Employ Negative Partisanship: Rachel Bitecofer
March 21st, 2024
“The voters will only be mad about what we tell them to be mad about.”
Rachel Bitecofer is a political scientist and election forecaster turned political strategist. Her most recent book is Hit ’Em Where it Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game. We discuss why it's time for Democratic Party candidates to embrace negative partisanship in their campaigns.
Half of America’s electorate doesn't vote – even in the most consequential elections – because they aren't interested in politics. The Knight Foundation took a very large sample survey of non voters and discovered that the most commonly cited reason for not voting is lack of interest. The US has raised and created a political culture that encourages lack of civic participation and views politics as dirty. Turning the tide on disinterest and bolstering American democracy must include fixing the civic culture.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Rachel Bitecofer
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Rachel Bitecofer Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like us the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful. All lowercase.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:24] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
It's 2024 and the future of America is in your hands. Democracy is not a spectator sport. So we're here to bring you an independent perspective about the election this year and empower you to change the status quo.
One of the things we often hear is that politics in America is uncivil, that what would cure our civic life is dialoguing across divides, widening our perspective and appreciating the lived experience of the other, and even working across the aisle, also known as bipartisanship. But this is not that conversation. Today we're going to discuss negative partisanship, how it works, and why it's time for Democrats to embrace it.
Our guest is Rachel Bitecofer. She's a political scientist and election forecaster turned political strategist, and the author of Hit 'Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game.
Welcome, Rachel. Thanks so much for joining us.
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:01:44] Well, thank you so much for having me today.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:48] We can all agree that democracy is on its deathbed, and we've had many guests discussing exactly this. We also agree that currently the Republican Party is anti-democratic, and the major reason why we find ourselves in the current state of politics. And you argue that we need to hit 'em where it hurts, the title of your book, by using their own playbook of negative partisanship. And before we go into how to do that, tell us what negative partisanship is and how it works.
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:02:18] Sure, negative partisanship is a concept from political science literature, and it's really important to understand negative partisanship that you understand partisanship itself. Political scientists set to understand American voters once we started to get things called surveys in the 1940s and 50s like, "oh, we can finally figure out, like, what Americans know about civics and government" and how they vote and what have you. And that was when political scientists first learned a really terrible lesson about the American electorate: it knows nothing, okay? It basically knows who the president is. And some loose, like, impressions about the party. But your average voter doesn't have a lot of knowledge about individual politicians, certainly the ones that you and I know by name and your listeners likely do as well. So what they noticed was that it didn't matter because they could use a clue, or what they called a heuristic, to make that vote decision. And that vote decision is the party label, and which is always on a federal and state election, general election ballot. You get a handy guide that immediately tells you there's a difference between John Smith and, you know, Quincy Adams, right? And one is a Republican. One is a Democrat. So it's always been that partisanship has existed and been a very powerful predictor for vote choice, for which candidate a voter will end up choosing. But what is interesting about it is that we have our partisan identity, and we also have an identity that is shaped in the negative to the opposition party. And so negative partisanship refers to the feeling of threat and fear that you get when you're being subjected, especially to the rule of the opposition party. So it's a very strong emotion, particularly when you're out of the presidency. So it's an advantage right now for Republicans. But it is also something that Republicans observed in the electorate and started to design electoral strategy around starting in 2004.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:16] So you just mentioned how little the electorate knows about politics. And I feel like before we go further, I, I feel like we need to understand just why the messaging is so important and that the messaging needs to be super strong and simple because not a lot of people are actually paying attention. In fact, you start the book with the statistic that essentially 54% of Americans generally don't vote. So that's actually a majority, you know, with some exceptions. Of course, in the 2020 presidential elections, 66% of the electorate turned out. But for the most part, the majority of Americans just don't vote. And I have to say that the scales fell off my eyes when I read that chapter about why Americans don't vote. Tell us a little bit more.
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:05:06] Yeah, I mean, there's a few reasons why Americans don't vote. But what the left has fixated on is institutional access, so the rules that surround voting. And we know for a fact because of the variation, it's a state level duty. So there's a lot of variation between the states. And in some states, they have tried greatly to expand the ease of voting, the access to voting through things like Oregon's program, a vote by mail, which has been, you know, only way that you vote in Oregon for over 20 years. Other states have done that. So you know that there's a relationship between like, how hard is it to vote? Can I vote early? Can I vote absentee? Can I vote by mail? And turnout rates. And we can see that, you know, in states like Texas that suppress the vote, make it hard to vote, the turnout is lower. But what escapes us and has really hampered democratic electioneering strategy is the other part of that story. Because the fact is the reason half of the electorate doesn't even bother to vote even in the most consequential elections is because they aren't interested in politics. Okay? It's not that they can't, and they just really wish they could. And I present some really compelling data that the Knight Foundation took a very large sample survey of Americans, of non- voters, to explore the reasons why they don't vote. And the reason that is most commonly cited is lack of interest. They just don't care. Right? We have raised and created a political culture in America that encourages lack of civic participation. And I point out that you might have a friend who would be embarrassed to tell you she ate French fries last night, but would be quite proud to tell you, oh, I'm not voting. I don't do any of that, right, because to her mind, she is morally clean. Because politics is so dirty, right? Just by engaging in politics, you're somehow morally flawed. Which is, of course, the exact opposite of how you would want a posture in a democracy to be. So getting people to understand that because of interest, if you think about the things you're interested in versus the things you're not interested in, you know, I'll just take a gamble. Most of the people hearing me right now are probably not into NASCAR, you know; probably couldn't tell me any names of current NASCAR drivers who won the last race. Which state has good NASCAR? I mean, all the little details that you learn when you're interested in something, and that's how most people are about politics. They don't know any of the details of Donald Trump's coup plot. They know there was a thing on Jan 6, and it was an insurrection, or whatever. But they don't know that that was part of a coup plot, that it was a capstone event out of a, you know, multifaceted effort to overturn the election. We assume everybody knows these things, and therefore, we've been doing our messaging down in the weeds. Right. And what we need to be doing is making sure
that the electorate knows one basic fact of contemporary American politics, and that is that the Republican Party is an extremist threat to their freedom right now.
Mila Atmos: [00:07:59] Well, I have to say, I found your book so refreshing. You don't mince words about having to go on offense to elect pro-democracy candidates. Like you just said, we just need to make sure that everybody understands what the overarching message should be for Democrats. So let's talk about the fighting words that lead to winning political power. And you just talked about how dangerous Republicans are. And we know that we need to make freedom the Democratic brand. What would be the overarching message you want all Democrats running for office to communicate this year?
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:08:31] You know, with the Democratic Party, you're talking about a very different party than the Republican Party. And we've allowed those differences to kind of hamper our strategic changes. Right? We're like, "oh, we can't do this because we're not all white people. We're not all conservatives," right? And I'm like, no, no, no, listen, it doesn't matter if your issue's climate change, gay rights, women's rights, whatever it might be in that Democratic coalition, it comes under the same threat from the Republican Party. So that the threat to freedom, the threat to your health, wealth, freedom and security is what I call it, it can tie in to all these different constituencies within the Democratic Party and unite them under one broad theme. And so getting people to do that is so important, because when you think about Republicans, they pick something. It could be immigration. It could be crime in 2022. It was all crime in 2021. In Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, who was the Republican candidate there, ended up kind of upsetting the Democratic frontrunner for the governorship. And what they did was they painted the entire election theme around some issue I had never even heard of called CRT. Okay. They take something that even me had never heard of in January of 2021 and made it the defining issue voters were telling pollsters about in the fall of 2021. And the, and the way they did that is that they focused all of their messaging around this one thing, even though individually, the candidates probably had many different things that they were focused on. And certainly Glenn Youngkin is a business type conservative. He would be focused on economics normally, but instead he ran on wedging this idea that we're indoctrinating white children to feel guilty in schools. And they all amplified that message through their media, through all three of the statewide races, even though, you know, most of those things had nothing to do with the CRT in school. So
getting Democrats to understand if the electorate doesn't know anything, and our goal is to make sure they know at least one thing, your freedom is under threat, then it becomes about repetition and centralization. And you need everybody pounding that same refrain over and over and over and really harping on the issue.
Mila Atmos: [00:10:43] Yeah. Well, you just mentioned about the coordinated messaging from the Republican Party up and down the entire infrastructure and how if you're a Democrat, it feels like nobody got the memo. There's maybe one person ...
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:10:59] And think about, like I said, you know, CRT in schools is not an issue that any of those candidates cared about. I bet you. You know, like maybe some of the deep red districts like the true cult believers did, but most of the swing race Republicans in Virginia that cycle, if you would have asked them as candidates, what is your issue? I am certain no one wrote CRT down. Okay. But they all understood the power of this thing that, you know... They they understand ambiguity is actually an asset. With us, it's like, "oh, you know, we can't call them fascists because no one knows what that is." And I'm like, no one knows what a socialist is, either, but after ten years of calling us that, they know one thing about socialism: Democrats. It's connected to Democrats. Right? So, you know, I think it's really important for us to get over this hump. It's certainly something I'm highly focused on for 2024, making sure that the Biden team is running a good message frame. They're going to be running under this banner of threat to democracy. They're going to be making that threat personal and concrete, not, you know, abstract and top level, but about individual freedoms and rights that people stand to lose under this new MAGA regime that wants to come in. But the swing races for the House and the Senate also need to be pounding that. They need to be really hitting the voters hard about freedom on abortion issue. That is the most salient issue. The voters are not shy about that. They're pretty clear about the power. I mean, thinking about disenfranchising half of the population, stealing a constitutional right. I'm here to tell the male analyst and others: you don't get over it. It doesn't go away. It doesn't, you know, recede in the background. In fact, as we've been subjected to headlines coming from places like Texas of medical torture of women, it's going to get stronger. And that's why I push very hard for people to understand the electoral power of focusing on on Dobbs and Republican big government intrusion into your private life. It's the way that you win power. If your issue's climate change or whatever else, you have the power to do the policy. But right now, we like to kind of mix those two things
up. You know, we're running on our favorite policy things, whether or not those are the most effective things to optimize winning.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:10] Right. Yeah. I totally agree that running on abortion is very strong. And people didn't miss that memo. Everyday people. They understood that it took away their freedoms to lead healthy lives, to start the family when they want to, to basically be in charge of their own decisions, of their own lives. In terms of CRT, I wanted to turn back there because I feel like maybe not exactly CRT, but Wokeism is still on the agenda for Republicans, especially at local levels or on school board elections. So what would be an effective rebuttal for Democrats when it comes to CRT or Wokist education?
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:13:52] I mean, I wish I could be on Meet the Press one day with Ron DeSantis when he starts talking about Wokeism and how he has to protect children from it, because the second a Republican makes the mistake of uttering the phrase protect children in my presence, they're going to get hammered for letting our children get slaughtered by weapons of war at school. And I'm going to ask them, "why do you want our children to die at school," just like they would do to us? Right. So it's about pivot and attack. In Virginia, I wrote, you know, in the CRT chapter about my frustration and, you know, this is when I was first trying to get in to the pit of Democratic electioneering that we were responding to CRT by proving it wasn't real, that showing how great Toni Morrison's book is or whatever. Right. And what we should have been doing is, oh, the Republican Party wants to make an election about education. Great, because the Republican Party's record on public education, it's dismal. Okay. They came in with their Reaganomics stuff in the 80s and utterly decimated America's K through 12 infrastructure. Our public schools have been in decline every year since then, and it's the Republican Party that killed them. So it should be a conversation where it would be like, come into my web little, you know, mosquito. I'm happy to have a conversation about protecting children with a party that's letting them get slaughtered every day at school.
Mila Atmos: [00:15:13] Yeah. So pivoting and attacking on something that really does hurt because of course they are the party that is preventing gun safety.
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:15:23] And voters do not know that. So like, okay, if you ask a voter which party wants to take away all your guns, Democrats. Okay. If you ask people which party wants pro-pot, higher minimum wage, climate change action, whatever it is, all of our popular stuff that we've made really popular gun reform, they don't connect it immediately to us. Right. And that's because we have developed a messaging system that bleached out partisanship. So we talked about the bad guys as the NRA, Big Pharma, Big oil, Congress generally. And. And you do that because when you're smart and you're informed, you read Congress and you saw the headline yesterday or whatever about the immigration bill get killed. So you immediately know, oh, that was Republicans in Congress. Normal people do not know that. And they will not know that unless you tell them. We have to be assigning blame to the Republicans. Wide brush. All Republicans, right? Not most Republicans. Just because somebody says they're not going to vote yes on it or doesn't support a national abortion ban, doesn't mean they're not going to vote for it. And they don't give us that kind of quarter. They don't say, "oh, well, Joe Biden doesn't want to defund the police." They branded him even though he said publicly I don't support it. They still run him as a defund the police candidate. And we have to do the same thing. We have to do the same thing, because if we do not, we're not going to win. And if we don't win, people who are these marginalized groups that we care about are going to be the very first people to suffer.
Mila Atmos: [00:16:55] Well, tell us a little bit more about taking credit and giving blame strategy, because we've heard so many times now in the news where Republicans tout the federal dollars that are coming into their district, even though these very same politicians voted against the Inflation Reduction Act or the American Rescue Plan Act. And then progressives, of course, on Twitter, go bonkers. They're like, oh my God, you know, these hypocrites. But then, of course, the elected Democrat says nothing. Give us an example of effective branding up for Democrats from the get go.
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:17:25] I mean, it comes from the members, right? The most important message narrative centers we have are our electeds. And so, you know, a big part of my work is about getting to them to give them an explanation of like, okay, look, if you were to watch, like election analysis today or any time you're going to hear election analysis kind of from a practitioner angle. And so candidates, you know, their their practitioners are not like studying it systemically or institutionally. So it's really important that at the end of the day, why does the Republican message machine work
so well? Well, it's two reasons. They built an ecosystem. And their people, behaviorally Republicans love, like old people love, Fox News, right? We have people who don't really like politics, but we'll vote for the left. So we're very diverse in all of our media. Even the people that do listen to the news, which isn't by any means the majority of us, okay. We're very diverse in our selections. They are very, very centralized. Almost all Republicans trust one thing for news, and that's Fox. They don't trust anything else. And so they have that amplification. But what makes it so powerful, folks, is the other side of it. And this is something we can fix. And that is, you know, they come up with an attack. It's a border invasion. They all start using the phrase border invasion from the party committees. The House Oversight Committee chair accounts, from everything official, all the electeds, and the press covers the politicians. Right? So they pick up the narratives from these politicians and they start talking about, "oh my God, Joe Biden, what is he going to do with this border crisis?" So we need to understand that we're stronger together, that we would be best off to have a talking point memo that we operate off of, where everyone's on message. Everyone's pounding things like: nowhere to hide national abortion ban. If you just keep saying "nowhere to hide national abortion ban," you're branding for people in these safe blue districts in states in particular like the threat is to you, right? You know, getting the electeds on the same page is, to me, a very important strategic shift that we're still working towards.
Mila Atmos: [00:19:44] We are going to take a quick break to thank our sponsor, Shopify, and we'll continue with Rachel in just a moment.
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And now let's return to my conversation with Rachel Bitecofer.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:58] Let's go back to the immigration bit, because we're in the wake of the second and now successful vote to impeach Secretary Mayorkas. And before his hearing, he submitted this multi-page letter, which I doubt anybody read. But I read it. It was very reasonable, you know, but it's also sort of like this whole age old thing that Democrats do. They rebut with the facts, you know, snooze, boring, or try to persuade with the logic of a policy prescription. Also boring. Nobody cares, like you said. So what could the Secretary have said in these hearings? Because I feel like it's really just political theater. And still nobody is understanding that this is what this is. And in your mind, if you had been in his ear, what would you have whispered?
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:22:46] I think it's very important that we define it as Trump wants the border open, right? He's the one that killed border security. So every time they bring up the word immigration, the strategic objective of Biden or anybody else that's opening their mouth should be to get the sentence across: "Donald Trump killed bipartisan border security." If you read the front half of this book, your polling data, understanding polling data is going to improve a lot because you're going to understand how is it that Donald Trump issues a public edict, vote no, kill this bill. And yet, when we poll people, why did border security fail? More people say it's Biden's fault than Donald Trump, right? The reason is, is that no one knows that. And so it's our job to make sure that the voter hears "Donald Trump killed border security." And so we need the politicians to say that sentence, you know, whatever else they're going to say on the issue, they need to make that point clear. "Donald Trump just killed border security" because we need the public to know. And the reason that the obstruction strategy has worked so good for them -- And they started the strategy, by the way, in 2010. It was an articulated strategy when they were out in the wilderness. I mean, in 2009, the conversation was after the
Iraq War debacle and the Great Recession. Was the Republican Party going to be DOA in terms of Congress and the Senate for a decade because of how bad the brand took a hit, and within a year michael Steele is picking up 63 House seats for the Republican Party. Right? I was like, okay, I got to understand how that happens. And, you know, at the end of the day, how it happens is that Republicans understand how to obstruct and then use public civic illiteracy to make it look like the president's inept. Do you see what I'm saying? So, like, they're able to say Biden wants open borders, and they know that most of the public is not going to know that they just had the best chance they've had in four decades. The most conservative border security bill. This is the third time that they've killed comprehensive border security, by the way, since 2006. John McCain voted against his own bill, just like Lankford did with his right, in 2006, because he wanted to be the Republican nominee in 2008. And that was when the party first started to radicalize on abortion. In 2013, same issue. The Senate passes a bipartisan bill over the filibuster. So hard to do! Send it to the House, where Republicans have complete and total control because the majority party rules the roost in the House, the minority party has literally no power. And they killed the bill then and now they've just done the same thing. And yet when you ask people why, why didn't border security happen with Obama, it's even on the left, even amongst activists who are not normal people, they are much more likely to blame it on Obama than on John Boehner. Okay. So we have to make sure that we're assigning blame, taking credit. If you're a senator and you're excited about $35 insulin, good. Let's say, hey, Democrats got you insulin. All the Republicans voted against it. Our brand up, their brand down. We're credit claiming because people like to do that. But we're also getting that contrast in and you know pounding a refrain basically which is "Democrats give, Republicans take."
Mila Atmos: [00:26:10] Yeah, that's a great example. Well, you also dedicate a whole chapter to giving wedgies, as you call it, which is to say, using wedge issues to accomplish what you call the two goals of negative partisanship. And I'm going to quote you now, "turn out voters from your team and to disqualify the opposition in the eyes of swing voters."
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:26:32] That's how Republicans do persuasion. We do persuasion to sell a candidate on their biography and on their policy promises like median voter policy proposals and, you know, appeals of bipartisanship. And what this book is designed to do is to get people to realize, actually, Republicans stopped doing that a
long time ago. They don't do that. They didn't sell J.D. Vance to Ohio. They made sure Ohio would not buy Tim Ryan.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:58] Right. Yeah. Well said, well said. Well, so you suggest a number of ways for Democrats to wedge various issues. And my favorite one actually was about wedging rural America, where Republicans have controlled politics for more than two decades. Of course, we know notoriously rural Americans are primarily Republicans. So tell us about how a good wedge would sound about rural America.
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:27:24] Yeah. So when we get to rural America, you know, here's the thing. Voters are mad, right? They're always mad because stuff's never great. We're living through the best, literally the best human experience any human has ever had in the whatever, 30,000, 40,000 years of humans crawling on the face of the Earth. We're the first people that have the opposite problem of starvation. We have too much food, calorie surplus. We're living at a time where we can regrow organs out of pig stuff. I mean, it's an incredibly, wonderfully rich time to be alive. No one cares. No one knows that. Right? So if you're going to be angsty and mad and they are -- especially about economic stuff. Probably we want to do, and instead of telling him not to be angsty because that's not going to work, and instead of saying, "well, you know, we know you're mad and that both parties have let you down" because that's also not going to work in terms of branding and winning stuff. We tell people the story of what happened to their rural community, because the Republican Party has ruled the roost there for 20 years, and their record is absolutely dismal. They've totally eviscerated rural America, and at every turn vote in ways that harm rural America, particularly with Medicaid expansion, which ended up costing many rural communities their hospitals. And that is still ongoing. Right? So to me, what you do is you come in and you stop being micro. It's not just that Trump is a scab, though that is a helpful brand he used in the Midwest. It's about telling the story to working class America, which is not just white anymore. Working class America: the Republican Party steals your stuff and gives it to their rich donors, right? If we try that, we don't know if it will work. But we do know telling them I'm not one of those Democrats and reaffirming the GOP's attack, which is that the Democratic brand is bad and there's something wrong with Democrats. We might want to go into rural America and run the race as a referendum on the Republican Party's rural record, which I just laid out is dismal in many ways. I mean, if you're a rural voter right now, you're not having a high probability of being able to keep your children in the
town that you're living in because they have no economic opportunity, and the reason why? Reaganomics. Starve the beast. Divest. And that's why we've seen a real decimation in rural America. It's a compelling story, and it's one you can lay squarely at the feet of the Republican Party.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:00] Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, we just spoke to Jess Piper in Missouri, where we know there are many schools that are only open four days a week because the teachers don't get paid, and many of them only stay in the job for like a year because they don't get paid and they have to find other work. And by paying them for only four days... They're only having school for four days, that means they can have another job on the weekend. And that's, you know, that's like a totally insane thing. And Republicans totally don't own it. They just think that's normal. And what I was actually also very shocked to discover was that in some places in Missouri, this has been the case for the last 15, one-five years. And I just thought, what? Like how come the parents are not in revolt? How come the state is not in revolt? And why are Democrats not running on this? You know, it's just shocking.
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:30:47] It is shocking. And the reason why no one's in revolt is the voters will only be mad about what we tell them to be mad about. It's just like what the Republican Party, right? You can't be mad at what you don't know about.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:58] Mhm.
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:30:59] I mean, think about that. Right. So like at the heart of the strategic shift is like, look, people if they cared about policy they'd already be us. Okay. Instead we've got to find something that they're mad about. Negative emotions. And this is just basic human psychology are stronger. You get more anger about something that hurts you than you get happiness about something that helps you. That's just how we're wired, unfortunately, and they're manipulating it. To win swing races, we have to do the same.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:32] Yeah, loss aversion is a very strong emotion. Rachel Bitecofer: [00:31:35] It is.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:35] And turns people out. I actually I'm wondering, you know, you talked in the book about the difference between independents who are leaners and you don't really count them. You know, you count them as partisan. Essentially, when you do the polling, does negative partisanship also turn out the true independents, which are only about 10 to 15% of the electorate, like the real swing voters?
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:31:57] Yeah, it's really great. I'm glad you asked that. Right. Because what's beautiful about the Republican strategy or modeling it off of negative partisanship strategy is that if you have people think, oh, independent voters are so informed and they're going to pull up both the candidate websites and they're going to read all this, and like, we might even know somebody like that. I do. I know one voter who's like that. You can find them, especially if you're out in the stump and you're, you know, campaign events because those people are not typical people. You're going to show up. But generally speaking, folks, if it goes back to the beginning of our conversation, we have found in political science that most people know nothing about the government other than who the president is. We have found they're using a cognitive shortcut to get around that and make political decisions that group them into two parties. We have found that most people who say they're independent will admit that they lean to the Republican or Democratic Party, and that when we take those people and we look at their voting behavior, there is not much difference in the strength of their party voting compared to somebody who admits they're partisan. And, you know, in the polling when they report independents is usually 30, 35% of the survey. Right? So what we're basically saying is of that 35%, really about 15 of it is fake partisans, closet partisans, who are just pretending to be independent or like to think of themselves that way. But then we get down to that 15, okay. And what Republicans found out, and I argue this in the book, we're not selling Toyota Tacomas, okay, or Apple Watches, or even a new sweater. We're selling a product everyone hates. Everyone hates politics. Everyone hates both parties. Everybody hates politicians. The decline in our institution stuff has been so horrible and bad for democracy because, you know, everyone thinks everyone is corrupt. So the end of the day, what matters to these independents who are mostly low info, low interest folks who don't have the passion to push them into one issue that then pushes them into a party, they have a deep sense of civic obligation to vote. So they were socialized into voting by someone, but they don't have an enjoyment of political phenomena. And what matters with them? Because this is a long way of answering your question does negative partisanship matter to the
middle? Yes, because what negative partisanship is doing is creating a top of mind brand argument. Right. And that argument from the right is always going to be Tim Ryan's a Democrat. Democrats are socialists, and they want to turn your boy children into girls, or whatever the thing is, this week. And at the end of the day, that's what the swing bucket's going to hear about Tim Ryan. If we're saying, oh, Tim Ryan's a nice guy, he does this and that and he's going to get you this and that. There's an asymmetry in that argument for that low information narrative. So what's important is to make sure that that 15% who are very imagistic, very fundamental-shaped in terms of like in party out, party economy, whatever, that they're hearing the Republican Party is a threat to you. And that pushes them from voting from the Republican to the Democrat by default. That's exactly how the Republicans do their swing messaging. So you look at why are extremist winning swing races if the middle of the electorate, the swing bucket is the way that the media and the analyst on TV and even people like Nate Silver talk about them, then why is it when you present them the perfect candidate in terms of biography, moderation, ideology, everything, and the extremist is winning? And I think the answer to that is it's because Republicans have set up their electioneering to utilize that low info by painting an impression in that swing bucket of extremism and threat, and that our only hope to offset that isn't an argument of how great our person is, though. Candidate campaigns will always spend money on that. At the end of the day, it's about how much do you make the election in Florida Senate, for example, a referendum on Rick Scott, who's a Republican, and all Republicans are a threat. Do you see what I'm saying?
Mila Atmos: [00:36:20] Mhm. Mhm. Yeah.
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:36:21] And like that's what swing voters are very, that's why the midterms effect was going to be so hard to stop in 2022. And I say in the book there were shifts in the map. Some places ran new strategies. Some places ran old. Where we ran old, in Ohio and Florida, and, you know, North Carolina races that polled competitively. Right? We lost them all. And it was no surprise to me in places where we stopped trying to sell a product to the middle of the electorate and instead built a strategy around telling, making sure the middle of the electorate, the swing voter bucket, the uninterested people in that bucket hear at least one thing about what's going on in contemporary politics, and that is Republicans have stolen your reproductive freedom and are going to subject you to death panels. And it's so hard just to even get that to
permeate to a tuned-out electorate that follows no news. Their algorithms are not news based, not politics based. They don't see any of the stuff we see. They see celebrity stuff, cooking stuff, Hollywood stuff, fun stuff. But they are not seeing politics. And it's our job to make sure they know what's happening.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:25] Mhm. Well said. You just mentioned the midterms and in every election there are the fundamentals of overturning the party in power. But also this year, a presidential election year, there's also the power of incumbency when thinking about Biden's reelection bid. How do you think it's going to work out.
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:37:46] Yeah, I mean, I was a big proponent of Biden running for reelection because, again, I'm a trained political scientist who knows the fundamentals of political science research really well. And there's one fundamental that don't lie, folks. It's called the presidential incumbency advantage. It's a big advantage. Why is it an advantage? Well, let's talk about like I think for a lot of people, and the reason you see this and saw this so much in polling, "I want a different candidate," is that when people are answering that, they just in their head take Biden and replace it with their preferred Democrat. But the problem is, like, my preferred Democrat, may not be your preferred Democrat. In fact, almost certainly it isn't. And so what you end up with is a very divisive situation where your party is fighting amongst itself over a nomination and sending $100 million of resources that could be saved and then pushed out against Republicans to win the general, over trying to, you know, make sure Buttigieg wins over Harris or Whitmer over Newsom or whatever. Right? So what people are not counting in is all the effects of that, okay. You lose the fundraising advantage. Biden has a war chest of $117 million. Trump has nothing, basically. Right. You have all the headlines are about internal party fighting. And imagine, folks, imagine if we would have had open Democratic primary going on on October 7th in the weeks after that. My goodness. I mean, it would have been an absolute mess. Okay. So Republicans would never even entertain for a second giving up the significant structural advantages that come with incumbent president. Okay, you get the presidential podium, you get the presidential plane, you get the bully pulpit, you get the news media. I mean, you have so much strategic structural advantage with an incumbent that they would never have entertained replacing theirs. And, you know, I had to do a lot of explaining to people, look, Biden is the guy. You want to run Biden and you don't want an open primary. You don't want all of this stuff going on. What we need is everyone focused on the opposition party, and I
feel very good about the Biden team's strategy. They're going to make sure you're tuned on, Americans hear the stakes of the election because they don't know. Many Americans have no idea the Republicans are planning mass deportations, that they're going to come after foreign nationals and apply loyalty tests. These are things they're openly discussing, and not like rando people. People like Stephen Miller, who had significant administration posts in the first Trump term. People don't know that. And the Biden team is going to make sure that they tell people that. My concern is that we don't amplify that and get the most bang for the buck like we did in 2020, when, you know, the Biden campaign was running kind of on the threat of Trump and Trump mismanagement, but the down ballots were just doing whatever. Like one person is talking about this and one person is talking about that, that centralization needs to exist so we can create a cacophony. We need every voter in every state and the state legislative race too, to hear this Republicans are coming for your freedom message. To be, you know, if we can do that, we can create something that at least resembles their noise machine.
Mila Atmos: [00:41:07] Mhm, I always ask this question towards the end of our conversation. What are two things an everyday person can do to have better tools in their civic action toolkit? And in this case, I'm curious what an everyday person can do to turn the tide on the fundamental lack of interest in politics and democracy, and to help establish a healthy civic culture. And I know it's a little bit out of left field because we just talked about messaging, but I kind of feel like, you know, if we had more people interested, we would have a different kind of politics.
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:41:41] Oh, we certainly would. Right. I mean, so I talk about it in terms of climate change and wildfire. Okay. Right now we have a wildfire. It is threatening to burn us all down in November. We have to put this wildfire out. And the only way to do so is to beat it electorally and beat it big. But at the end of the day, we still have climate change. So at that point, it comes into what you're asking me about, how do we fix this? What can individual people do? So in terms of putting out the wildfire, every single person who hears my voice is an influencer. It doesn't matter if you have 165,000 followers on Twitter or 100, you're still influencing people and you're also influencing your personal network, right? And you know, people like this, like I have friends that vote, but they don't really follow anything, right? We have to make them look. We have to make Americans eat their civic vegetables. They're not going to watch
news. So then our job is then to inform our friends, the people on our timelines, using those communication tools to intentionally to make sure people hear about the threat to democracy. It can be very hard to talk about. So I'm so proud that Biden's willing to talk about fascism, that some of our country's most notable historians have been very, very vocal about the similarities between the modern Republican Party and a fascist movement. And I think it's important that people get over their fear of looking silly and start to explain to people what's happening within the Republican Party and what their plans are for America starting in 2025. They aren't shy about it. They wrote a whole manual from the Heritage Foundation for a transition into autocracy. It's called project 2025, The Manual for leadership. They're hiring young conservatives into a data bank that they plan on replacing all of our career merit based civil service employees with. They want to purge out the civil service, and once they do that stuff, they'll be able to consolidate power. So it really is time to panic. If we panic now, we might be able to prevent democratic catastrophe. If we wait until the democratic catastrophe is obvious to everyone, the lesson I learned from three years of studying the rise of the Nazis and other totalitarian regimes is that it's too late. You have to panic in advance. Very hard for humans to do so. It really takes everybody influencing their own sphere of influence. People are much more likely to trust people they know or are related to. So please use your own personal networks and make sure every voter that you can shows up to vote on Election day and votes a full D for democracy ticket.
Mila Atmos: [00:44:17] Yeah. Hear, hear. Good advice. You're so passionate. I love it. So looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:44:25] Whoohhh. Election results keep making me hopeful. Okay, you know, I say in the book, I'm just part of a bunch of people who are pushing the messaging and strategic machine forward. But we could have done all that work. And without the Dobbs repeal, I don't know that it would have still had the same effect in thwarting the red wave. So what makes me hopeful is this: we didn't run perfect strategy in 2022 everywhere, and we still did okay. But gives me hope is that we're going to have good strategy across the board in 2024. We're going to repudiate fascism at the ballot box. We're going to force the Republican Party to finally splinter, whatever, fall apart. It needs to do something because it used to be like our party, 70% establishment, 30% like progressive base type person. And in the Republican Party that has flipped in ten years. It is now majority base controlled. And that is why even with Mike Johnson, you
know, he can go one day killing border security for them and giving Ukraine to Putin. But the next day, if he doesn't toe the line on America's impeachment vote or whatever, the MAGA is right after him, threatening to vacate him, right? I mean, you don't want to be in a position where you have radicals in charge of your party. And unfortunately, the Republican Party has put us all in that position. So what gives me hope is that we'll win in 2024. We have to win the presidency, or I think the changes that are going to come are going to be fast and furious to how we operate in the US. Parchment only helps us if people are willing to abide by it. And unfortunately, all it takes is the willingness to say, I'm suspending the Constitution and a party willing to stand by and let him do it. And I think the Republican Party has demonstrated, especially with the reaction to Jan 6, that they are just the kind of party that would be willing to stand by and let somebody do that. So it's, uh, gives me hope that we're going to win in 2024 and that that will give us some momentum to start fixing our civic culture. Our civic culture has to be fixed. We cannot go on with a population that is too dumb for democracy.
Mila Atmos: [00:46:41] Amen. Yes. Well, that also makes me hopeful. Here's to winning in 2024 and fixing our civic culture. Rachel, thank you so much for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Rachel Bitecofer: [00:46:56] Oh, such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:46:58] Rachel Bitecofer is a political scientist and election forecaster turned political strategist, and the author of Hit 'Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Braxton Brewington. He's the press secretary of the Debt Collective and a PhD candidate in sociology at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Braxton Brewington: [00:47:28] People should have the choice to make on their own. If people want to pursue a type of career that requires a bachelor's degree or a master's degree, they should be able to do that. And if that's not something they want to do, then they don't have to do that. But education is a public good. And so if you believe that, then you probably quickly get to student debt relief. On top of that, it's just good for the economy.
Mila Atmos: [00:47:50] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
And before I go, first of all, thanks so much for listening. If you like this episode, you'll love what we have in store. Be sure to hit that follow button on Apple Podcasts or the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app, so you'll catch all of our upcoming episodes. Thank you! Oh, and please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an independent show like ours. It's the main way other people can find out about the show. We really appreciate your help. Thank you.
This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged. The Democracy Group: [00:48:48] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.