has built and funded what will be, by far, the most extensive and comprehensive national field program in the party’s history.

Howard Dean dreamed about a 50 state vision for the DNC. Jaime Harrison actually built it.

https://x.com/harrisonjaime/status/1740762500788867466

Its real. Its here. And its about to face off against an RNC that has been gutted and turned into a piggy bank for Donald Trump.

I’ll keep you posted.

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