“Public opinion is almost completely inelastic in the United States, and that is a sign of a very sick body politic.“
Rachel Bitecofer is the Senior Fellow for Elections at The Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank that works to promote an open society. Her innovative election forecasting model predicted the 2018 midterms five months before Election Day, far ahead of other forecasting methods.
“If Donald Trump had handled the pandemic well, it probably would have benefited him in the 2020 election.” However, we see that the pandemic response does not have the power to move people away from the President because of political polarization. Trump enjoys a high floor, but also suffers from a low ceiling, consistently polling in the low 40s.
Fear is a major factor in election turnout, something Democrats are not good at stoking in their base. Nativism will be electorally costly for Republicans in this environment, and Democrats are far less likely to coast into the 2020 election as they did in 2016.
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
SPEAKER
Rachel Bitecofer
Senior Fellow, Elections
The Niskanen Center
MODERATOR
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Anthony Scaramucci: (00:08)
The first thing I want to say is, we met on the set of Bill Maher, and I had known your business and known your career, and you have correctly assessed the midterm elections, many other elections, but you were spot on, on the midterms. But I'm going to read your bio very quickly. Rachel Bitecofer's a nationally recognized election forecaster, and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center in Washington DC where in addition to her groundbreaking election analysis, and election forecasting research on the presidential and congressional elections, she conducts pro democracy research. Rachel's work appears in a variety of the nation's leading media outlets, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Market Watch, The Guardian, the BBC, MSNBC, Sky News, CBC, and my favorite, Real Time with Bill Maher. By the way, unlike you, Rachel, he happens to love you and he loved you from day one, he was making fun of me on the show when I was a Trump supporter.
Anthony Scaramucci: (01:13)
She is the host of The Election Whisperer, which is a database politics and election show that Rachel says, is the electioner Disneyland for wanks with a good sense of humor. And you certainly have that. You're a senior advisor on The Lincoln Project. I did Lincoln Project TV last night, I really enjoyed that. So, Rachel, first of all, you've had a fabulous career, you've been spot on on so many things, but I love asking people this in the beginning, how did you get to be where you are and what drove you to go in the direction that you've taken your life?
Rachel Bitecofer: (01:47)
That's a really great question, and actually, it's good, because my career has really been very short, and that's because I delayed growing up like Peter Pan. That's because I was really interested in hanging out and partying when I was a teenager, and I didn't have parents that went to college, so college ... And this was like ... I'm a Gen X, in between Gen X and front end millennial, so everyone didn't go to college. And so, my parents didn't really focus on sending people to college, and so, I didn't go to college, and instead I went to Grateful Dead concert, it's like lots of them, in the early '90s, and that's what I was really focused on doing, and I learned-
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:36)
Where did you grow up? What town did you grow up in?
Rachel Bitecofer: (02:38)
In the Mid-Atlantic. My dad had been in the Navy, and he retired, and I was the youngest, so I didn't get as much Navy moving, but, because of that, we lived in Virginia ... Spain, Virginia, and then moved to Maryland. So, it's North of DC, in a place called Walkersville, which is a little bit outside of Frederick.
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:57)
Yes, yes, I know where that is.
Rachel Bitecofer: (02:58)
And all I cared about was getting the hell out of there.
Anthony Scaramucci: (03:02)
All right, all right. So, you're at the Grateful Dead concert, you're not going to college, but you end up as this brilliant pollster. Take us through that.
Rachel Bitecofer: (03:12)
And I don't do it at all until I'm 20. I go and do other things, and I get a job as a HR manager in a polling firm, out West in Oregon, and I'm 24, I'm a single mom, and I don't want to be broke forever. And also realizing I'm actually unusually smart, it was just that I had better things to do in school before, which was, a.k.a, not go to school and party. So, I go to college, and I go to a community college, because that's where you go when you're working class and don't have connections. And I realized pretty quick, I might have a huge passion for politics, and current events, and I'm not sure if I wanted to do law, or ... I find out how to become a professor is a really hard path, but I'm interested in doing it. I really wanted to be doing this. I would watch TV analysts, and I was like, "I think I can do that," but I didn't think that was too likely to occur, but I thought being a professor would be a nice second more achievable version of life.
Rachel Bitecofer: (04:24)
And so, I did. I went and did community college, working full-time the whole day, raising the kid on my own, young child, and then moved out to Georgia to do my PhD, because that's the place that accepted me with funding. And I only finished in 2015, and then my first year teaching was the 2016 cycle. So I always tell people, I'm an accidental election forecaster, what I was studying was political polarization. And then, I come out of that 2016 election having had all these observations about elections, and the way they're being analyzed, and what people were talking about them, realizing that people were looking at squares where I was seeing triangles, predominantly, because of all of this expertise about polarization. And that's when I stumbled into the path that you now have found me on.
Anthony Scaramucci: (05:21)
Okay. But you seem to be like ... I'm saying this as a compliment, some people say that word savant, and it's not a compliment, but you are a savant on this stuff. You have a knack for this stuff, and it's something that Simon Cowell would call the X Factor, where you're actually seeing something that other people don't see. And so, I'm going to get right to the 2020 presidential election, and I'd like you to lay out for people your narrative of what you think is going on in the body politic, and how do you think things will shape up? And we know it's a moving target, so, where are we today? Where do you think we'll be November 3rd, and how do we get to where we are?
Rachel Bitecofer: (05:59)
Right, right. And really, I mean, that's a big part of my research, but it's not a moving target like it used to be, and that's because of hyper partisanship and polarization, and even with a massive event, and something that is, even if it had been decently managed, and it certainly wasn't, the pandemic is a massive political event. It is also accompanied with a second massive political event, which is this economic event that goes along with it, and everywhere around the world, the public that goes in a country, you can see the effect of the event on public opinion, because it registers either positively or negatively, pretty significant changes in public opinion. There's only one country in which that's an exception, of course. I mean, I'm talking about countries with free and fair information systems. There's only one place in which that's different, and that's the United States of America.
Rachel Bitecofer: (06:55)
Public opinion is almost completely inelastic here, and that is a sign of a very sick body politic, but it does actually make forecasting election analysis, things like that, much easier, when things are going to be set in stone or pretty fundamentally, concrete for months on end, and nothing can, even a pandemic could move somebody away from an incompetent president, no matter how poorly managed it is, it does make it easier to guess where things will be. And so, what I said in March, as I wrote my March update, I said, "I won't update this forecast again until September." So it's coming out in a couple of weeks, but my expectation is A, this pandemic will not be managed well by Donald Trump, because he has incompetencies that made him always unqualified throughout the job of the presidency, which doesn't have a hiring process that's elite driven, it's mass driven, so [inaudible 00:07:56] he could get hired anyway, but he's probably not going to handle this ideally.
Rachel Bitecofer: (08:01)
And so, my assumption is, though, that that won't matter the way it did in 1980, when Carter faced an inflation crisis, Iran-Contras crisis, didn't handle those things well, and then got shellacked. We're not going to see that kind of movement, we will see some penalty, and we have. We've seen some additional erosion in peer independence, and some right leaning independence. I'll be really showing voters that, or people that in the September update, but by and large, Trump's still like 42, 43%, 41%. I mean, it's almost inelastic and it's amazing. It's amazing, because it's unique in the world to see a political event of this magnitude, have almost no effect on public opinions, assessments, and it's a ... We can talk about why and how it functions, but it's something that I [crosstalk 00:08:59]-
Anthony Scaramucci: (09:00)
Yes. If you don't mind, I would love to know your theory on it. I mean, I've heard you say this, "He has a high floor, but he also seems to have a low ceiling." I think that was your comment. It's a bandwidth that's very tight, and nothing seems to move it. To use the President's own words, "I can shoot people on Fifth Avenue, no one is really breaking support from me," but the flip side is, a good two thirds of the country seems to disagree with the way he handles the pandemic. That's a polling that I've seen. So, why do you think it is this way? Why do you think there's that level of rigidity in the polling?
Rachel Bitecofer: (09:37)
So, in particular, broadly speaking, it is, [inaudible 00:09:42] people hear in the media, and probably their own conversations these days, that you hear the words, polarization, maybe you hear the less common term, hyper partisan, but polarization certainly. Those are not just buzzwords, these are quantifiable, empirical characteristics that political scientists, like myself, have studied and documented, starting, really, with some very impressive quantification out of the US Congress, but it's been quantified in the courts, in the executive branch, and it took longer to quantify or find evidence to support in quantified terms, empirical terms in the public, but eventually, really, Bill Maher, what we call mass polarization, really starts to emerge in a big way, 2008, 2009 when two major events happened simultaneously; the economy collapses, and Barack Obama gets elected. So it's really difficult to disentangle how much of each thing impacts that movement, but we do know ... I mean, at that point on my dissertation, which is pushing back at a big book that's claimed to disprove mass polarization. In other words, like by Pew Center's public polling data, really starts to show definitively, no, no, no, polarization is not just something in the elites, it's not just a product of having to choose between parties that are polarized. This is something that's affecting regular rank and file voters.
Rachel Bitecofer: (11:23)
And, of course, that's what my forecasting work is about. It's about arguing with the election forecasting status quo, "Hey, you can't have mass polarization and hyper partisanship, and then keep analyzing elections and expecting election behavior to not be severely impacted, particularly in so far as a persuasion elements of a lecture of elections."
Anthony Scaramucci: (11:51)
What do you think's going to happen?
Rachel Bitecofer: (11:53)
Oh, so, for months, my forecast for the presidential election officially dropped 13 months ago, and it anticipated, based on my forecasting work, which talks about how Democrats have a numbers advantage. And this is a decision that was made by the Republican Party against its own advice in 2013. It issued a report, it's known as the RNC autopsy, and Reince Priebus, who was the chair of the Republican National Committee at the time, commissioned this report, post Romney's loss, to argue, "Look, the demographic realities of America, especially when we look at the millennial and Gen Z generations, are such that, nativism, especially, a language that is a hostile to racial minorities, is going to be electorally costly, and we should definitely moderate on the issue of immigration, and also probably stop fighting cultural war issues around issues like gay marriage, in particular, because public opinion has changed dramatically," and when we think about public opinion on gay marriage, it's one of the most astounding reversals that we've ever seen in a short 10, 15 year period.
Rachel Bitecofer: (13:09)
And, they commissioned this report, they put it hell in the part, and in ... This is part of what the republican civil war is about, half the party, your, is like, "No, that's not going to happen. Instead, we're going to go the other way. We're going to primary challenge, basically, the autopsy and scribers, and remove them from office." And so we see this big office purging of Republican establishment members, Eric Cantor, others, and then of course, the fight for the soul of the party in that 2016 nomination fight, and they take over of the Republican Party by Trump, which is a new version of the Republican Party. That's why the party did not put out a new convention plank, the plank is Donald Trump, basically. So, we have seen the ... And this is, if you look through the 245 years of America, and plus the pre-American history time period, you have already evolution. The democrats went through something very similar in the 1960s when it lost its whole Southern wing of the party collapsed. So, parties are amorphous, they change over time, and the Republican Party has had an amorphous experience that we're living through, it's impacting our national politics.
Rachel Bitecofer: (14:29)
So, I predicted Democrats were going to have a massive reaction to the election of Donald Trump, and we're not just talking about Democrats, and when we say Democrats, a lot of people say base. Even if you do talk about the democratic base, you're not talking about progressives, you're talking about progressives, you're talking about African Americans, you're talking about college educated women, talking about pretty big group, but my research really is careful in its language, and it talks about coalition of Democrats, because that encompasses, too, a pretty fair chunk of independents, because many independents are closet partisans, they lean left, they lean right. So when I talk about my work, I really like to use a coalitional term, because this is important on the other side as well. There's a big coalitional factor for Republicans with right leaning independents. That's especially important right now with so many X padded Republicans floating out there who are not calling themselves Republicans right now. But in any case, because group of Democrats were floating through 2016 in a complacent mood, and then got a big shock on election night, they are much less likely to go into 2020 with that level of complacency.
Rachel Bitecofer: (15:41)
That would be one major issue, but on top of that, there's this concept in polarization called negative partisanship. And negative partisanship refers to feelings that you have about the opposition party, which are grounded in your own partisanship, and people like to think about it as hate, like, "I hate the other party," but it's also fear. And that's fear ... When you think about Republicans when Obama was in office, and Obamacare was passed, or whatever Obama would do, Republicans would feel fearful of it. We're watching the RNC this week, really, a palpable fear of what would happen if Democrats end up in charge of America. So, fear is a major factor for turnout, and Democrats don't do fear artificially. Republicans do great artificial fear, but Democrats don't. So, we're going to see a huge turnout surge that I anticipated in 2018, four months before election, and that's what made my house forecast unique. Wasn't the accuracy of the end, which everyone was pretty much accurate at the end, the art of the forecast is done at the end anyway.
Rachel Bitecofer: (16:51)
It was the for forward accuracy, it was the fact that it was four or five months away, saying, "Hey, it's going to be more like 42 seats, and not 20, 30 seats fighting for the flip." And so, it predicted a Democratic win anyway. And then this pandemic happened, and that you said Donald Trump couldn't really do something. He had this feeling, and that's true, because, when we were on Bill Maher, it was literally the last few days before the country shutdown. It was the last couple of days, and still couldn't really conceptualize a world with this pandemic, and how it would exist, but the fact is, actually, that if Donald Trump had handled the pandemic well, let's say he had just made the same policy choices that all the other Western democracy leaders did, like Trudeau, or Morrison in Australia, Johnson, eventually, the more he screwed it up at the beginning that he copied Trump, and then was, like, "Oh, maybe I shouldn't do it this way." So let's say that he had done a national shutdown, all states at the same time for that first month, and then the defense production act, massive production of testing and PPE, and just did a slow reopen where things were getting ...
Rachel Bitecofer: (18:14)
Australia's very strict; when there's a flare up, everything gets shut back down. Let's say he had done that, and America did not have this raging out of control pandemic, and economic activity loss was able to resume, because it ultimately holding back economic activity, is people like you and me that have money, and we're too smart to go out and kill ourselves. We're not going to go to a restaurant, we're not going to go to a movie theater. You can open them all you want, we're not going to them. So, it's demand driven. So, you have to contain the virus if you want to reinstate demand. And as economic people, I'm sure you guys understand what I'm arguing here. So, containment was such a critical component to economic relief, so he didn't do that. But if he had done that, if he'd managed this well ... I actually disagree, it is true, in the normal course of things, he couldn't have improved his feeling, but with something this spectacular, something this disruptive to people's lives and businesses, if he had managed it well, he actually ... Democrats are more or less polarized, and this is just a qualifiable fact, and it's because the Democratic coalition is less ideological than the Republican coalition.
Rachel Bitecofer: (19:37)
It doesn't live in an alternative media system that's pretty intense on Fox News, it probably would have benefited him, and I think he honestly would have been fairly competitive, more competitive than my initial modeling would have had him, but of course, he did not, because he-
Anthony Scaramucci: (19:58)
But Rachel, I've been watching the Republican convention, and they say that he's handled it brilliantly, and they say that without him, more people would have died, and he shut down China, the travel ban with China. So, are you saying that the American people are not buying that narrative?
Rachel Bitecofer: (20:18)
So, it's a fine narrative for everywhere that you have full control of people's information diet, and that's not an insignificant portion of the public, because ... I'm a social political scientist, I'm sure other social scientists as well, have documented this in the study, after study, after study, and it has gone profoundly worse since Donald Trump came into the political stage and started telling people, overtly, especially from a position of legitimacy, as the president, [inaudible 00:20:49] that's a extremely powerful position that the rest of the media system is fake and what have you, but Republican identifiers in survey after survey, tell pollsters, "I only trust Fox News. I only watch Fox News." And that's a very different construct, because, remember, we're not talking about 5% of the public, we're talking about all around 30% of all Americans only get information from one source, and that is Fox News.
Rachel Bitecofer: (21:21)
And Fox News, when pandemic, and all of that stuff is a major story, that's not what they're talking about. They're really focused on this federal courthouse story in Portland or other things. Now, if you happen to be not consuming that, it's like the impeachment process or the house trial in Ukraine. I monitor right wing media very extensively, and I try to get people on, not in that environment, to understand, "Look, if it doesn't break through over there, it doesn't happen." So, during that house hearing for Ukraine, the right wing media was telling its audience that there was no evidence of misconduct produced from the house investigation, there was only evidence that implicated Hunter Biden in wrongdoing that Trump was exonerated in the process of ... And, in other, the rest of the world, headline after headline of just really compelling evidence in that house hearing from the Ukraine investigation. So, it's a very unique process too, because in conservative audiences across the globe, who don't have that media ecosystem, their perceptions of Trump's handling of the pandemic are very different, they're much more critical of it, obviously.
Rachel Bitecofer: (22:54)
So, if you don't have that context, though, how can you criticize something if you think it's going well, and you don't have any other information?
Anthony Scaramucci: (23:07)
Okay. So, Trump's gonna lose?
Rachel Bitecofer: (23:10)
If the election was held today, there's absolutely no way that he could win an election which everybody is voting either by mail, or whatever they're doing. And there's only so much disconnect you can have from polling data and reality. So people are, "Oh, well, the polls were all wrong in 2016, and he won." Well, there was actually quite clear, and I really would point people to read this MarketWatch article that I put out a couple of weeks ago, that walks through specifically what happened in 2016 with polling data, because actually, the polling data was very, very clear, and again, I wasn't an analyst, and I say in the article, I don't know if I would have noticed this if I was an analyst. I hope so. I like to think I would have, but I can't say that I would have. I know I noticed it right away when I wrote my post book, but hindsight is 20/20 definitely. But in my analysis of 2016, when I went to write my book on the election, it was like a blaring fire alarm signal in the polling data, that a very large number of voters in every poll, national polls, state polls, were saying that they were undecided. And that is weird for presidential elections.
Rachel Bitecofer: (24:28)
Usually ... We have this big theory in political science called minimal effects theory, and it's one of the most stable things if you're ready to go get a PhD in policide, and study American politics, every PhD American politics seminar is going to cover this research, and it's called the minimal effects theory, and it talks about how campaigns, because of polarization and the strength of partisanship, and how powerful partisanship is, that before there are candidates, before there are campaigns, most people have already made up their mind who they're going to vote for, and therefore campaigns have minimal effects. And so, when you look at polling data in any other cycle, when you get close to election day, you should not be seeing undecideds above 10% certainly, and the more normal a map for the polarized era, especially, is six, 7%. In 2016, in poll after poll, it's 15%, 12%, 20%.
Anthony Scaramucci: (25:31)
Where is that now, Rachel? Where are the undecideds now?
Rachel Bitecofer: (25:37)
It's at 6%. A lot of the poll ... I have this huge spreadsheet that I'm tracking of all these different indicators. It's like Bitecofer's secret tracking sheet. I mean, not all of the parts of it are secret, and this is definitely one of the things that isn't. I'm tracking the number of undecideds, you have to wait a little bit to track a couple of things, one of them is, how much ... Or when you have one party has a primary, and the other one doesn't, you have to wait a little while to see, will people coalesced around the candidate that had a primary? Because, otherwise you're measuring primary animosity affects more than anything else. I had to wait a long time to be able to see, "Are Democrats going to rally behind Biden, or are they going to have similar issues that they did with Clinton, where they never quite ..." I mean, it was atypical, so that was another thing I talk about in this article, was that third party defection where you see a state like Wisconsin, was 7% of the electorate doing third party or right invaliding in a state that went for Trump by point seven, less than a point.
Rachel Bitecofer: (26:45)
I mean, these are massive, massive impacts on the 2016 election, and these noises in the data are not there in 2020, a third party validing is much, much, much, lower already, undecideds are much, much lower, but when I'm looking at, "I want to figure out, will democrats consolidate around Biden's because you've got this progressive base?" They have twice now been thwarted in their efforts for their socialist revolution. And, free tip, I mean, nominate somebody who's progressive, but not an actual socialist, and you might have actually succeeded. Anyway, I wanted to see, this is a major weakness that can be exploited and would be, is. I mean, that's what the Death Star is all about, exploiting these disaffected Bernie people, trying to get to re-defect, because Donald Trump is not ... He's got the ceiling and he can't get above 50% in Ohio, in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, so, if your job is to reelect this dude, your job is to actually pull down the winning vote share below a majority. Has to be a plurality race like it was in 2016, or straight up, you cannot election him.
Rachel Bitecofer: (28:02)
So, like always, if you're running the Trump campaign, it's always been like, "How can I recreate that scenario in 2016 where there was a lot of third party defection," and you really wanted Bernie Sanders from on a competitive race, Bernie Sanders to lose, and people to be pissed off about it. So I wanted to see-
Anthony Scaramucci: (28:23)
Well, we don't have that now, though, right?
Rachel Bitecofer: (28:25)
No, we don't.
Anthony Scaramucci: (28:26)
The Bernie boys or whoever they call them, the Bernie band is with Joe Biden.
Rachel Bitecofer: (28:32)
They have totally consolidated around him already.
Anthony Scaramucci: (28:35)
Let's talk about women for a second, the female voter. Is the female vote going to be the determinate of the election?
Rachel Bitecofer: (28:43)
Yes. I mean, one-
Anthony Scaramucci: (28:43)
Tell us why.
Rachel Bitecofer: (28:45)
I think people ... Are we allowed to use salty language on the Salt talk?
Anthony Scaramucci: (28:49)
Yes, you are allowed to use salty language. Yes, you are.
Rachel Bitecofer: (28:51)
Good, just letting you know. I get bored-
Anthony Scaramucci: (28:53)
Although I've never used salty language in my life.
Rachel Bitecofer: (28:56)
Never.
Anthony Scaramucci: (28:56)
Yes, I'm a very strange-
Rachel Bitecofer: (28:58)
Not when you call reporters at home, right?
Anthony Scaramucci: (29:00)
I'm a very straight laced person. I mean, come on, I mean, let's just talk about that jerk off for a second. I mean, the kid was from Long Island, an Italian kid from Long Island, could you believe he did that to me?
Rachel Bitecofer: (29:10)
He did you a favor.
Anthony Scaramucci: (29:11)
That's another topic.
Rachel Bitecofer: (29:12)
You know what? Not too bad that they're nice and quick, right?
Anthony Scaramucci: (29:15)
I'm happy that I got ejected like an Austin Powers villain at this point in my life, but the thing I'm most happy about, Rachel, is I got Steve Bannon out of there with me. Okay? Because, trust me, those two lunatics together, forget about it, but let's go to this, the salty language and the female voter.
Rachel Bitecofer: (29:34)
Oh, yes, that's what I was going to say. People are going to ship their pants when they see what happens in suburban America, because, where's my mind kind of, because they've got a preview now. I thought the first time, I'll catch everyone by surprise. I mean, obviously, after arguing all through the summer, and the fall with the election quitter bros about how much suburban America was going to change, not just because the group of 100 swing voters that voted for Trump are now going to vote for Democrats, which is definitely a factor, but also because there's going to be, not just 100 new voters that didn't vote before, but maybe 300 of them, and that's going to have a major impact on the vote share. I thought, "I'll catch him by surprise in '18, but for the 20/20 narrative, I won't have that whole space to myself," because everyone will fill the space, and dah, dah, dah, but, really, I'm still out there in my ... Because it's not going to look like 2016 at the suburbs at all.
Rachel Bitecofer: (30:40)
It's going to be a whole different banana.
Anthony Scaramucci: (30:44)
Okay. So, he's gonna lose, Trump's going to lose. That's your prediction.
Rachel Bitecofer: (30:47)
Yes, I mean, as long as, A, as long as the polling and things are as they are today, we've got two massive fundamentals working against Donald Trump; negative partisanship, which is but my forecast stuff is about, and now we have this pandemic effect, which is exasperating that, and together, it's about a eight point advantage for Democrats, and that takes them a pretty deep senate map, by the way, takes them to that majority that they need, the four seats that they need to get that majority. I mean, if everyone can vote. And that's why Donald Trump is like, "Well, I'm losing, so I just have to try to make it ..." I mean, how am I now democratic?" Small d democratic. "I can't wait on the numbers, I'll just try to make sure people can't vote."
Anthony Scaramucci: (31:40)
Right, right. Try to suppress the vote. I got to turn it over to John. We've got 10 minutes to go in the Salt Talk, and he's got questions, which are lining up in our little chat box there. Go ahead, Mr. Darsie.
John Darsie: (31:51)
So, with all the analysis you provided, what is the impact going to be on Senate and House races? How do you expect those to turn out, and what do you expect the effect to be from the national races on those state level, both in the short term and the longer term?
Rachel Bitecofer: (32:07)
So, to shadow Tim Russert who I still miss daily, Texas, Texas, Texas. 2019, I put out an analysis, I said, "My model is really focused on demographics, college educated population, and percent non-white." Where is there still a lot of that that's untapped? And that is Texas, Texas, Texas, that is Dallas, and Houston suburbs, in particular. Of course, there's a couple of districts that they didn't pick up in 2018, tucking into this Austin gerrymanders, and so, I think people are going to be really shocked to see just how much is going to happen in that Texas area, because it's never been competed in. So, there's just a lot of potential growth. The state house, it picked up 12 seats in 2018, there's another nine between them and the state house, and I think they have a real strong potential because of the addition to the pandemic effect, to pick it up. So it's going to be, I think, on ... Everyone's been talking Texas.
Rachel Bitecofer: (33:11)
And then, at the Senate, Colorado ... In order, Colorado, Arizona, and then Maine. I mean, Colorado and Arizona, there's just no way to imagine the GOP could come out ahead on those two Senate seats, and then in Maine, I mean, in order for Susan Collins to survive in Maine, you have to believe that there's going to be a significant amount of Maine voters who are in this environment, in which ballots are now naturalized, and that means the down ticket candidate is connected to the president on that back in the days of Obama, that meant the Democratic senator was ... Their fate was tied to Obama, and now it means the Republican is tied to Trump, and that's ultimately why in Arizona and Colorado where the demographics are just so strongly in favor of Democrats, they just don't have a hope in hell, but in Maine, it's a different scenario, because it's not a demographic realignment situation, it is a independence scenario, but Maine is 100% going to the Democrats or Electoral College for Biden.
Rachel Bitecofer: (34:22)
So you have to believe that a significant chunk of those people are going to vote for Susan Collins, and I just don't see it. I do not see a whole bunch of people splitting their ballot and voting for Joe Biden, and seeing Susan Collins in her old maverick way, as this independent check against Trump, when she has literally failed in that, and there's things like The Lincoln project making sure voters know it.
John Darsie: (34:52)
Well, in terms of Trump's strategies for winning, you talked about voter suppression, the other element that's taking place is Kanye West. So, they're trying to get him on the ballot in several states including most of the swing states, in hopes that he acts as the spoiler that steals votes from Biden. Do you think he has the potential to make enough of a difference in those states to move the needle?
Rachel Bitecofer: (35:14)
Again, I mean, that strategy, and really, most of these suppressive efforts are things that can matter in very close elections. I really urge people ... I mean, and I hate urging people to buy my book, because it's looks really boring. It's not, I promise, I don't do anything that's boring, but it looks boring as hell. And it's titled something really boring. It's called The Unprecedented 2016 Presidential Election, but it really does walk you through the role that third party balloting played in those post Midwestern clips, because it's not a story of the Midwest having a political revolution. It's a story of who didn't show up and how many protest a motive, how much of that occurred naturally. Not all of it was naturally, I didn't know at the time that the Russians were working those two audiences pretty hard with propaganda, and the Trump campaign is replicating that strategy. That's what the Death Star is about. So, for two years, I've been trying to get people to understand, it's a subtraction campaign, it's not an addition campaign. You can't run a persuasion campaign around Donald Trump, because he would undermine it every single moment of every single day anyway.
Rachel Bitecofer: (36:21)
So, to be fair to the Trump campaign, you have to work with the clay that you have. And he is the first candidate at either a senate competitive level, or the president, who forces the campaign into a purely mobilization strategy, and so they have to do things that are ethically disgusting, like look like, "Well, we need someone to siphon off votes from the Democrats. How do we do it? We hope that Bernie Sanders has a really divisive primary, and can hyper target progressives on those YouTube shows that are on Sirius radio, and tell them not to vote, or tell them to vote third party," and that they're going to spend millions of dollars on that stuff. And then, the other way to do it is to get black voters to do the same, "We're going to tell black voters that Joe Biden has this complicated history with race and the crime bill, and try to get them to vote against their own self interest." And yes, it can matter if the election gets really close in Michigan, and 10,000 people write in, you don't need a candidate on the ballot when they're famous and everyone knows their name.
Rachel Bitecofer: (37:33)
So, it can still be of effective tool at rein in. It's certainly not, I think, the GOP's first choice. I think they would have preferred something a little bit more, like a libertarian that was attractive, like Gary Johnson. I mean, that dude stole a lot of votes on the left just by being pro pot. I mean, everyone's like, "Oh, he's the dude that smokes pot." It is not ethically ... But hey, you just watched the convention that broke balls and many ethics. I mean, we are living in strange times.
John Darsie: (38:12)
We'll leave you with one last question before we let you go, Rachel, if you are the DNC, and you only had a finite amount of resources to spend over the next 70 days, or whatever it is, until the election, would you focus on trying to swing those 5% of actual swing voters, or would you focus on trying to push turnout among the coalition of Democratic voters that you talked about before?
Rachel Bitecofer: (38:35)
Well, it should never be an either/or. You should be doing both at all times, but if I was running the DNC, a lot of things would be different. I mean, number one, I would have spent the last four years building, basically, a war machine, and it wouldn't be dead. Let me make that clear, dead, to the GOP's ambitions to ever control the presidency or Congress again, but I don't, and in the triage format, what I would do is, I would make my persuasion campaign a sniper strategy and not a shotgun, which is shooting in tons of different messages, and that sniper campaign would be, "Donald Trump screwed up the pandemic response. Here's specifically what he did compared to how other people dealt with it. This is why we have a raging pandemic, and a permanently inferior economy, and on top of that, the GOP and Trump will not give you any aid." And that's what I would focus that on. I would really be painting the Republican Party as a party of extremist, and winning middle America on that message. And then the rest of my money would be spent on making sure, at the end of the day, if you want to win Wisconsin or a house district, it doesn't matter what it is, if you want to win it, if 70% of Republicans in that district turnout, you damn well better have 70% democrats turnout too.
Rachel Bitecofer: (40:10)
So you want to make sure you're spending a lot of money on turning out that voter file, and that's where that resource should be focused.
John Darsie: (40:21)
Well, thanks so much for joining us, Rachel. Anthony, do you have any final word for Rachel?
Anthony Scaramucci: (40:24)
No, but we got to be tracking you, Rachel. I just wrote down the book. Give us the title of the book again. I don't have a copy of it in front of me, but I've got to order it on Amazon when this is over. What's the title of the book?
Rachel Bitecofer: (40:36)
It's called The Unprecedented 2016 Presidential Election, and it is a academic book. So it looks really boring, but it isn't boring, I promise, and it actually is the only book, in my opinion, that actually will tell you what really happened in 2016.
Anthony Scaramucci: (40:54)
All right. Well, you're terrific, want to see what happens over the next 60 or so days. I try to make these things less partisan, if you will, so I didn't go to off on my own personal opinions, Rachel. So, we'll save that for the next time. You and I are on the Bill Maher show together.
Rachel Bitecofer: (41:12)
There you go. We'll turn this now non-partisan in the Trump era though, buddy.
Anthony Scaramucci: (41:16)
No, that's very true. I was just trying to keep it neutral, like salt itself. Everybody likes salt, Rachel, everybody.
Rachel Bitecofer: (41:24)
Who doesn't?
Anthony Scaramucci: (41:25)
I have a high sodium diet myself, but anyway, God bless. Thank you, and I look forward to seeing you. Maybe we can have you back closer to the election, and then, or perhaps after the election, so that we can get your analysis of what actually happened.
Rachel Bitecofer: (41:39)
Yes, I'm happy to do either or both, and I'm happy to talk to your audience. I hope and assume it's a audience that has a lot of potential to impact America for good, and I have a lot of stuff that I'm doing related to that. So, I would love to talk about some of that stuff.
Anthony Scaramucci: (41:55)
No question about it. God bless. Sending you lots of love. Be well.
Rachel Bitecofer: (41:58)
All right. Thanks.
