Factually! with Adam Conover - What Every Political Pundit Gets Wrong about the Election with Rachel Bitecofer

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

Political scientist and election forecaster Rachel Bitecofer joins Adam this week to discuss why “swing voters” don’t really exist, the dynamics that truly drive political trends, and how COVID-19 will affect the 2020 election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. And first of all, I hope you're doing okay. We've been in the COVID-19 I hope that you are able to be with folks that you care about. If not, I hope you're in touch with those folks. I hope that you are keeping your hands washed. I hope you're tipping your delivery people very, very well. And I hope that you'll keep in touch with me.

Drop me a tweet, drop me an email. Let me know how you're doing. And let me know if there are any topics that we can cover on this show that would bring comfort to you. You know, sometimes, never sure, should we be doing more COVID stuff? Should we be doing less COVID stuff? We're trying to have a nice balance on the show. And today, I'd like to take a little bit of a break from talking about the COVID stuff

directly to talking about something that we were all thinking about quite a lot right before COVID-19 hit our country so hard. I'd like to talk about the upcoming election. Now, when you watch news coverage of this upcoming election, and you know, Chuck Todd, you know, that guy with the weird haircut on NBC, when he's asking serious questions to another reporter with a better haircut, believe it or not, you're actually watching a political theory at work. It's not just objective reporter truth.

There's a political theory behind the questions that are being asked. See, we have ideas about how elections work. Chuck Todd has ideas about how elections work. And those ideas guide commentary and campaign. See, the standard theory of elections in America goes like this. Most voters have already made up their minds. They're in the bag for one party or another. So campaigns should orient themselves to the swing voter, right?

You've heard of the swing voter. Those voters in the middle who can be persuaded to vote for one party or another. They might lean a little bit Democrat or a little bit Republican, but they can swing one way or the other if they hear just the right messaging and just the right policy proposals. Win the swing and win the election. That's the predominant theory. That's the theory you hear from Chuck Todd and all his friends in the traditional political media. And we saw this at play in 2016. We saw this exact theory. Rather than pick a VP to the

ideological left of her to appeal to the activist progressive Democratic base, Hillary Clinton picked Tim Kaine. Remember Tim Kaine? He's a nice guy, solid grasp of Spanish, a good dad by all accounts, a safe choice, a choice in part meant to appeal to and not offend voters who couldn't decide between Clinton and Trump. And that choice was received very well by all the people who held that swing voter theory. The New York Times editorial board wrote, quote, Mr. Cain delivers a potential advantage among moderate swing state voters. Well, we all know how that worked out, right? Hillary Clinton, in fact, lost that election. There were not enough persuadable voters, in fact, to flip it.

There were not a bunch of Republican-leaning independents waiting for a moderate sign in the sky to vote Democrat. Tim Kaine, in fact, did not do squat. So the theory of politics used by Clinton, the New York Times, and yeah, probably Chuck Todd in this case, didn't work. You can't win an election by persuading swing voters, it turns out. So how can you? Well, there's a political scientist, an election forecaster, who is throwing this shitty old

theory of elections in the trash and describing how they really work. She contends that a lot of the things we think are important for elections just aren't. Incumbency doesn't matter much. Neither does the ideology of a candidate, the news cycle, or even the economy, unless something truly extreme is happening, which, okay, fine, there is in this case, but the fact remains all those other markers of who will win and who won't, she contends these do not really matter this much. So if none of those things matter, what does? According to her, it's just one thing, turnout.

In an era of hyper-partisanship where party affiliation is tied up in personal identity, you're not going to win by persuading voters on the fence. There simply aren't enough of them anymore. Even if Chuck Todd did meet one once at a diner in Des Moines, they are a vanishing breed. They are like unto the dodo. So the question is, how do you motivate the rest of the voters? Here, too, following on the work of other political scientists,

she differs from the conventional wisdom. Yes, voters today are hyper-partisan, deep in the bag for one party or another, but that's only one part of the dynamic. Stronger than their belief in their own party is their disdain for the other side. This concept is called negative partisanship, and it explains why a presidential campaign seeking common ground and consensus today might be setting itself up for failure. Now, taken together, this is a radical new way to look at elections that has massive implications for this November. And that was

before coronavirus hit. Not only might the pandemic change voters' views of the incumbent Donald Trump, positively or negatively, but social distancing rules could affect the very way the election is conducted or drastically suppress turnout. Politics literally are not what they used to be. We need a brand new approach to forecasting elections and to talking about even how to win them. Well, to answer those questions for us today, we have on the show that very same maverick political scientist I referenced earlier in this monologue. I am so excited to have her on the show today. Her name is Rachel Bitticoffer. She's the assistant director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University. Please welcome Rachel Bitticoffer. Rachel, thank you so much for being on the show. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. You're a political scientist and election forecaster, right?

Yep, that's correct. So first of all, I just want to ask, how has coronavirus scrambled your models or the way you think about the upcoming election? Yeah, it's a really great question, right? I was working on the post-democratic primary forecast update for the 2020 presidential forecast and had to put that out. It was due right at the beginning of the pandemic. So, you know, I was working on it through March. So I put it out and I put a, you know, hey, this is the world, you know i was working on it through march so i put it out and i put a you know hey this is this is the world you know understanding that the pandemic can scramble things um but you know assuming that we have an election and we have robust participation in the fall this is what

will happen and i'm doing the same thing now with my congress uh forecast that's going to be coming out in a couple of weeks. And I'm in progress with that now. And, you know, when I do put that out, I'll talk about, you know, this is what the world would look like if we have something, you know, close to what we anticipated was going to be somewhere around, you know, between 65 and 70 percent voter turnout in the fall. 65 and 70 percent voter turnout in the fall. And do you really think how much do you think voter turnout will be affected by coronavirus? I guess that's really hard to predict. It is really hard to predict. I mean, we know this is what we do know. We know the experts are telling us that if the virus recedes, it's going to make a second surge, and that surge is going to come in the fall. November is around the time period we'd expect that to come back. So, you know, I mean, it's

enough that, you know, we know we could take actions right now to facilitate voting in the pandemic. We know that one political party sees higher participation as, you know, antithetical to the probability of them holding on to Congress and winning the presidency. And so they're not keen to make those safeguards and those reforms and beef up the type of stuff that would help people cast ballots. So, you know, I don't I think I'm pretty bearish that we're going to see a lot of reforms done to, you know, facilitate pandemic style voting. I don't think we'll see in total inaction, but I don't I definitely don't see a universal like vote by mail, full absentee, you know, in 50 states type pandemic voting, you know.

So I think that it's reasonable to assume that we're going to see a reduction in turnout. So as far as election forecasting goes and the way that you think about elections, you're a little bit of a maverick as a political scientist. You have made a name for yourself as disputing a lot of the traditional tenets of how American elections are understood. Can you tell us a little bit of what that old model is and why you dispute it? I'm arguing is we have in political science, I mean, you know, people who are more talented than I am, researchers have documented polarization, quantitatively documented it in Congress and many other aspects. And then it took a long time to emerge, but we eventually start to see it and quantitatively be able to demonstrate it in the public. My dissertation does this, some Pew research that they start to do in the late 2000s. And now in other research, we start to see the mass public responding to elite polarization and polarizing themselves. And so we know that there's polarization. And yet yet in terms of and we've seen see it do things right like donald trump's nomination to the republican party and let alone election to the american presidency

like those are things that a healthy democracy should not especially an american democracy should not be able to do and yet like, like, even though these things happened, like much of the election analysis and, you know, forecasting world, like it did not, it doesn't account for polarization as a game changing variable. They just kept going along with the normal. Yes, exactly. Like everything was just normal when clearly it was not right. Clearly there was something had changed dramatically. So, you know, it's not that I'm, you know, in the world of political science, actually, what I'm arguing is not all that radical, especially the stuff that I argue about independence. documented that, you know, it's not 30 percent of the public that's persuadable and open to evidence. And it could be, you know, wrestled over from one party to the next in an election.

Yeah, the swing voter, the mythical swing voter. Right, right, right. Political science research is very, you know, conclusively shown that most independents are what we call leaners, that leaners behave like soft partisans in their vote choice and their policy preferences. And, you know, this part of the electorate that is independent and swingy is much smaller than the way that they're discussed on like a Sunday morning talk show. And then, you know, where my research innovates with swing voters is that I'm saying, look, there's two swings. You've got these pure independents, this smaller chunk, but still important that are preference change voters, though I argue that their preference changes is actually fairly well predictable, that they are stat anti status quo or what I call change voters. They tend to break against the status quo. So in that regard, like that's a novel argument that I'm making. But the second and more important

novelty that I'm arguing about swing voters is that there's two swings. There's their preference change, and then there's their turnout swing. And that is just as important to explaining why a state like Iowa might have gone for Obama by six points in 2012 and then Donald Trump in 2016 by nine points. So we're talking about what amounts to a 15 point preference change. Right. And the way like the Chuck Todd theory looks at that change is all preference change. And the way I look at it, people change their minds. It is all preference change. And the way I look at it, people change their minds. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the way that I look at that is, OK, there's preference change there. And it's it's predominantly driven by these change, you know, pure independent change voters.

Some of it is driven by the long term coalitional realignment voters that we have, like two, like big atmospheric realignments going on in the voting coalition. So the parties were, and we're talking mostly about white voters, because minority voters don't vote for Republicans for obvious reasons, right? You know, the party's hostility, especially in the modern platform, the last 10 years, like a dog whistling really changed to overt racism, right? So, you know, we're talking about white voters and white college educated voters are moving towards the Democratic Party. And every four years, they became more likely to vote for Democrats, not necessarily because it's the same people, but through generational replacement. And then white non-college educated voters were moving to the Republican Party.

So some of that 15 point swing is that. And then the other part of it is the people who decided in 2016 that they weren't going to vote, right? And 2016 actually has a whole different element that we should not neglect to cover in this conversation. And that is, and that explains that 15%. And that is the progressively minded, so like not necessarily moderate type people, but maybe even extremely liberal people who showed up to vote in a state like Iowa and then cast a vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or Bernie Sanders. And by doing so,

like that took a vote away from Hillary Clinton, right? So, you know, we're talking about defection rates in those 2016 cycle that were five, six times higher than 2012 and 2008 and had absolutely profound impacts on the vote share between Clinton and Trump. So how do you do this research when you're looking at, hey, how do we explain this change in preferences in Iowa? I think you said, right. How do you, and then you're going through and allocating all the different types of reasons that has changed. So like not, it's actually not very much these swing voters. It's much more a change in turnout, people deciding to stay home. How do you go about finding that out? So, you know, it took me a long time to realize that like people were looking at

that and they were all saw squares and maybe and a lot of it was just motivated by like they didn't want to look closer at it. You know, they didn't have the questions that weren't motivating them to look differently at it. And I was seeing a rectangle. Right. But yeah. So like when I see a state like a cycle move. OK, why? Why is it, you know, the economy collapse? You have this big, giant wave in 2006 and 2008 ushering Democrats into control in the post Bush, like, you know, atmosphere. And then all of a sudden you get to 2010 and Republicans are picking up 63 seats in the House and the economy is still basically on fire. Right. You know, it's like so you're thinking, what the hell? Like the voters have like this massive amnesia as to like, OK, now, OK, so there's this thing is still this tire fire still burning. It's a tire fire set for the by the republican party and now the elect the electorate's like hey

you know who we should hire to go put this tire fire out are the very people that created it right like to me that didn't make sense but that's what the narrative was according to like all the punditry right is like oh yeah you know, Obama got into office and he passed some, you know, super middle of the road health care reform package. And now suddenly the electorate's looking to the Republican Party for moderation. Right. And it just it didn't make sense to me. So I so I looked at the data and I noticed it was really clear to me right away. to me right away. I was like, oh, well, yeah, half the electorate, especially the kind of voters that would vote for Democrats, just disappeared. Right. They're like, oh, our guy won. We don't have to show up. Job done. Yeah. And they like literally left him at the altar, you know, like, hey,

thanks for that health health care for reform package, Democrats in Congress, you know, hasta la vista. We'll see you later, you know. And they all got, you know, pushed out of Congress because, you know, the turnout for Democrats, Democratic constituencies anyway, were really terrible in the 2010 midterms. And one after the other, you know, and meanwhile, Republicans were really fired up because, you know, God forbid, a private market based health insurance package got passed. You know, we must must fight back, you know. thing I want to know is what percent of the electorate was Republican and what percent of the electorate was Democrat, because that's going to tell me more about the outcome than anything else. Like like even regardless of who those people voted for, like what is their party affiliation? Oh, yes. So like like take Iowa, for example, since we're talking about Iowa and, you know, we don't have a perfect data world. We live in a much better data world this 10 years

than even the 10 years previous. And people who, you know, do data analysis are surprised when I tell, you know, somebody sometimes will reach out to me and be like, I can't find, you know, primary polling in 2004. I'm like, that's because that shit didn't exist, dude. Like we live in this like data fantasy land now. But, you know, so like the exit polling weighting has changed for 2016.

They went back and reweighted that data. And, you know, looking at comparing the exit polls now in 2012 and 2016 isn't a perfect science. But like when you look at 2012 data for Iowa, you see right away that Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the electorate and not by just a little, probably by four or five points. All right. And so there you go. That's how you have Obamacare, Iowa by six points. And then when you look at what happened in 2016, Republicans outnumbered Democrats. It's not by as big of a margin. It's actually by, you know, one or two points. But in that scenario, too, we had that high protest balloting. So when you take Clinton's vote share and Trump's vote share, keep in mind, Trump carried Iowa by a nine point margin. So it's better than what Obama did in 2012.

But when you add Clinton plus Trump, you actually get to 92 percent. That's not 100. And that's weird because that means, you know, that's not what you would typically see in a presidential election eight percent of the vote went somewhere else right and that had a massive impact on that two parties split between clinton and trump those eight percent and not all of it went um was you know naturally people that would have voted for a democrat. But a lot of it is because Democrats don't have the ideological discipline that Republicans do. And that's, you know, why in this cycle, still, even with negative partisanship and Trump actually being in office, the biggest threat that Democrats face other than the newest threat, which is this pandemic curveball on turnout is the possibility that Bernie voters won't like the not not the extra 15 percent,

but the Bernie Bernie base, like the real Bernie or bust people will not vote for Biden. And that could be enough to help the Republicans win it. And that's just that's turnout, right? Like like that's not, oh, they're going to go right in Bernie Sanders name necessarily. You're just talking about the idea that like that part of the party will be depressed in terms of their motivation to go hit the polls. No, it will be both. Like some of them may not show up to vote at all. And then some of them will show up to vote and they'll vote for the Green Party ticket or the or, you know, there might be an independent candidate on their state ballot because the ballot rules are very different by state. Some states have a lot of weird candidates that can access the presidential ballot or they might write in literally write in Bernie Sanders.

Yeah. I mean, like so Wisconsin, you know, I mean, all of the Midwestern states, like actually all but two states in 2016 of the swing states. This is what was, in my opinion, the most decisive factor, because, you know, Wisconsin, Clinton and Trump, you know, is point seven of a point that separated them. You know, it was point seven of a point that separated them. Wisconsin had six point three, two percent of its vote go to third party or right in six percent. And that's a state that was decided by less than one point. And I know. And like in 2012, it was one and a half percent that went to third party balloting. So that tells you like how different that is. And we think about Florida 2000 is like this big election where Nader spoiled at things. Nader's 2000 vote was less than 2%.

Wisconsin, we're talking about 6%. And that's not actually unusual. We could go to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, pretty much any swing state. And it's the same story. We're talking about 5%, 4%, 6% defection rates. Those were absolutely, they absolutely crushed Clinton. Well, let me ask, though, again, just in terms of how you study this, because one of the things I've been appreciating lately is how weird voters are, right?

That, like, you know, the Chuck Todd view I sort of knew was way off. I think is way off, as far off as can be, because actual voters are just, look, if you meet the average American, the average American is a weird person. You meet anybody in America and they've got crazy ideas and they're emotionally unstable. They're they're emotionally unstable. They're they're running around with shoes on their head. Right. And I'm not talking about like any particular group. I'm talking about everybody is just nuts in this country. Like I saw an interview with a woman. It just stuck out to me. I forget where I saw it. But you know, it was a woman who was a diehard Pete Buttigieg supporter and she loved Pete

Buttigieg. But she said, if the party screws him, I'm going to vote for Trump instead. And, you know, the reporter who had read about this was sort of baffled, like this doesn't fit any model of like a voter type that we're talking about. Right. Or I think about actually just talking to my mom before the primary. I think they haven't voted yet in her state. I was just talking to my mom before the primary.

I think they haven't voted yet in her state. And I said, well, who are you going to vote for in the primary? Because she typically votes Democrat. And she said, oh, I don't, I'm not registered in the Democratic Party. I don't want to call myself a Democrat. I said, oh, oh, that's interesting. Why? And she says, because of what they did to Bernie last time.

And I was like, but if you called yourself, if you called yourself a Democrat, then you could make a different thing happen to Bernie. Like he's currently running. If you're a fan of his. So I was like, that's odd for a motivated Bernie supporter to to to not be registered to vote in the election because they're mad at the party. So my point is, like on the individual level, people's motivations are, are almost inscrutable sometimes. Um, and so how do you thereby, uh, understand them well enough to make a forecast or make a conclusion about how they may vote? So, yeah, like literally in every political science, like intro to American government textbook, there's a chapter on public opinion, and it talks about how this phenomena, how at the individual level, all of the Americans that you meet are nutso and they have these crazy things. And then it says, but when you aggregate them all together, it cancels out all the noise and

somehow it makes coherence. It doesn't really explain how that happens right um you know i will say this you know like you know at the aggregate level like most people profess to be ideologically moderate because you know if you call somebody and ask them or what you know right now it's the cool answers for smart people are to say i'm moderate and I'm independent because then you're blameless for the best, right? So, you know, to admit you're a partisan, you have to admit that you are, you know, in the fray or in the trough to admit that you're ideological, same story. So there's a incentive to say I'm independent and I'm moderate. Right. The best way to measure that stuff then is to look at people's policy preferences where I'm big into measuring the public's opinion implicitly and not explicitly.

And if I had a big national research budget to run national surveys, That's what I'd be doing. So that's like rather than looking at, oh, I say I'm affiliated with this party, you look at what they actually vote for or what their finer detailed policy preferences are, and then you infer their. Yeah, yeah. If you want to know what people are thinking, the worst way is to ask. OK, yeah, because number one, they'll lie to you. That's one thing. And that's that's you know, that's understandable. But number two, and this is what baffles me about Democrats and their so-called strategist is that they lie to themselves.

All right. Voters lie to themselves. People lie to themselves all the time. Voter people don't want to say, you know what's motivating me right now? Donald fucking Trump. Okay. I want to show up and vote him out of office. You know, so if you ask them, hey, voter, what's more important to you, voting Donald Trump out or, you know, policies and a candidate having ideals and having a goal, you know, voters are going to like that. Voters like to think of themselves as rational, idealistic, you know, higher calling creatures. We don't like to think of ourselves as base animalistic, revenge oriented assholes.

That's right. But that's where we are. No, that's exactly right. I mean, so like, you know, that's why I'm a big fan of behavioral economics. You know, I'm a big fan of implicit research. Like, so like, OK, if you want to know what people think and feel, don't let them know you're testing them and ask them indirectly and you will find out. Right. You'll at least see a better window than if you ask them indirectly and you will find out, right? You'll at least see a better window than if you ask them directly. Well, something else, one of your earlier answers made me want to ask about

was you said that Democrats are less ideologically, what was the word that you put? So number one, the Democratic coalition is less ideologically homogenous, right? So like in the Republican Party, the modal ideology is conservative. So like if you were to ask in a poll and you break down ideology, the most common response Republicans are going to give is actually conservative than moderate. In the Democrats, it's going to be moderate, then liberal, right? And so,

and that's a big difference, right? But Republicans behaviorally naturally have a fall-in-line mentality, but, like, this is where I differ again with the Democratic consultant class. Democrats act like it's some kind of genetic thing, right? It's actually a product of messaging from the top down, from the elites, from the Republican campaign apparatus, from the media apparatuses on the right. Because, you know, it's not like Republicans come out of the womb valuing control of the Supreme Court.

Right. Somebody's telling them, like, this is why it matters. And this is why you should care about it. And that's why it registers high on their radar. They're being cued into those opinions. Right. So like with Democrats, they would understand the importance of falling in line more if somebody was explaining to them, if you don't vote for Biden, this is going to happen. And it will not be, you know, defunding Planned Parenthood or some arcane bullshit like that. Right. The way the Republicans would describe it is if you don't vote for Biden, then, you know, you're going to die. They're going to take all of your guns away. They're going to kill children. Right. Like, you know, it's a it's a stakes frame. But the argument I've also heard the argument,

though, that the Republican Party simply is more homogenous than the Democratic Party, that the Democratic Party is and is a theory that I've I believe we've talked about on this show that the Democratic Party is a more disparate coalition, that it's it's a combination. It's a it's a combination of more disparate groups that actually don't have the same goals. Right. If you're talking about, you know, union members, African-Americans, union members, African-Americans, New Yorkers who work on Wall Street, young, ideologically progressive people of color. And it's not a theory. I mean, the theory is like the theory comes from Matt Grossman and Dave Hopkins' book, Asymmetrical Politics. And it's a great articulation of what I'm talking about, about this,

you know, how these parties are different. They're talking about two types of things. I've touched on the ideological difference. So the Republican Party is homogenous ideologically and ideologically organized, whereas the Democrats are heterogeneous are more heterogeneous in terms of their ideological distribution. And they're organized around these group interests, right? And the reason why I'm recapping that and jumping here is that you're absolutely right. So Democrats have this major organizational disadvantage insofar as that there's there this coalition of group interests are not organized around an ideology some of that is because for 30 years the mainstream of the party has been afraid of its own ideology right so like the mainstream moderate messaging machine of the party has been to pretend you're not a member of liberalism, right?

Right. And so like, there's no, there's no like way to rally around the ideology. Now, we're, I mean, you know, I'm arguing the party needs to work on that, right? Like that, you know, the way that moderate messaging happens should be completely revamped and rebranded because right now it's it comes from a position of a weakness instead of a position of of strength and that over 30 years like if you want to deal with the long-term problems in places where what you know white working class voters and rural america and all those things you cannot do it unless you deal with this moderate messaging problem that is at

the heart of all the Democratic Party's problems. Moderate messaging is like the, it's the wound, right? It's the main cancer, right? But in the other way, in the other way that it hurts them is because if you know you've got this heterogeneous coalition, ideologically and practically, because it's not a theory, it's a fact, right? As you pointed out, women, African Americans, you've got the environmental movement, you've got the gay rights movement, you've got unions. I could go on. So you know, if you go down below 15,000 feet, you're going to have fracturization, right, of all these different interests. So you have to keep the conversation at 30,000 feet because that's where the commonality can be found, right? So if you go

into the weeds, you're going to lose, right? So how do you deal with like the Bernie people and the Biden people and the Buttigieg people and the Klobuchar people and the Harris people is you don't let the conversation get down to that level because once you do, forget about it, right? And the party's strategy right now completely ignores that reality. So when I say they need strategic revamping, what I'm really talking about is a massive hierarchical, you know, top down, you know, boot camp revision. I'm talking about like a major, major thing. Yeah.

But that seems to be against what a lot of members of that coalition might want. I mean, for instance, the, you know, the progressive wing of the party, the Bernie folks, they would probably be resistant to a top down anything, wouldn't you think? I mean, that entire part of the party is grassroots bottom up people power. No, no, actually, they're very they they love like whenever I talk to progressive groups like they they are very receptive to this because I'm talking about, OK, hey, we're going to, you know, this is, you know, I'm saying it has to be holistic. Right. So like you can't right now. They suffer from this problem where the other side is highly organized and efficient.

Right. And the Democratic Party is disorganized and a mess. And what progressives are hungry for and the reason that they're looking to have a revolution is that they they watch a mainstream of the party that they see as shooting itself in the foot. Right. Every election cycle, because they're watching that mainstream message go out and that mainstream message is, as I said, like it's basically embarrassed to be a Democrat. Yeah. Right. And like as long and because that is the message, it inflames that that progressive base. Yeah. I mean, you can see how that actually adds or causes actually a lot of that tension is avoidable.

lot of that tension is avoidable and um you know this is they see they understand like getting the party to see the benefit of getting their candidates you know moderate mainstream candidates to run from strength and not apology they're very hungry to see the party they want to believe in something they want the party to stand for yes yeah yeah so like when i go i mean i don't make any bones when i go places i'm very clear you know hey i'm you know i'm a moderate in you know independent basically i just like to win shit and let me tell you how to do it right like this is how you win shit right and like you know one thing that progressives and mainstream democrats can agree on there's a couple things they can agree on number one they get their ass kicked continually okay and number two and number two they don't want to

keep getting their asses kicked right so there's there's an increased appetite between these two factions to do better, right? And what I'm offering is a solution. It's a solution that both sides can find value. To have a little bit of party rigor and discipline. That's the word I was searching for earlier, discipline and force like putting forward of ideas. That's exactly right. Because, you know, ain't nobody got, I mean, here's the problem for them, like, I mean, here at the end of the day, you know, this is, this is, this is the fact. The other side has declared war on the Democratic Party. Right. And, um you know it started off being like okay now you're taking knives to a gunfight that's that was like 10 years ago now uh democrats are taking knives to a tank

fight yeah yeah like the republican party means to win and you, at this point, like if Democrats don't get their shit together, we're not talking about health care reform or, you know, this economic reform or student loan thing or that. We're talking about institutional durability, right? Like the long term plans for the Republican Party are to create citizenship tiers, you know, because how do you maintain power when you have less people? You know, you. There's less Republicans and Democrats in America. Right, right, right, right, right, right.

So, like, I mean, you know, I think that there is a recognition, like that's the one thing that the Trump, is a vantage of the Trump, of having gone, having to actually go through the Trump presidency. In many ways, it's been a civic renaissance for Democrats, for, you know, progressive Democrats, liberal Democrats, you know, mainstreamers, whatever the hell you want to call them. And then like independence, right? Like non-Republican independence is that, you know, mainstreamers, whatever the hell you want to call them. And then like independence, right? Like non-Republican independence is that, you know, hey, the American experience is actually fragile, right? People have had this misplaced belief that our democracy was impenetrable. And now people know that it's fragile. And so, you know, I think that in that regard, people are capable and willing to see change. Now, that doesn't mean everybody, right? So people listening to this, well, I argue with

these people on Twitter, and they're, you know, da da da da da. And, you know, it could be a Bernie person saying that about a Biden person, a Biden person saying that about a Bernie person. reflection of a distorted perception of real life right uh in terms of who's on twitter and arguing politics on it um but you know the they're you know what what i'm saying what i am saying is like uh you know this fall is it this is it like this is the, you know, people always say the country's future is on the ballot, right? Well, this is it. Like this is, this is an all hands on deck moment. And I think that within much of the progressive movement, you know, maybe not the ones you see on these Twitter threads, there's a recognition that, you know, ended in the mainstream part of the party that, that things have to change if they want to survive. Well, I want to ask you more about forecasting why we do it and how it's done.

And if we even should be doing it, I frankly want to know. But we've got to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Rachel Bitticoffer. I don't know anything Okay, we're back with Rachel Bitterkofer. This has been fascinating so far. I want to ask you more about forecasting generally. You're a political scientist, but you also have made a venture into election forecasting itself. I've looked at your most

recent forecast. You've got a blue bars and red bars. You've got your state projections. You're you're doing it in that style. What what is the value of election forecasting? You know, I had the and of course, like I loved your writing. I love the you know, the piece that you wrote. And of course, like I loved your writing. I love the piece that you wrote. But I also so distinctly remember 2016, the shock of 2016 and my feeling of, OK, I had been reading all these forecasts. I've been reading FiveThirtyEight and The New York Times and a bunch of other ones. I've been following along with it. I had felt well informed. I had felt, you know, I was like really trying to be a maximally informed news consumer. And then when that happened, I was like, what was the point of this? Like, why? Why was why are we even doing this? Like, other than satisfying some sort of prurient need to know an unknowable future, which,

of course, is, you know, is seductive. What's the value of doing it? Yeah, it's funny, you know, because I barely looked at the forecast in 2016. You know, I mean, it's not to say I didn't ever look at Crystal Ball or the forecast. I occasionally would glance at them them but i certainly was not a regular reader of 538 and i mean i have a phd in american politics so there's really nothing

that i can learn from you know the 538 website you know um so i i didn't really follow it and then like my interest is actually like i put out the forecast map and the predictions mostly because people expect me to, you know, but like I have almost zero interest in that end of it. What I'm interested in is the theory that drives it and the arguments that I'm making about electoral behavior. And if the spitting out of state predictions allows me the avenue to be able to talk to people about that, you know, then that's good. Right. But I see like the forecasting end of stuff is to me like the byproduct. It's not the main event, you know. And it gets people in the door for your wider argument.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And what's the point of it? Well, for me, the point of it was to explain why everything got missed in 2016, because you can't have this major mass behavior change unaccounted for and also you know not be appreciating like what hyper partisanship and polarization is doing to vote choice and voting behavior and then and not and then be surprised when like something gets missed you know what i mean so you know i the theory like the theory of for my research like it begins like like I never knew I was going to be an election forecaster. I wanted to be an election, like a political analyst from the time that I went to college, let alone to get a PhD.

I was like, you know, I'm pretty smart. I love politics. I would be great to be like on the radio or on TV talking about politics. I think I'm as smart as these people are. What do I need to do to do that? I need to go get I was you know, I was a non traditional student. I was 24 before I went to college at all. I was a single mom. I was I went to a community college to start my degree. And I was motivated, you know, in part to be able to talk about politics. I just loved it so much, and I wanted to be able to have high-level conversations about it. But I didn't know specifically it would be about elections and about election forecasting until very, very recently.

and forecasting until very, very recently. And then, you know, in 2010 was the first time, like I said, those House elections, really, that was an interesting, that was like where, you know, if I had to say my theory has a genesis is definitely there because I remember just being surprised too that like nobody saw it the way I did, which was like a story of who didn't vote as much as the story of who did yeah and you know no one ever covered it that way and you know the 2014 midterms were similar for me i you know they i kept saying to my students it was my first year teaching at all still a graduate teacher uh teacher student teacher hey, you know, this is what the polling says. But, you know, after what happened in 2010, it wouldn't surprise me if they lose all these seats.

Like if I and I would tell my students, like if I was them, you know, these seats are basically lost in the South because the South is realigning away. And like in 2014, they had all of these seats that they had to defend the Democrats did. Obama was president. So you just knew it was going to be a shitty midterm, you know? And I was like, you know, this, the assumption that I would make if I was running any one of these campaigns is that we're going to lose, right? That, you know, no way can we win. So we might as well play like you would play football if it was the fourth quarter and you were down three touchdowns and you knew you were going to lose, which is to say out of the box and, you know, aggressive. Right. And I and everyone was running away from Obamacare and away from Obama in a time when I I saw turnout as the main impediment to winning.

turnout as the main, you know, impediment to winning. And I was like, you know, if I was Mary Landrieu, I'd bring Barack Obama to Louisiana and be like, you know, pump up African-American turnout as much as I can because the white people aren't going to vote for her. They're moving to the Republican Party and there's nothing she can do about it, you know? You know what I mean? And like my students thought I was nuts, you know? I'm teaching in the South to the University of Georgia. But, you know, sure enough, they all lost except for Shaheen up in New Hampshire, and it was like a nail-biter,

you know? But, you know, I didn't really articulate the theory clearly, you know, even then. And then, you know, in 2016, it was, I was not telling everybody Trump was going to win by any means. But I, I was saying that I expected Clinton to win, based on all the forecast and, you know, the blue wall and demographic change. But I did say, you know, the one weakness

that she has are these pissed off Bernie people, because it was very clear from the convention that this, that was going to be a problem, you know, and then they never, they never did anything to address it. You know, they had Tim Kaine as the running mate, and they didn't really do anything to bring these progressives in. And I said to my students, you know, the one weakness is like, if all these millennials just, you know, don't show up to vote or vote third party and, you know, so like, for me, like, as soon as the election happened, and the dust settled, and I saw the defection rates, I was like, well, there it is, you know, like, that's what happened. And then, instead, like the whole punditry was like, oh, no, it's the white working class.

You know, it must have been the white working class. That must be the story. Yep. It's the white working class. I mean, that same one that stopped voting for Democrats like 30 years ago and, you know, never is going to vote for them again because of cultural and racial resentment and sexism. Everybody went off. That seems weird. Everybody went off and read Hillbilly Elegy. Nobody read Bernie Voter Elegy. No shit. And so I wrote my book and I, you know, I zeroed in on lower turnout than the Obama years of black voters in key places,

in Philly and Detroit and Milwaukee and defection. And of course, at that time, we knew that the Russians had interfered and they had done so with propaganda, like broadly speaking, and that propaganda had been aimed at Bernie voters and suppressing black voters. But like that was before that Senate database

came out with the ads. I mean, when I saw those ads, like the book was already out when those ads came out. And it was just so affirming because they were literally, you know, that's exactly what those ads were tailored to do. And they did exactly that. Ads like what? Remind me. that were micro-targeted on Facebook that played up convincing Bernie people that there was nefarious activity by the DNC to steal the election from Bernie. Because there was no election interference in the primary in 2016. And in fact, that primary was less competitive than the 2008 primary that Clinton lost. And in fact, superdelegates were more decisive in 2008 when they helped Obama beat Clinton than in 2016 when Clinton beat Sanders.

It's funny how short our memory is for that. I had to remind so many friends. I was like, well, because people like all this, this primary is going on forever. And then, of course, it wrapped up pretty quickly. But 2008 went on a long time like that was really much more competitive and it got really bloody. And superdelegates were extremely important in 2008 because they swing over to Obama in the run up to Iowa. And right after that superdelegate movement was really important. In 2016, the superdelegates lined up super heavy with Clinton very early and they never moved.

And, you know, there was no nefarious activity. Now, was there emails and the Russians strategically released them at peak time to get progressives to defect? Yes, they did. Right. And it worked. I mean, we see. I mean, just blows my mind that like I'm the only person out here telling people, look at the defection rates. We know the Russians were focused on getting Bernie people to defect. We know defection was five, six times higher. And we know that it was, you know, in states like Wisconsin, decisive. I mean, just it's just bottom line. Like no one talks about it. And you know what? Well, it really is important to talk about because the GOP was watching and they're like, oh, shit, that looks like a great plan because

they've got a problem with Trump. And this is a problem before the pandemic. It's a problem after he is a plurality winner. Right. He didn't win the electoral popular vote. And the reason is that in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, wherever, other than Iowa and Iowa and Ohio, he didn't crack 50 percent. He won with a plurality because so much protest balloting occurred in those states. Really? He could win with 47 percent. Even in those states, he won with a plurality.

Yeah. I didn't realize that. Oh, my gosh. Yes. And so like when you for a year and a half now, I've been going around the country briefing groups saying, hey, look, the GOP is going to spend millions of dollars this time on micro targeting on social media. of voters that supported Sanders, and they're going to convince them to either sit out the election or vote third party, because they cannot win unless they can get Trump's winning margin to be below 50%, right? And so like, now we know that, you know, of course, Sanders is not going to be the nominee. And that's exactly what, you know, the GOP winning, you know, playbook is. I mean, I'm anticipating maybe 20,

25 million dollar investment from Brad Parscale on getting progressives to beat themselves. Yeah. Well, and so much of the time you see on Twitter when people are having this conversation that they're blaming each other about it, right. That they're saying, Oh, you know, you burn voters. You're not going to vote for the Democrat, you know, vote blue, no matter who. So, uh, you're a, you're a traitor to the party in some degree, and that's Twitter, right. That's getting very vituperative. Um, but you know, I always think of the flip side. This debate has been going on forever. I mean, I remember in 2000 when people were saying that to Nader voters and I remember Nader voters saying in response, well, nobody was bringing, there was no progressive movement in the Democratic Party. There's no place for me in

the party. So what was I going to vote for? Like you need to, you know, I need to be brought into the tent, those folks were saying. And so how do you, how do you see that? Yeah, I'm so glad you asked, because in my book, I do not blame the voter. Right. And in this in my writing and analysis and conversations that I'll be having headed to 2020 to talk about this GOP multimillion dollar targeting propaganda and disinformation campaign that they'll be launching against the progressive left. I will be always talking about how it is a it is the responsibility of the campaign. Right. So in 2016, all of that could have happened if Clinton had nominated a progressive or liberal. You know, I'm not talking about Bernie Sanders necessarily.

And I'm talking about somebody who's just not a moderate, an olive branch. Right. Yeah. To the progressives. She'd probably be sitting in the White House. You know, but you can't just ignore the entire ideological like, you know, base of your party, you know, you can't, and I would argue also in today's 2020 Democratic Party, ignore the racial, demographically racial base of your party and expect to win an election that's based on turnout. And today's election is based on turnout. The 2016 election is based on turnout. The 2018 election is based on turnout. The 2022 election is going to be based on turnout because you cannot win unless your election coalition is larger than theirs. Democrats, it's just bottom line. If you want to win today, tomorrow, in the future, you have to make sure that you're

turning out as many young people as possible, as many college-educated women and men as possible, especially whites and African-Americans and Latinos. That's how you win. You don't win by the old playbook of finding a pool of white people that vote every election and then wasting 70% of your resources trying to convince them to vote for you. I'm not saying you ignore, I'm not saying you just completely ignore the old playbook and the old white people, but you have to turn out that demographically friendly electorate if you want to win. If you do not do that, you will lose. Now, right now, Democrats have an advantage because a lot of that coalition is stimulated.

Right. But that it could be stimulated more with good campaigning. But, yeah, I say like the Democrats are in were in decent shape before the pandemic. The pandemic is introducing an element of uncertainty that wasn't there before. And I'll be talking a lot about that in the coming months. Yeah. Right. But one way to mitigate turnout uncertainty for Democrats is via, you know, putting on the ticket racial diversity, gender diversity and ideological diversity all in one fell swoop. Right. So you put a female

African-American who is a liberal on the ticket and you give progressives something to vote for because Biden isn't it? Yeah. So you pick you pick you pick Stacey Abrams rather than Amy Klobuchar. Yes. Or Kamala Harris, if you're uncomfortable with Abrams lack of experience, though, you know, I have to say, I don't know what I've heard what the progressive left says about Kamala Harris. I know I have heard, which is, you know, and here again, you know, where reality meets the road. Right. I mean, her Senate record on every vote to, you know, this is every vote that's non-unanimous in the Senate. It's a quantitative record. It's an unbiased record, too. It's not a selected database. It's every

single vote that the Senate has ever taken that's non-unanimous actually has her more liberal than Bernie Sanders. Yep. But you know what? The voter doesn't know that. Like you're Bernie Sanders people. You'll never convince them of that. So, you know, this idea of I have to make the decision based on the assumption I'm going to win the election and therefore Harris is better because she has more experience. That's what I would argue is a flawed assumption. because she has more experience. That's what I would argue is a flawed assumption. You should assume you will not win unless you have, you know, Stacey Abrams on the ticket, you know,

a woman that inspires people to stand in line for hours to hear her speak. Right. That moves people to tears, right? That's what matters. Charismaiden like you know i mean god love the man and his many years of public service isn't particularly charismatic yeah and you know he's definitely a better nominee than a self um you know um avowed socialist because you know there's a lot of gray area between, you know, apologetic Democratic model and Bernie Sanders. And I my research suggests that gray area is rich for Democrats to tap into. Like, you know, Katie Porter ran in her swing district in California in 2018, you know, as an unapologetic Democrat. She did not run, you know, I'm going to abolish ICE, okay, because that's not a great message for average people. But she ran a,

you know, I'm a liberal Democrat, and let me explain to you why liberal economics is better for you, middle class and working class voter than Republican economics. But that sounds like what you just described. That sounds like what Elizabeth Warren was running on. And, you know, she did not fare that well. Why do you think that is? Well, I mean, Warren would have fared perfectly fine if Bernie didn't exist. And it would have fared perfectly fine if Bernie didn't exist. OK, so she'd be she'd have been the progressive, you know, it would have been her and the mainstream candidate. So here, let me explain a really sad truth about American politics. We started off a year and a half ago with two candidates that average people had heard of, Joe Biden and Bernie

Sanders. Joe Biden because he spent eight years as vice president, Bernie Sanders because he was the runner up in the previous year's primary. And lo and behold, what a shock. Who are the two that came out on the other end? Joe Biden andie sanders and this continues an almost completely uninterrupted pattern of presidential primaries in which the two people who are well known enter and leave it okay yeah because like it's not like the electorate considered 27 candidates and found some of them lacking and went back to Bernie and Biden. You know, most we are not we are not modal examples of the American voter. If you're listening to the show, congratulations, you're in the one percent. Oh, no, no, not the economic one percent. No, no, the politically knowledgeable one percent. And that means that you are extremely atypical in terms of, you know, you're not an average voter.

You're not even an above average voter. You are an exceptional voter. Right. And so most voters who will cast ballots in the Democratic primary who are themselves actually above average because they're voting in a presidential primary. Most voters don't vote in presidential primaries and never consider the other candidates because they don't care. They don't follow politics. They never watched one of the debates they heard.

You know, they know who Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders is. And it really was only ever between those two. And the decision came down to, am I a moderate or am I a progress? Like, yeah, far left. If you even know who Pete Buttigieg is, you're a super fan. There are moderates out there than there are people on the extremes of the bell curve. I mean, that's why the bell curve is shaped that way. And we call them extremes. So it's just a matter of mathematics and

and name id and i know that sounds sad and jaded and depressing but occasionally a young charismatic person will come and break that uh barack obama you know i mean he did but it takes a real i mean it takes a special individual who can come out and get it done in one try and can break through that name id and you have to keep in mind what did barack obama have to do that he had hollywood behind him yeah right yeah so maybe the best media coverage any candidates ever received. Yes, exactly right. I mean, you it is so hard to get on the radar of the average American. Very, very, very difficult. So, yeah. Well, let's talk about Bernie Sanders for a second, because Bernie Sanders had the name recognition. This being his second time that he's run, he and I'll take as a foregone conclusion that he will not be the nominee at this point,

based on how things have been going. But it seemed like his movement grew in the last four years. Let's just talk about, I'm curious about your view on why he ultimately, you know, his movement did not, you know, transform the electorate the way that he hoped that it would. And what do you think would be the result had he been the nominee? I know that's a little bit hard as a counterfactual because it would require a change in the electorate that did not occur, but go, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, number one one the reason he's not the nominee is because they needed like they needed to understand once they vanquished warren as a viable progressive

like competitor and there was a time period where she had not only the the likelihood of replacing him as the progressive candidate. She did replace him, right? And I had anticipated that she would, right? I said, oh, Warren is going to come out and within six months, they're going to transpose and she's going to be the front runner. What I didn't anticipate is that she would be dumb enough to drop a detailed $23 trillion, that's with a T, trillion plant plan for health care reform which if you're ever running for public office um you know free bit of coffer advice don't release a 23 trillion dollar plan okay no matter you know if your brand is about having plans or what have

you still don't do it it's a very bad bad idea. That made nobody happy. It pissed off both moderates and progressives. It set you up to fail. Yes, it was a very bad decision. I mean, whoever told her to do that really did her a major disservice. And if I had been on her campaign and someone said, Rachel, we want to release a $23 trillion detailed plan, I would have said no. Don't do that. It was probably the same person who told her to take the DNA test. Yeah, it was a very bad idea. So, you know, but anyway, so I didn't see them re-transposing, but that happened. And actually, once it did, they should have understood like that at this point, we need to broaden the coalition, Right. You have the progressive base. I honestly think there is a problem within the progressive bubble.

You know, understanding like it is not some elite conspiracy, you know, to say like in the data distribution, you know, as I was just saying, the modal distribution is moderate, right? So there's more moderates in the electorate than there are progressives. In 2016, when turnout was low, ideologues had an advantage because when turnout goes low in a primary, it goes low because of moderates not being interested. goes low in a primary, it goes low because of moderates not being interested. In an environment like we're in now, in which negative partisanship is driving democratic mass behavior and they're freaked out about Trump, who's going to be activated that wasn't before? Primarily these moderates and more independent-minded people, and they're going to be looking for a moderate, independent-minded candidate, okay? And, you know, strategically, I don't know why Sanders never seemed to ever, you know, deviate in his campaign strategy, but he was never going to be able to win

without African-American votes. I mean, period. You just can't do it. And I got a lot of flack on Twitter when I would put that analysis out in August and September and October, especially as Bernie was doing better and better in the national polls because he, you know, some poll would come out and everyone would talk about him as the front runner. And I'd come and poop on everyone's party and say, he's still not going to be the nominee because he can, he's not picking up traction amongst African-Americans. And until and unless you do, you will not be the Democratic nominee, you know? And sure enough, you know, that's exactly what happened because it's just a mathematical fact, you know, you need, you cannot win in a party that you know in a primary electorate

that's going to be you know 40 percent black duh you know you need those votes you're not going to get 60 percent of the white vote so you need you need to whoever wins that that black coalition you were saying that at the peak when he when he seemed most likely the whole time, whole time. Yes, no. And there's always and I'm not alone. There was other people who understand like the Democratic electorate who understood that as well. Yes. Well, not media pundits, but not so many media pundits, but other other political science types. Well, let's just put ourselves in the alternate history where, you know, he won enough states where right now he seemed like their front runner. Let's say that, you know, he now seemed that he was coasting towards the nomination. How would you how do you analyze the

the election now, the national election we're going to have in November versus if Bernie were the candidate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. So like, you know, I also get a little bit of flack for this, but like, here's the thing. If Bernie had won the nomination, the Democratic Party probably would have imploded on itself because it's not strategically talented, as we have spent the first hour of this conversation discussing. The Democratic Party has some strategic inadequacies, and one of it is message centralization. So this is what I think would have happened. We were already seeing it when he won Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, right? when he won Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, right? Well, you know, did well, at least in those three contests, and it was looking like he was doing good. And there wasn't really a

viable alternative before Biden's, you know, strong performance in South Carolina, and people were anticipating his nomination. The mainstream part of the Democratic Party was freaking out and they were positioning themselves against socialism, right? So like, let's say Bernie Sanders became the nominee. My modeling and my work anticipates a Democratic vote being rowed in one direction, all the rows, you know, oars are moving in one direction, and they're moving, the election is a referendum against Donald Trump. Under a Sanders nominee, you have your frontline Senate candidates like Mark Kelly in Arizona and Sarah Gideon in Maine, you know, easily distracted into running two campaigns. They're running the campaign

against Trump and they're running a campaign trying to distance themselves from socialism. And the GOP is so talented that they know the more they force these guys to talk about socialism, the less they're talking about Trump. It's a wedge. The less they're talking about Trump. Right, right, right. So like they, in my opinion, so I actually had a whole alternative forecast update written in case Sanders did become the nominee. And he might have been by plurality because I was talking about, OK, Sanders could become the nominee without the black vote under this scenario.

Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Bloomberg, four people are dividing the rest of the vote, including the black vote. Sanders keeps winning, you know, 15, 20 percent of the vote in these various states. There's no majority delegate winner. And he heads into the convention with a plurality lead. So he basically becomes the Democratic Party either has a plurality nomination going to Sanders or they have to take the nomination away from Sanders. And it's a rebellion. Right. Either way, it's a shit scenario. Right. So that was the alternative that they were looking at. And I had a forecast written for that.

And in that forecast, everything was moving back to toss up, basically, because I understood that the Democrat, the Democrats were going to splinter into chaos and the Republicans were going to move in like vultures. going to splinter into chaos and the Republicans were going to move in like vultures. Let me push you on that a little bit, because that sounds like the same thing that, you know, I, as a naive observer, thought about Trump in 2016, that, well, his election is going to split the party because his essential crudeness and crassness, I still saw the Republican Party as being socially conservative in that, you know, the morally upright party, you know, the the party of, you know, language warning labels on rap CDs. I know that's Tipper Gore, who is a Democrat, but you know what I mean as being that sort of thing. And a lot of the way that the election went seemed to trend that way. I mean, you had people like Paul Ryan running away from Trump, especially after the Access Hollywood tape

and et cetera. And it really seemed like disaster until that final moment. I think all the time about like this one joke that Stephen Colbert made on his live election night broadcast when he was, oh no, maybe it was actually the next day. But he said, you know, the, the, the Republicans were in an elevator that was like hurtling towards the bottom of the you know, the cables were cut and it was hurtling towards the bottom floor. And then the door opened into a candy shop where everything was free. Like it, it seemed as though the party was split in exactly that way. And then it turned out to be a massive success for them because the voters actually wanted something different

than all of the party elites wanted in a way that, you know, almost everybody missed. And that ended up like being a wave. And, you know, I had the thought plenty of times this last year, the same thing could be true of Bernie Sanders. And I'm not sure why I would think it isn't. So I'm curious what you say to that. Well, some key differences. Number one is that Trump was racking up clear electoral victories all the way through the primary. He wouldn't have gone into the convention and have become the nominee as a as a plurality

default winner. But that's because Republicans have the winner take all states, right? Isn't that a key difference? I mean, they have some. I mean, it's a hybrid system, right? They did. They did change the system to to make it so that there are more winner take all states at the beginning so that it'd be easier for the front runner to consolidate their victory

after 2012 when it got drowned out. And of course, that's what helped Trump win early. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that's definitely a factor. Right. But yeah, I mean, when we think back to Trump's later primary states, we don't I mean, we don't know because we're never going to get to see that scenario. But Trump Trump was winning big he was winning like 40% in New Hampshire 45% at the later states he was getting 60% of the vote do you see a scenario

in which Sanders is winning the March 17th and March 23rd primaries with 50 60 i don't i don't think the democratic electorate was is as as so like in terms of like how the mass electorate is i don't think the democrats were as quite as unified behind sanders as the mass republicans were around trump okay and another key difference is this so at the end of the day all that disunity at the elite level the republican candidates did some of them distance themselves from trump personally i mean you got to remember too that like none of the republican elites went to the convention. Right. Like, I mean, people forget about that. But like even John

Kasich didn't go to his own states like the Ohio hosted the convention. He wouldn't go. People forget now because, of course, the Republican Party is so allegiant to Trump. But back then, like, no. And they had to give it a speaking spot to ted cruz for a reason right ted cruz talks shit about trump from the stage yeah because they and they had to give him that speaking role because they could not find like any credentialed human being in the republican party to come speak on behalf of donald trump right yeah and this this time is going to be different but like that convention like it was, very hard to fill those speaking roles for them. Right. So you're you're but so you're right.

The elites were really, really divided. And but the public was really not. And I don't know that the public would have been as unified behind Sanders in this case as the public would have been behind Trump. And when we think about what happened on Election Day, you know, 90 percent of Republicans cast ballots for Donald Trump. For Sanders to have a chance, you'd have to see 90 percent of Democrats do that. I think that's achievable, definitely. But, you know, what I said to you is that I would have been changing my forecast to toss up. All right. Because keep in mind, my forecast is, you know, the Democrats would win in 2020.

Right. It's a decisive victory for Democrats. So, you know, basically what I'm telling you is under a Sanders nomination, I would have been moving from that certainty to a scenario in which I would not be able to say with certainty what the outcome would have been. Well, this has been really – I could talk to you about this for hours. But we do have to bring it home here. I'd like to ask – you were talking about a Twitter's not real life. I mean that's a meme. We all know that. But it's often hard to remember it. You've talked about the different bubbles that we all live in.

For folks listening who want a more clear eyed view of what's happening in politics, what do you suggest they do? What do you suggest they read? What do you suggest they think differently about? What do you suggest they take home with them from this? Well, I mean, sadly enough, I'm going to tell them to follow me on Twitter. Go ahead. I put out content there all day, every day. So it's like a live blog for me. And so there's a lot of stuff you would see there that you would never see anywhere else. And the Twitter archive, you know, if you search my Twitter account, you'll find lots of cool threads about a lot of the topics that we talked about today, you know, ranging from the thing that we were just talking

about, which was how would the Democratic Party have responded to a Sanders nomination, you know, especially, you know, its ability to row the boat in one direction, which would have been a referendum on Trump and not a referendum on socialism. I just think that would have been a major potential down pitfall for them. But also a lot of the stuff about messaging and, you know, how to not be an apologetic Democrat. But I also have a really cool analysis that I'd point people to that came out of the New Republic. It's called Hate is on the Ballot. And it pushes back quantitatively at this idea that the blue wave is actually a red wave powered by disaffected Republicans realigning away from Republicans in the suburbs. That is not

what powered the blue wave. There are some realigned Republicans in the suburbs, but the bigger story are these turnout changes that I talked about with you. And people really should read that analysis. It's the most important thing I've written. I think it's really interesting because you, you know, you've been having a very, I'm going to call it moderate realist view of the progressive movement in a way that I imagine progressives listening to this might be a little uncomfortable with, if not irritated by. You're making arguments that I've often heard those folks be irritated by. But you're also making the turnout argument, which is one of the're making arguments that I've often heard those folks be irritated by. But you're also making the turnout argument, which is one of the central progressive arguments that like appealing

to that, you know, that white swing voter in the Midwest is not as important as getting the turnout up. And so I don't know, I find that way that you situate yourself very interesting. Yeah. I mean, you know, I just, I just let the data tell me what's going on. And, you know, I don't, I tell people, this is what I tell people. You don't follow me or read my stuff to feel good. You follow me and read my stuff. I mean, there's plenty of stuff that you can do to do that, right? God love the partisan media atmosphere. If you want to feel good, you can tap it in right into your veins every day and just go off to La La Land. But if you want to be smarter and you want to

understand how shit works, then you should follow me. Hell yeah. And that's exactly the kind of person I love having on this show. Thank you so much for coming on to talk to us about it. Well, thank you so much for having me. much for having me. Well, that is it for my interview with Rachel Bitticoffer. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. That is it for us this week on Factually. I'd like to thank our producer, Dana Wickens, our engineers, Brett Morris and Ryan Connor, our researcher, Sam Roudman, Andrew WK for our theme song. Hey, you can check out my mailing list and the place where I formerly used to show my tour dates at adamconover.net.

Follow me on social media anywhere you want, at Adam Conover, and we'll see you next time on Factually. Factually. That was a HeadGum Podcast.