Tag: Rachel Bitecofer

Democrat’s Messaging Needs a Rethink

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Motif #1, Rockport MA – 2020 photo by Kristen Wilkinson. Motif #1 is among the most painted fishing shacks in the world. It was originally constructed in 1840, and reconstructed in 1978.

Dr. Rachel Bitecofer is a political scientist who became famous 2018 and 2020 by predicting the midterm and presidential election results of those years nearly perfectly. By doing that, she was way ahead of most pollsters. Bitecofer has now declared her true colors by forming a Democratic PAC called StrikePAC, designed to show Democrats how to fight today’s Trumpy GOP.

Bitecofer is warning Democrats that they could face a wipe out in 2022 if they continue to focus on policy and “kitchen table issues” to the exclusion of the toxic effort by Republicans to brand them, because those issues will not resonate against the GOP’s messaging of cultural issues and the Big Lie.

In a sense, Republicans are branding experts. They fuel the grievances of their supporters every day by waving the cultural wedge issues (abortion, LBGTQ, Critical Race Theory, voter fraud and BLM) in the faces of their followers, while simultaneously demonizing Democrats as against freedom, and for socialism.

Paul Rosenberg at Salon interviewed Bitecofer, and her analysis seems intuitively correct to Wrongo. She argues that the 2018 midterms were more a referendum on Trump’s presidency than on individual candidates and individual races. She foresees that the Republicans will be similarly motivated in 2022: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Look, the GOP doesn’t really run anything except a marketing/branding op [operation] and it’s predominantly a branding offensive against the left.”

More:

“They don’t spend a lot of time on their own brand, but they do spend a lot of time in their messaging on discounting, discrediting, and debasing our brand…..so it’s always about showing us as unattractively to voters as possible. We’ve never answered that.”

Bitecofer says that the Dems have been told by their consultants that they shouldn’t push back on the “socialism” or “defund the police”, or “destroy democracy” messaging, but some of those stones are starting to land, just like they did in the 2020 down ballot elections in which the Democrats badly under-performed. More from Bitecofer:

“…you can’t just stand there and pretend it’s not hitting….The GOP is saying, ‘We’re going to have a debate about these topics,’ and when you enter…that field, you are basically on the defense the whole time because you’re having a conversation that’s been structured by the opposition party.”

Bitecofer thinks it’s time to flip the script on the GOP’s tactics by making the 2022 election a conversation about their anti-democratic power grab, including contesting the results of 2020, their Jan. 6 insurrection, that Trump tried to use the Justice Department to stage a coup, and the Republican Party’s embrace of all of the above.

Republicans have normalized anti-democratic behavior by going into state legislative sessions to try and restrict voter access, even trying to take the vote certification process away from nonpartisan actors and placing it into partisan hands.

So, her basic point is that Democrats need to make the electorate realize that American democracy is on the ballot in 2022. A final quote from Bitecofer:

“To me, ‘bringing a brand offensive’ pretty much describes how Republicans have run the vast majority of their national campaigns at least since Ronald Reagan….Democrats have virtually never done so—not even when Trump first ran in 2016…. we are not engaged in a campaign technique that matches the moment.”

The collective decision by Republicans to stay on the anti-democratic, racist trajectory that the GOP had been on, even before Trump, is perhaps the most important story in American politics right now. The modern GOP messaging tries to turn out their side using the wedge cultural issues, but they also try hard to nationalize politics by making local races be largely about the differences in the two Parties.

Bitecofer says that started with the 2010 midterms which they made a referendum on Obamacare and Nancy Pelosi. They tied every candidate to that as tightly as they could. So candidates didn’t stand for re-election on their own performance and voting record, things that people traditionally thought mattered most. Instead, it was all about whether they were Democrats. And it worked.

Democrats noticed the strategy, but never adjusted to it. In some ways, it seems like Democrats fail to recognize how distinctly different voter behavior is inside the two Parties, and how hyper-partisanship has changed branding and messaging.

The GOP is running a strategic, intentional branding campaign. And Democrats are still talking policies and whether the filibuster should be dumped. Are we making a huge mistake by focusing solely on the issues when the opponent is focusing on killing democracy?

You bet. We need to find and deliver messaging that creates both persuasion and mobilization for our 2022 midterm candidates.

Make it a referendum on Republicans.

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Turnout Must Be the Democrats’ Election Strategy

The Daily Escape:

St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans, LA – December 2019 iPhone photo by Wrongo

So, what’s the Democrats’ 2020 campaign strategy? As usual, they can’t decide. Should they run to the center, again following a “Blue Dog” strategy that will sound a lot like Republican-lite? Should they go big, calling for structural change that expands health care and grows the middle class? Or should they simply run against Trump?

Which of these, or which combination of these strategies, are winners?

Ask any pundit, and they will say that Trump won Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by appealing to white, working class voters who abandoned the Democrats based on Trump’s economic populist messaging. This makes all Dem strategists say the Democratic presidential nominee must run as a centrist.

That was true in Ohio in 2016, where Trump managed to win 50% of the votes. In the others, he won with pluralities. Trump “won” Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan with 47.22%, 48.18%, and 47.5% of the vote, respectively. Why? Because five times the normal number in those states cast their ballots for someone other than Trump or Clinton. In this polarized era, the average vote that goes to a protest ballot is about 1.5%. In 2016, in Wisconsin, 6.2% of voters cast protest ballots.

Most of those third party voters should have been Democratic voters—they were disproportionately young, diverse and college educated—but the Clinton camp made no effort to activate them in the general election.

Instead, Hillary Clinton ran her campaign by trying to appeal to Republicans and the few Republican-leaning independents appalled by Trump. She chose a bland white man, Tim Kaine, as VP. Her messaging and ads were policy-lite. And in the end, most of those voters stuck with the GOP.

Rachel Bitecofer, a 42-year-old professor at Christopher Newport University Virginia, says that there are no swing voters, and that it’s useless to design a campaign to appeal to them. Crazy, right? We should take her seriously because she nailed, almost to the number, the size of the Democrats’ 2018 win in the House.

Bitecofer’s theory is that today’s elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote. She says the real “swing” doesn’t come from voters who choose between two parties, but from people who choose to vote, or not. The actual percentage of swing voters in any given national election according to her analysis, is closer to 7% than the 20% most of the media thinks are out there.

Bitecofer’s view of the electorate is driven by Alan Abramowitz’s concept of “negative partisanship,” the idea that voters are more motivated to defeat the other side than any particular policy goals. Abramowitz says that American politics has become like bitter sports rivalries, where the parties hang together mainly out of sheer hatred of the other team, rather than a shared sense of purpose. Republicans might not love the president, but they absolutely loathe his Democratic adversaries.

Bitecofer says that negative partisanship makes the outcome of our elections highly predictable.

For what it’s worth, Bitecofer’s model has a yet-unnamed Democrat winning 278 electoral votes with 68 electoral votes still rated toss-up. From Bitecofer:

“In short, the 2020 presidential election is shaping up as a battle of the bases, and the Democrats’ base is simply bigger. When their demographic advantage combines with an enthusiasm advantage and heightened party loyalty fueled by negative partisanship, they hold a significant structural advantage. Turnout in 2018 was about 12 points higher than 2014 turnout and higher than any midterm in decades…. It is not infeasible that turnout in 2020 will exceed 65%.”

This means that Democrats have to harness the anger of Democrats, and that is more important than using policy to energize them, and then TURN THEM OUT.

Wrongo isn’t sure what to think about this. Intuitively, the “bitter sports rivalry” makes sense. But at the 30,000-foot level, hers may just be another plea for driving higher turnout.

As Bitecofer sees it, we shouldn’t be thinking about the Democratic or Republican “base.” Rather, there are Democratic and Republican coalitions, the first made of people of color, college-educated whites and people in metropolitan areas; the second, mostly noncollege whites, with a smattering of religious-minded voters, financiers and people in business, largely in rural and exurban counties.

She may be right accidentally, rather than because her model is great. But focusing voters’ anger at Trump is better than saying that “Trump voters are stupid” (or racist, or deplorable)and  seems smart.

Huge turnout is key. Voter turnout in 2016 was around 50%. If that can be increased by 10-15%, all things become possible for the Democrats.

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