Rachel Bitecofer’s radical new theory predicted the 2018 midterms spot-on. So who’s going to win 2020?
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 muchthe 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...
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.
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 terms in power for a single party, and that’s an electoral drag.
The prevailing analysis was that Democrats had overreached on policy: After Obamacare, the stimulus, the bankauto bailouts, the center just revolted. But when Americans picked a president in 2012, they didn’t seem so appalled; Obama won again.
Rachel Bitecofer has a decorative nameplate on her desk at Christopher Newport University. | Julia Rendleman for Politico Magazine 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.
“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. “She has taken a Krassenstein Brothers approach at getting attention for her forecasts,” says the election forecaster Dave Wasserman, House editor of the, referring to the pair of anti-Trump bros who gained over a million Twitter followers between them, mostly by being some of the first people to reply to Trump tweets and by stirring up #Resistance memes. “In my view that is unfair to the many thoughtful forecasters who don’t relentlessly self-promote.
Bitecofer, as it happens, flew to Iowa for three days before and after the caucuses, a few weeks after I spoke to Wasserman—and rejects the criticism that somehow getting out in the world would improve her modeling. If she allowed personal conversations to influence her work, she said, then “I would be a god-fucking awful quantitative scientist.”
“It’s the big discussion in election forecasting and political science right now,” said Kyle Kondik, communications director at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics and an editor at its Sabato’s Crystal Ball forecasting site, Sabato’s Crystal Ball. “As I look at it, there are just a lot of different things going on in the electorate. There are a lot of folks who switched from Obama 2012 to Trump 2016.
But still, the results bore out her theory: For Democrats to win, they need to fire up Democratic-minded voters. The Blue Dogs who tried to narrow the difference between themselves and Trump did worse, overall, than the Stacey Abramses and Beto O’Rourkes, whose progressive ideas and inspirational campaigns drove turnout in their own parties and brought them to the cusp of victory.
Once you know the shape of the electorate, she argues, you can pretty much tell how that electorate is going to vote. And the shape of the electorate in 2018, and 2020, for that matter, was determined on the night of November 8, 2016.
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