🧵Here's Why Democrats Can't Meet This Moment
And How We Can Fix It

Folks, for a long time I’ve wanted to introduce you to a book that came out a year or two ago by a journalist named Tina Nguyen called The MAGA Dairies.

There are a lot of reasons to read this book and for a long time I’ve held out hoping to get the author onto the podcast to talk about it with me, but I can’t afford to wait any longer. Why?

Because this book is the perfect illustration of how and why the Republican Party has managed to radicalize 50 million people into wanting autocracy AND also the perfect explanation of why Democrats seem completely lost in response.

🧵Living History:

Plenty of Parallels between MAGA and the NAZI Movement

Folks, sometimes when I’m waging war against the MAGA Nazis on the twitter machine I come across something I read and then want you to read too.

This is why I am going to copy and paste this short piece from someone who would prefer to remain anonymous (with their permission!) This analysis shows the parallels between MAGA and another fascists movement from 100 years ago who you know as the Nazis.

Here it is:

The comparison to Nazi Germany isn’t just a stretch—it’s a direct historical parallel unfolding in real time. Trump’s playbook is eerily similar to Hitler’s rise to power, and the signs are all there for those willing to see them.

🧵The Tipping Point Is Upon Us:
Will MAGA Simply Ignore the Courts?

Ok folks, we’re three weeks in and have already entered the “constitutional crisis” phase of things.

I want to draw your attention to something critically important in the coming week. The federal courts have started to respond to Elon Musk’s illegal attack on federal agencies and programs like USAID. This is going to create a real litmus test for the survival of our democracy.

Much of what Trump and Elon are doing is so flagrantly illegal, it is hard to imagine much of it surviving judicial review, even at the Supreme Court level.

Yes, the Federalist Society controls the Court, but on occasion at least three of their justices, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Roberts have ruled on the side of the Constitution against Trump. There is one major exception and that is the immunity case where they not only did their best to create an untouchable presidency, but also did it in a way to drag the case out of being tried before the election. So we know they have it in them.

American Idiot:
Voters Know Nothing, Jon Snow.

This 🧵 is about the effects of partisanship on public opinion.
Please RT & share it! #TheMoreYouKnow This book, The American Voter, first published in 1960, is the Bible of my subfield in political science: political behavior.

Political behavior is the study of the way people think, feel, and act with regard to politics and includes everyone from political office holders and candidates (elites) to your average man on the street voters.

🚨🧵New from The Cycle 👇

Trump, MAGA, and the Breaking of the American Mind:

A Majority of Republicans Say They are A-OK With Trump Suspending the Constitution

Have you ever had a random conversation with someone that just sort of stays with you over time?

I had one such conversation back in 2019 or so participating in an event. The conversation was with a graduate student assistant from Rwanda who was working the event. That evening a few of us gathered under the Virginia summer sky to night gaze and hang out.

Always eager to talk with people from other cultures, and especially from places with a political history like Rwanda’s, I was eager to ask about Rwanda’s recovery from the genocide that ripped the country apart in a 100 day blood bath during the Rwandan civil war in 1994.

🧵Welcome to the Crusades 2.0

An Interview with Matthew Taylor, author of The Violent Take it by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening our Democracy. If you’ve been following the transition of the Republican Party from the party of Reagan into whatever the hell it is now you’ll know that the once “useful idiots” of the Republican Party, the Christian Right, now rule the party and they have big plans for Trump 2.0.

🧵How to be Sand in the Gears of Tyranny

A Guest Essay by @GalvinAlmanza

Friends,

I’m aware many of you want/need actionable advice on things you can do to help thwart what is coming so you don’t marinate in hopelessness. As Dr. DOOM, I’m not well-positioned for this role! That’s why when I came across Emily Galvin-Almanza's threaded tweet offering tangible, actionable ideas for real resistance that can really matter I knew I needed to get it to you.

So, I reached out to Emily and offered her the opportunity to write up her ideas to share with The Cycle’s audience and I am delighted she agreed.

What follows is Emily’s article.

🧵Why Democrats Failed to Save Democracy
Identity Politics and Microtargeting Killed The Party's Brand

Once upon a time the Democratic Party, with its regional base in the Southern U.S. was the party of slavery, and then of segregation.

If you spend much time on social media you already know this because of the many times Trump voters have told you, “but Democrats are the party of segregation!”

Back in the 1950s and 1960s during the Jim Crow Era, the Democratic Party had morphed into an unholy alliance merging a party of liberal Whites and racist White Southerners into one big coalition that by staying together, dominated Congress for decades. By the 1960s, the activism of MLK. Jr and thousands of other largely unnamed civil rights activists finally forced the Democratic Party to choose: preserve their large coalition or end segregation. In part due to the assassination of JFK, then-President Lyndon Johnson sided with civil rights for Blacks signing both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and in doing so, set off the realignment that would lead to total domination of the South by the Republican Party just a few decades later.

Welcome to the Upside Down:
It's Gonna Be a Long, Strange Trip Into Autocracy

Folks, if you subscribe to the Cycle you know I like to give you reality straight, with no chaser. If you think your mental health isn’t up to that, please flee. There will be little feel-good content coming from me. Instead, I plan on bringing you a weekly blow-by -blow documenting the decline of democracy loosely based on William Shirer’s work as a foreign correspondent reporting from Berlin in the early years of the Third Reich.

🚨 My final election analysis: who will win?

Dude, Where's My Man Wave?!

Its Starting to Look Like America Understands the Assignment

We’re humans, we like certainty.

In fact, we crave certainty of event outcomes that probabilistic models and horserace polling simply can’t give us. Whether a single poll, many polls aggregated together, or many polls aggregated together and then combined with other important components of elections (forecasting “models” like 538, Silver Bullet, etc) statistics can only take us so far in predicting election outcomes.

Why?

🧵What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?

Like Hitler, Trump Has Made Clear His Plan is Dictatorship, Not Democracy

January 30th 1933 dawned cold and clear in Berlin as Adolph Hitler took his oath of office and promised Germans he would uphold the constitution. It would ultimately take him less than 30 days to dismantle it. By March, Dachau concentration camp was opened with its inaugural prisoners: members of the Communist and Social Democrat parties and other prominent Hitler critics. including some members of the Reichstag which Hitler’s allies would join with the National Socialists to voluntarily dissolve to give Hitler near total power.

🧵General Election Update
Are the Polls Really Narrowing?
When we say Republicans are flooding the zone with partisan polls to set a narrative that Trump can win, the data above is what we mean.

Here I have highlighted the one poll in the past 3 days which comes from a reliable pollster and that is the one that still shows Harris +4 among likely voters. 👆

🧵24 Days to Go, I Wanna be Sedated:
As Election Day Nears, Race Remains a Toss Up

As the final 3 weeks begins, the race between Harris and Trump remains a toss up, with a modest Harris lead in the polling aggregation and within margin of error polling in most of the swing states. There is nothing I can do to give you absolution, this is (and always has been) a race that will come down to a few thousand votes in states like Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona and will be much tighter than in 2020.

There are precisely two polls that show Trump winning and both are from partisan pollsters.

🚨Trumps Closing Message: Kamala's Agenda is They/Them, Not You

The Trump Campaign is Going All In on Men. Will It Work? Elections are usually games of addition. That is what makes the Trump campaign’s 2024 strategy of purging voter rolls in swing states they control like Virginia and Georgia so unique: their goal is subtraction.

🧵How To Win (Or Lose) an Election:
Democrats Have a Clear Road Map to Victory, but Will They Use It?

Blunting a midterm effect is hard.

In fact, its so hard that when I set out in the winter of 2021 to teach Democrats how they might do it, I assumed it was an impossible task we’d ultimately fail at. And we well might have, if not for Dobbs.

The day the Dobbs memo leaked I knew that Democrats now had a powerful wedge issue they could use in the midterms to potentially disrupt one of the most reliable patterns in American politics, the midterm effect.

Believe it or not though, it was not easy to convince top tier campaigns that wedging Roe/Dobbs was the only path to victory in 2022. That rather than doing what their traditional strategists were privately and publicly telling them to do (play defense on crime and inflation), Democrats who wanted to actually win needed to go hard on offense on abortion.

🧵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.

🧵General Election Update 4:
What Does the Data Say?

It’s mid-September and for subscribers to The Cycle, the election is exactly where I said it would be back in late July after The Switch. Kamala Harris has maintained her predicted popular vote advantage of about 3 points and continues to pick up ground in the swing states.

Yes We Kam

Harris/Walz Have Changed the Fundamentals of 2024🧵

The data is starting to catch up to the shockwave that is the nomination of Vice President Harris. One of the biggest problems Democrats faced this cycle was voter apathy towards Joe Biden. Fair or not, Americans wanted a new candidate and as Nikki Haley suggested back in the GOP Primary, the first party that gave them a new choice would have a big edge.

We had another election with “double haters.”

Now we only have single haters.

The Winds of Change:
Harris at Top of the Ticket is About to Shake It Up

🧵You know I prefer to have solid data to back up my assertions, but in this case I have decided for the benefit of your mental health to throw caution to the wind and get ahead of the data a bit. The temptation to parcel out every poll this past week and next will be high (and the clicks they provoke too tempting) for them not to do so, but I want to make something crystal clear:

Trump forced 12 year olds to perform lesbian sex acts for him.

That seems important. Here’s the full doc storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

Today in 1933, Adolph Hitler swore this oath as he as he became the German chancellor:

“I swear loyalty to the Constitution, obedience to the law, and conscientious fulfillment of the duties of my office, so help me God.”

Having run on an explicitly authoritarian platform, within a year, Hitler had completely neutralized the "coalition government," outlawed all parties aside from the Nazis, purged the civil services of Jews and political foes, cracked down on the free press, and sent thousands of political enemies to Dachau.

In Hitler's Germany, Germans took a very different kind of oath, one to Hitler, not the law.

“I swear I will be true and obedient to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, observe the law, and conscientiously fulfill the duties of my office, so help me God.

Over the next 10 months, we are going to walk you through Project 1933 so you can appreciate the weakness of legal protections in the face of people committed to violating it and understand how Project 1933 relates to the Republican Party's Project 2025.

RT & Tell your friends.
#Project1933

https://twitter.com/cwebbonline/status/1752331479596843507