Rachel Bitecofer on Swing Voters

[lpetrich]

Rachel Bitecofer is back in the news again. Some months back, some people had mentioned her and her predictions in Polls And Surveys - Trump Will Lose In 2020

Rachel "The Doc" Bitecofer (@RachelBitecofer) / Twitter - her Twitter feed has a prediction for how the states are likely to vote in 2020.

An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter - POLITICO

Rachel Bitcofer successfully predicted the Democrats' regaining the House in 2018, and her predictions are that Democrats are likely to add House seats, win the Presidency, and have a chance at winning the Senate.

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.

This is what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez meant when she once said that there are two kinds of swing voters: red-to-blue and nonvoter-to-voter. I note that because she used a version of RB's theory in her run for office. Instead of only campaigning against opponent Joe Crowley, she sought out new voters, and she got a 68% increase in turnout.

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.”

The big upset event that got her started was the Tea Party's victory in 2010 - it made the House Republican again only two years after the seemingly decisive repudiation of that party in 2008. Obama won again in 2012, though the Senate became Republican in 2014.


I note that she has an interesting path to her position, studying elections and trying to predict them. In her youth, she was a Grateful Dead fan, and she read the New York Times between shows. She ended up in a dead-end administrative job with a Republican polling firm in Eugene, Oregon, but one day she heard Rachel Maddow mention that she has a political-science degree. "Wait, you can study politics?" she thought to herself, and she went to some colleges and universities to study that subject, eventually graduating and getting some university and think-tank jobs.

 

[lpetrich]

Trump's victory in 2016 was a big surprise for her, as it was for so many other people. She noticed that a surprising number of people voted third party: the Greens, the Libertarians, and even Never Trumper Evan McMullin.

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.

A much-discussed feature of that election was a majority of white women voting for Trump, despite him talking about grabbing a woman's ladybits. But less discussed was a majority of college-educated white *men* voting Democratic. A realignment is underway.

RB likes Alan Abramowitz' notion of "negative partisanship", wanting to vote against the other party. That means that each party's base is a coalition of people who dislike the other party and its candidates.

She first got noticed in late 2018, when she tweeted her prediction of how many House seats the Democrats would gain that year. It was 42, only one more than the actual number. Her success got her some attention, and she added to her attention with her use of Twitter - something that displeased many of her election-analysis colleagues.

The 2018 elections weren't a perfect fit. The Republicans did better in the Senate than she expected, for instance.

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.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Looking as PA, voter turnout in '16 was higher in every county in '12. And Trump's increase over Romney's take was always greater than the increase in turnout. This means both that people in PA swapped the party and new voters showed up.

Michigan is different. 55 of the 83 counties saw increased turnout. Trump generally gained in most lower population counties, often in kind with Clinton's loss implying party changes. Michigan is a different bird though as the Detroit area is wonky. Oakland County turnout was up 2% (13,000ish), but Trump and Clinton in aggregate lost 13,200ish votes, so that bonus turnout went to a third party (which doesn't make a lot of sense). Kalamazoo shows a similar deal of increased turnout, but lower Trump and Clinton support. Wayne County itself lost the election in Michigan for Clinton. Turnout in Wayne County dropped 5% (37,000 votes), and Clinton lost 76,000 votes while Trump gained 15,000. If I were a CT'er... I'd say something was wrong in Michigan.

 

[lpetrich]

Numbers of independents:

• Total: as much as 40%
• Usual estimate of swing voters: 15 - 20%
• RB's estimate: 6 - 7%
• RB's "closet partisans": 15 - 20% (number above)
• Whoever will break with the status quo: 6%

“If you think of independents as a fixed pool of voters that change preferences,” she says, “well, that has implications for how you campaign after them. But if you are talking about the preference of independents changing because the pool of independents changes, well that is a different fucking banana.”

In 2012, Bitecofer points out, Obama actually lost independents while winning the election, and in Ohio, he lost them by 10 points, but still carried the crucial swing state. There are just simply more Democrats in much of the country, and if they are activated by a belief that, say, the Republican presidential nominee is a heartless plutocrat who thinks 47 percent of the population can be written off as grifters and that corporations are people, and the Democrat gets just a handful of those true independents, then it becomes impossible for Republicans to win.

RB expects the Democrats to win the Presidency without depending on any of the states that she considers tossups. She also expects them to win more House seats and to have a fairly good change of getting back the Senate.

She thinks that the Dems ought to choose a Vice President that will excite the party's base, someone like Stacey Abrams or Julián Castro.

The reason Trump won in 2016 was not, she says, because of a bunch of disaffected blue-collar former Democrats in the Midwest; it is because a combination of Jill Stein, Gary Johnson and Evan McMullin pulled away more than 6 percent of voters in a state like Michigan. These were anti-Hillary voters, yes—but they were anti-Trump voters especially, and they are likely to come to the Democratic fold this time around if they’re given a reason.

So instead of voting for Trump, they voted for others if they voted at all.

 

[lpetrich]

Rachel Bitecofer: The 2020 election will be hyper-partisan, and that makes it quite predictable. And that’s good news for Democrats. - about the Democrats winning big in VA governor in 2017 - "My argument then, and Bitecofer’s now is: If you polarize and divide the country, make sure you end up with the bigger half of the china when it breaks (my way of putting it, not hers)."

I recall from somewhere that that was Pat Buchanan's advice to Richard Nixon. But that strategy is now much more difficult for the Republicans.

Opinion | Why Trump Will Lose in 2020 - The New York Times - "The president is running hard on a strategy of riling up his base. But by doing that, he riles up the Democratic base, too, and that one is bigger."

She talked about the 2018 elections, and how Democrats were provoked to vote in them by President Trump.

Rachel Bitecofer Blog | Palgrave - has an entry on the 2016 Presidential election and what she thinks happened in it.

The Swing Voters in 3 Key States Democrats Must Persuade in 2020
Approval - Disapproval
Nationwide: PA, MI, WI similar

• All voters: 42% - 53%
• Obama-Trump voters: 73% - 24%
• Obama-nonvoters: 19% - 75%

So the Obama-nonvoters are the best ones to reach, since they already dislike Trump.

 

[lpetrich]

Signs, Signs, Everywhere Are Signs: Why Democrats Will Win Big in the 2018 Midterms - Judy Ford Wason Center for Public Policy - Christopher Newport University - Rachel Bitecofer predicted a D gain of 42 House seats.

With 16 Months to go, Negative Partisanship Predicts the 2020 Presidential Election - Judy Ford Wason Center for Public Policy - Christopher Newport University

Barring a shock to the system, Democrats recapture the presidency. The leaking of the Trump campaign’s internal polling has somewhat softened the blow of this forecast, as that polling reaffirms what my model already knew: Trump’s 2016 path to the White House, which was the political equivalent of getting dealt a Royal Flush in poker, is probably not replicable in 2020 with an agitated Democratic electorate. And that is really bad news for Donald Trump because the Blue Wall of the Midwest was then, and is now, the ONLY viable path for Trump to win the White House.

"As the other Rachel says, watch this space." - Rachel Maddow

A new election forecasting model for 2020 - podcast with transcript

RB speculates that there is not enough right-wing-themed drama in places like Netflix, so the right wing gets its drama fix from the likes of Fox News.

"But I now believe that Trump derangement syndrome exists and that Democrats now feel existentially terrified of Trump’s re-election."

So she expects Democratic turnout to be good - and good enough to get the Presidency.

BTW, RB's last name is pronounced Bitteh-cofer.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

I have been following Bitecofer's blog for some months. She does have an interesting take on all of this. But I also wonder about her prognostication. I am looking at how women voters seem to be abandoning Trump and the GOP over Trump's attacks on SS, Medicare, Medicaid, ACA and more safety net programs. Partisanship can shift over time due to what many voters see as important issues. Which is the deciding factor this election cycle? Slashing the safety net or abortion? Immigration or climate change denial/GND?

 

[Harry Bosch]

I have been following Bitecofer's blog for some months. She does have an interesting take on all of this. But I also wonder about her prognostication. I am looking at how women voters seem to be abandoning Trump and the GOP over Trump's attacks on SS, Medicare, Medicaid, ACA and more safety net programs. Partisanship can shift over time due to what many voters see as important issues. Which is the deciding factor this election cycle? Slashing the safety net or abortion? Immigration or climate change denial/GND?

I think that the deciding factor is going to be the same again: the economy. And I don't see any democrat talking about the economy. Zero. I actually think that most Americans want to lower access to college, increase the safety net, increase access to health care, pro environment, pro dreamers and etc. However, most Americans vote their pocketbook first. And the dems are conceding this issue to Trump.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/government-elections/info-2019/women-voting-poll.html

....
The poll shows that 50-plus women are not optimistic about their personal economic prospects. Of those surveyed, only 24 percent expect their personal financial situation to improve in the next 12 months versus 38 percent of men. This lack of confidence in the economy is also dragging down women’s prospects for retirement. While 62 percent of men over age 50 polled are confident they will live comfortably in retirement, only 47 percent of woman have that same belief.
....

Again, women over 50 make up 28% of all voters. 95% of registered women voters over 50 plan to vote.

...
This research proves that “women are coming out,” says Tawny Saez, senior strategist at Harris, who says the response that 95 percent of women age 50 and over plan to vote “is one of the highest I’ve ever seen. Women 50-plus have been an overlooked group you cannot overlook any longer.” According to April, 2019 U.S. Census data, women over the age of 50 comprise 28 percent of all registered voters.
...

Again, part of the economic system is health costs, drug costs and not having adequate health care. These women are not happy with what we have today in large part. If I was Bernie Sanders, I would pitch my program to these older women voters with special vigor and care. 40% of these women say they cannot afford health care. 10.6% of probable voters do not have adequate health care. 70% of these women still do not know who they will vote for. They plan to make up their minds near the end of the voting season. I do not see how Trumpo can win them over with his chainsaw to the safety net policies. I do not see any grand GOP proposals that will fix any of this for everybody. Since 28% of the electorate has not made up their minds yet, horse race polls are somewhat meaningless.

Bitecofer is right to ignore these sort of polls. 28% of America's most reliable voters aren't happy, and are looking for a white knight to turn things around. I do not see that being Trump, and fear mongering about immigrants, abortion and second amendment rights isn't going to do the trick for all of these voters.