Once you get past the potty mouth, you might find the explanation of Walker's loss in Wisconsin even though he got 30,000 votes more than in his earlier election.
www.politico.com
02/06/2020 05:09 AM EST
What if everything you think you know about politics is wrong? What if there aren’t really American swing voters—or not enough, anyway, to pick the next president? What if it doesn’t matter much who the Democratic nominee is? What if there is no such thing as “the center,” and the party in power can govern however it wants for two years, because the results of that first midterm are going to be bad regardless? What if the Democrats' big 41-seat midterm victory in 2018 didn’t happen because candidates focused on health care and kitchen-table issues, but simply because they were running against the party in the White House? What if the outcome in 2020 is pretty much foreordained, too?
To the political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, all of that is almost certainly true, and that has made her one of the most intriguing new figures in political forecasting this year.
Bitecofer, a 42-year-old professor at Christopher Newport University in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was little known in the extremely online, extremely male-dominated world of political forecasting until November 2018. That’s when she nailed almost to the number the nature and size of the Democrats’ win in the House, even as other forecasters went wobbly in the race’s final days. Not only that, but she put out her forecast back in July, and then stuck by it while polling shifted throughout the summer and fall.
And today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics. Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”
Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”
Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place. To her critics, she’s an extreme apostle of the old saw that “turnout explains everything,” taking a long victory lap after getting lucky one time. She sees things slightly differently: That the last few elections show that American politics really has changed, and other experts have been slow to process what it means.
If she’s right, it wouldn’t just blow up the conventional wisdom; it would mean that much of the lucrative cottage industry of political experts—the consultants and pollsters and (ahem) the reporters—is superfluous, an army of bit players with little influence over the outcome. Actually, worse than superfluous: That whole industry of experts is generally wrong.
The classic view is that the pool of American voters is basically fixed: About 55 percent of eligible voters are likely to go to the polls, and the winner is determined by the 15 percent or so of “swing voters” who flit between the parties. So a general election campaign amounts to a long effort to pull those voters in to your side.
Bitecofer has a nickname for this view. She calls it, with disdain, the “Chuck Todd theory of American politics”: “The idea that there is this informed, engaged American population that is watching these political events and watching their elected leaders and assessing their behavior and making a judgment.”
“And it is just not true.”
Election forecasting has existed at least as long as there have been elections. In the 15th century, there were betting odds on who would emerge the winner of the next papal conclave. By the end of the 19th century, newspapers were asking readers to cut out makeshift ballots and mail them to the newsroom in order to get a preview of the election outcome. In recent years polling has grown more sophisticated, as has poll analysis: Pity the poor rube these days who cites a mere poll instead of a “polling average.”
Alongside the enthusiasm for polls has grown a serious academic interest in predicting elections. Unlike polling, academic forecasters tend to use the state of the world on Election Day to determine who is going to win. An improving GDP? It means an X-point advantage for the incumbent. Two (or more) terms in power for a single party, and that’s an electoral drag.
In 2016, the pollsters had the race largely wrong, but the academic forecasters got it mostly right, even though many ended up doubting their formulas after they spat out a likely victory for Trump, since such an outcome seemed impossible.
But even the more academic forecasts, like the polling models, are based on longstanding assumptions about why and how candidates win elections. And sometimes an event occurs that blows up those assumptions.
In Bitecofer’s experience, that event wasn’t Trump; it was the Tea Party. She was still a graduate student in 2010 when a wave of conservative populism returned the Republicans to power in the House. According to any conventional theory of politics, that wave made no sense. Two years prior the GOP had run the economy into the ground; under a Democratic president and a fully Democratic Congress, the economy had stopped its slide and begun to recover. How could the Democrats lose 63 seats in a brutal shellacking two years after totally routing the Republicans?
The prevailing analysis was that Democrats had overreached on policy: After Obamacare, the stimulus, the bank and auto bailouts, the center just revolted. But when Americans picked a president in 2012, they didn’t seem so appalled; Obama won again. The 2014 midterms confounded the polls; the generic ballot heading into Election Day had the two parties basically tied in the national generic ballot, but when the votes came in, the Republicans added seats to their House majority and routed the Democrats in the Senate, picking up nine seats.
For most election forecasters, these results meant more data, and they went back and tweaked their models. For Bitecofer, at the beginning of her career, they became the foundation of her thinking.
“I was like, ‘Wait, you can study politics?’” she says. She enrolled in community college, then the University of Oregon, then on to the University of Georgia for a Ph.D., and was soon hired by Christopher Newport University to work in its public-policy division. (She has since been hired away by the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank based in Washington, D.C., while maintaining her academic post.)
In 2016, the election that truly embarrassed the experts, Bitecofer was teaching in her new job and didn’t put together a forecast. She doesn’t pretend she saw it coming: She says she was as surprised Trump won as anyone else, but what struck her in examining the results, and what she saw as getting lost in the postelection commentary, was exactly how many people voted third party—for the Greens, the Libertarians or Evan McMullin, a former CIA operative who was running on behalf of the “Never Trump” wing of the Republican Party.
Hillary Clinton had run an entire campaign built around classic assumptions: She was trying to pick off Republicans and Republican-leaning independents appalled by Trump. So she chose a bland white man, Tim Kaine, as a running mate; it also explained her policy-lite messaging and her ads. But in the end, almost all of those voters stuck with the GOP. The voters who voted third party should have been Democratic voters—they were disproportionately young, diverse and college educated—but they were turned off by the divisive Democratic primary, and the Clinton camp made no effort to activate them in the general election.
As she delved further into the data on 2016, Bitecofer noticed something else. As much as the media had harped on the narrative that a majority of white women had voted for Trump, the election also signaled the first time that a majority of college-educated white men had voted for the Democratic Party. There was a long-term-realignment happening in America, and 2016 had accelerated it.
Part of Bitecofer’s job involved polling Virginia, and she saw a Democratic counterwave building there in 2017. She noted to Democrats in the state that they should spend resources in areas that had traditionally been off limits. Had they done so, Bitecofer says, they could have flipped the Legislature that year. (Instead it flipped in 2019.)
When 2018 rolled around, she saw what was coming: “College educated white men, and especially college educated white women,” she said, “were going to be on ****ing fire.”
It didn’t matter who was running; it mattered who was voting. From there, the model followed. She put out her forecast for the general election when there were still candidates battling it out in primaries.
Bitecofer’s view of the electorate is driven, in part, by a new way to think about why Americans vote the way they do. She counts as an intellectual mentor Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University who popularized the concept of “negative partisanship,” the idea that voters are more motivated to defeat the other side than by any particular policy goals.
In a piece explaining his work in POLITICO Magazine, Abramowitz wrote: “Over the past few decades, American politics has become like a bitter sports rivalry, in which 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. And it’s also true of Democrats, who might be consumed by their internal feuds over foreign policy and the proper role of government were it not for Trump.”
Bitecofer took this insight and mapped it across the country. As she sees it, it isn’t quite right to refer to a 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.
“In the polarized era, the outcome isn’t really about the candidates. What matters is what percentage of the electorate is Republican and Republican leaners, and what percentage is Democratic and Democratic leaners, and how they get activated,” she said.
Accordingly, she believed that whom the Democrats nominated didn’t matter much, and while the rest of the country focused on the districts where Hillary Clinton defeated Trump, she thought those were already mostly in the bag, and so focused instead on the 20 or so districts where Trump performed worse than Mitt Romney had in 2012. Those were places with latent Democratic possibility, and had the national party recognized it earlier, they could have flipped even more seats.
Since she was new on the forecasting scene, having sat out the 2016 election, Bitecofer took to Twitter, where she had a mere 600-odd followers, and started flogging her analysis relentlessly. “I decided I’d market it on Twitter by being kind of like this clunky annoying little sister on all the big threads. I would jump on Nate Cohn and Nate Silver threads to promote the forecast. And it was just when the generic ballot was starting to narrow and all the other analysts were saying, ‘Oh the Democrats are going to screw this up. They are overreaching. They are going to get 23 seats if they are lucky.’ And I just came out swinging.”
“She has taken a Krassenstein Brothers approach at getting attention for her forecasts. In my view that is unfair to the many thoughtful forecasters who don’t relentlessly self-promote.”
- And while other forecasters picked a range, Bitecofer picked a number—42, only one more than the actual number of seats Democrats ended up winning in the House. (As other forecasters saw the Democrats’ chances dropping, she revised it upward in the race’s waning days, saying in the final week that the Democrats would net 45 seats.) The forecast, and the relentless Twitter-hyping, brought her recognition. The woman who decided to get a degree in political science because she heard Rachel Maddow on the radio was suddenly on Rachel Maddow’s network. In the MSNBC Green Room before a guest appearance on “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” she wrote on the chalkboard: “Rachel’s Bucket List: Make it to MSNBC Green Room.”
(M0RE)
An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter
Rachel Bitecofer’s radical new theory predicted the midterms spot-on. So who’s going to win 2020?
www.politico.com
What if everything you think you know about politics is wrong? What if there aren’t really American swing voters—or not enough, anyway, to pick the next president? What if it doesn’t matter much who the Democratic nominee is? What if there is no such thing as “the center,” and the party in power can govern however it wants for two years, because the results of that first midterm are going to be bad regardless? What if the Democrats' big 41-seat midterm victory in 2018 didn’t happen because candidates focused on health care and kitchen-table issues, but simply because they were running against the party in the White House? What if the outcome in 2020 is pretty much foreordained, too?
To the political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, all of that is almost certainly true, and that has made her one of the most intriguing new figures in political forecasting this year.
Bitecofer, a 42-year-old professor at Christopher Newport University in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was little known in the extremely online, extremely male-dominated world of political forecasting until November 2018. That’s when she nailed almost to the number the nature and size of the Democrats’ win in the House, even as other forecasters went wobbly in the race’s final days. Not only that, but she put out her forecast back in July, and then stuck by it while polling shifted throughout the summer and fall.
And today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics. Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”
Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”
Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place. To her critics, she’s an extreme apostle of the old saw that “turnout explains everything,” taking a long victory lap after getting lucky one time. She sees things slightly differently: That the last few elections show that American politics really has changed, and other experts have been slow to process what it means.
If she’s right, it wouldn’t just blow up the conventional wisdom; it would mean that much of the lucrative cottage industry of political experts—the consultants and pollsters and (ahem) the reporters—is superfluous, an army of bit players with little influence over the outcome. Actually, worse than superfluous: That whole industry of experts is generally wrong.
The classic view is that the pool of American voters is basically fixed: About 55 percent of eligible voters are likely to go to the polls, and the winner is determined by the 15 percent or so of “swing voters” who flit between the parties. So a general election campaign amounts to a long effort to pull those voters in to your side.
Bitecofer has a nickname for this view. She calls it, with disdain, the “Chuck Todd theory of American politics”: “The idea that there is this informed, engaged American population that is watching these political events and watching their elected leaders and assessing their behavior and making a judgment.”
“And it is just not true.”
Election forecasting has existed at least as long as there have been elections. In the 15th century, there were betting odds on who would emerge the winner of the next papal conclave. By the end of the 19th century, newspapers were asking readers to cut out makeshift ballots and mail them to the newsroom in order to get a preview of the election outcome. In recent years polling has grown more sophisticated, as has poll analysis: Pity the poor rube these days who cites a mere poll instead of a “polling average.”
Alongside the enthusiasm for polls has grown a serious academic interest in predicting elections. Unlike polling, academic forecasters tend to use the state of the world on Election Day to determine who is going to win. An improving GDP? It means an X-point advantage for the incumbent. Two (or more) terms in power for a single party, and that’s an electoral drag.
In 2016, the pollsters had the race largely wrong, but the academic forecasters got it mostly right, even though many ended up doubting their formulas after they spat out a likely victory for Trump, since such an outcome seemed impossible.
But even the more academic forecasts, like the polling models, are based on longstanding assumptions about why and how candidates win elections. And sometimes an event occurs that blows up those assumptions.
In Bitecofer’s experience, that event wasn’t Trump; it was the Tea Party. She was still a graduate student in 2010 when a wave of conservative populism returned the Republicans to power in the House. According to any conventional theory of politics, that wave made no sense. Two years prior the GOP had run the economy into the ground; under a Democratic president and a fully Democratic Congress, the economy had stopped its slide and begun to recover. How could the Democrats lose 63 seats in a brutal shellacking two years after totally routing the Republicans?
The prevailing analysis was that Democrats had overreached on policy: After Obamacare, the stimulus, the bank and auto bailouts, the center just revolted. But when Americans picked a president in 2012, they didn’t seem so appalled; Obama won again. The 2014 midterms confounded the polls; the generic ballot heading into Election Day had the two parties basically tied in the national generic ballot, but when the votes came in, the Republicans added seats to their House majority and routed the Democrats in the Senate, picking up nine seats.
For most election forecasters, these results meant more data, and they went back and tweaked their models. For Bitecofer, at the beginning of her career, they became the foundation of her thinking.
“I was like, ‘Wait, you can study politics?’” she says. She enrolled in community college, then the University of Oregon, then on to the University of Georgia for a Ph.D., and was soon hired by Christopher Newport University to work in its public-policy division. (She has since been hired away by the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank based in Washington, D.C., while maintaining her academic post.)
In 2016, the election that truly embarrassed the experts, Bitecofer was teaching in her new job and didn’t put together a forecast. She doesn’t pretend she saw it coming: She says she was as surprised Trump won as anyone else, but what struck her in examining the results, and what she saw as getting lost in the postelection commentary, was exactly how many people voted third party—for the Greens, the Libertarians or Evan McMullin, a former CIA operative who was running on behalf of the “Never Trump” wing of the Republican Party.
Hillary Clinton had run an entire campaign built around classic assumptions: She was trying to pick off Republicans and Republican-leaning independents appalled by Trump. So she chose a bland white man, Tim Kaine, as a running mate; it also explained her policy-lite messaging and her ads. But in the end, almost all of those voters stuck with the GOP. The voters who voted third party should have been Democratic voters—they were disproportionately young, diverse and college educated—but they were turned off by the divisive Democratic primary, and the Clinton camp made no effort to activate them in the general election.
As she delved further into the data on 2016, Bitecofer noticed something else. As much as the media had harped on the narrative that a majority of white women had voted for Trump, the election also signaled the first time that a majority of college-educated white men had voted for the Democratic Party. There was a long-term-realignment happening in America, and 2016 had accelerated it.
Part of Bitecofer’s job involved polling Virginia, and she saw a Democratic counterwave building there in 2017. She noted to Democrats in the state that they should spend resources in areas that had traditionally been off limits. Had they done so, Bitecofer says, they could have flipped the Legislature that year. (Instead it flipped in 2019.)
When 2018 rolled around, she saw what was coming: “College educated white men, and especially college educated white women,” she said, “were going to be on ****ing fire.”
It didn’t matter who was running; it mattered who was voting. From there, the model followed. She put out her forecast for the general election when there were still candidates battling it out in primaries.
Bitecofer’s view of the electorate is driven, in part, by a new way to think about why Americans vote the way they do. She counts as an intellectual mentor Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University who popularized the concept of “negative partisanship,” the idea that voters are more motivated to defeat the other side than by any particular policy goals.
In a piece explaining his work in POLITICO Magazine, Abramowitz wrote: “Over the past few decades, American politics has become like a bitter sports rivalry, in which 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. And it’s also true of Democrats, who might be consumed by their internal feuds over foreign policy and the proper role of government were it not for Trump.”
Bitecofer took this insight and mapped it across the country. As she sees it, it isn’t quite right to refer to a 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.
“In the polarized era, the outcome isn’t really about the candidates. What matters is what percentage of the electorate is Republican and Republican leaners, and what percentage is Democratic and Democratic leaners, and how they get activated,” she said.
Accordingly, she believed that whom the Democrats nominated didn’t matter much, and while the rest of the country focused on the districts where Hillary Clinton defeated Trump, she thought those were already mostly in the bag, and so focused instead on the 20 or so districts where Trump performed worse than Mitt Romney had in 2012. Those were places with latent Democratic possibility, and had the national party recognized it earlier, they could have flipped even more seats.
Since she was new on the forecasting scene, having sat out the 2016 election, Bitecofer took to Twitter, where she had a mere 600-odd followers, and started flogging her analysis relentlessly. “I decided I’d market it on Twitter by being kind of like this clunky annoying little sister on all the big threads. I would jump on Nate Cohn and Nate Silver threads to promote the forecast. And it was just when the generic ballot was starting to narrow and all the other analysts were saying, ‘Oh the Democrats are going to screw this up. They are overreaching. They are going to get 23 seats if they are lucky.’ And I just came out swinging.”
“She has taken a Krassenstein Brothers approach at getting attention for her forecasts. In my view that is unfair to the many thoughtful forecasters who don’t relentlessly self-promote.”
- And while other forecasters picked a range, Bitecofer picked a number—42, only one more than the actual number of seats Democrats ended up winning in the House. (As other forecasters saw the Democrats’ chances dropping, she revised it upward in the race’s waning days, saying in the final week that the Democrats would net 45 seats.) The forecast, and the relentless Twitter-hyping, brought her recognition. The woman who decided to get a degree in political science because she heard Rachel Maddow on the radio was suddenly on Rachel Maddow’s network. In the MSNBC Green Room before a guest appearance on “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” she wrote on the chalkboard: “Rachel’s Bucket List: Make it to MSNBC Green Room.”
(M0RE)
