1. You also have to give them a landing. It's tempting, I know, to take the pent up rage out on the only ones who respond to you (like @ProjectLincoln!) or Never Trumpers like @RadioFreeTom or @BillKristol bc they were "guilty" in the past or "waited too long" like @WalshFreedom

2. but at each of the big inflection moments where Trump lost support I've begged non-Rs to consider the fact that if Trump supporters see that they have nowhere to go, they will stay w the only people that DO accept them, & the price might actually be the collapse of democracy
3. which, until Weds, some people thought I was being hyperbolic about. I WASN'T! When the MAINSTREAM of a major political party divorces themselves from democratic norms & values & its supporters turn to a fictionalized world to justify their political party's actions, your
4. country's stability is at risk & one by-product of poor messaging on the Dem side is that extremism on the Right was able to not only take root in the Rep Party, it was able to take OVER the R party & become the party's mainstream- pinnacled w the presidential win via the EC
5. of Donald Trump, w/o the GOP paying any electoral price for their extremism. A healthy Rep Party might have found the courage to reject Trump's nomination & accept the short term costs that would have come w refusing to endorse his 2016 candidacy. But the Rep Party of 2016
6. was already quite "ill" w polarization & hyperpartisanship & was winning elections despite their extremism, which was never highlighted as a campaign issue even while the still-mod Ds were being erroneously classified as a party of socialists & communists in an increasingly
7. strident & intense right-wing media environment that was also being echoed in GOP campaign materials. Together, this environment was radicalizing the GOP electorate- dehumanizing Democrats & artificially inflating the stakes of campaigns to the point that GOP voters began to
8. become increasingly radical. The chickens came home to roost in the 2016 Rep primary when Donald Trump decided to run. His candidacy tapped into all of the dark undercurrents GOP politicians, media figures, and campaign strategists had been playing w- a fire that burned out of
9. control bc party primaries attract very small electorates and thus can advantage more ideological candidates although traditionally- the best known, best financed candidates win. Trump was a celebrity, that was very imp to his success.
10. Ironically, it was a commitment to pluralism & democracy by party leaders in that cycle who felt that since the voters chose Trump, their choice had to be honored w the party's nomination even though our poll of VA Reps in April of 2016 found shockingly high receptivity
11. to a brokered convention- w somewhere near 50% of surveyed Rs supportive of it, & maybe even higher though I can't recall what the exact % was except that I was floored by it- it played a big role in my falling into the trap in '16 that Trump was such a threat to democracy
12. there might really be more than 10pts of crossover Rep voter support for the Dem ticket in VA (there wasn't though- in the end HRC received almost exactly the modal 10pts of R crossover vote here & it was the LAST time I ever believed in crossover voting >10pts in prez
13. elections aside potentially the weirdo states (WVA, MD, MA) & ever so slightly AZ, where we HAVE seen some >10pts crossover I suspect is due to McCain Rs but which has really only emerged post Trump's actual win. Having been studying polarization as a grad student & doing
14. my dissertation on polarization, along w other scholars I was watching polarization & hyperpartisanship tear through the GOP like a wildfire- seeing its moderate wing get completely wiped out in just a couple of election cycles via ideological primaries till the people being
15. called its moderates were the people that 2 cycles ago had wiped out the moderates! And political scientists, empowered w a amazing quant tool called NOMINATE were showing the world the asymmetry between Rs & Ds- the ideological purge was only happening on the Right
& now anyone can use the NOMINATE tool bc its been put into an easy app on a site called Vote View (I used to have to make little gifs w the raw data to show Congress moving apart which did make me look cool on the job market!). Voteview is an amazing tool- very user friendly
16. which I've posted often on here & am putting here again so you can check it out. I'm also showing you the distribution of members in the 103rd and 116th Congresses. Each dot represents a member of the House or Senate(red Rs, blue Ds) & you https://t.co/0FGUaFjhKe
17. can see how the members are distributed relative to each other very differently over the two+ decades (earlier decade on the right) You'll note the space in the middle where there are no dots have grown and that in the images on the left, the most current session of Congress,
18. there are red dots that touch the cap of the "egg" when there weren't ANY that did so (or even any in that area of the graph!) in the Congress from the 1990s. Generally, after the end of segregation in the South, we only interpret the left/right part of these graphs but you
19. might notice, there is variation of the members on a Y axis too and NOMINATE produces 2 measures of ideology for each member with the one running on the X axis understood to be the liberal/conservative dimension and the only one used. BUT bc the data includes all members
20. of Congress & all non-unanimous votes from the 1st Congress till the current day a 2nd dimension (Y axis) exists for everyone although the belief is that the Y axis is non-interpretable beyond 1960s when segregation ended & race stopped being an explicit issue coming before
21. Congress. Don't forget, until recently, the GOP was at least pretending to be racially liberal by voting en masse to renew the Voting Rights Act every time it came up & only when Trump came along did it move from dog whistle politics to full bullhorns on race & ethnicity
22.(though the dog whistles were PLENTY obvious to anyone that chose to see them). So, the Y axis placements are generally not interpreted but is included so it can be plotted. These 2 congresses are separated by about 25yrs but are WORLD's apart in terms of the
23. voting behavior of men & women serving in the House & Senate- which serves as a proxy for ideology here. NOMINATE is nice bc it doesn't do what the websites that attempt to classify members ideologically does which is to make subjective determinations regarding various votes,
24. often choosing particular bills to include. NOMINATE is not subjective- it includes ALL votes & the program doesn't even know its coding votes or legislators- all it sees is a series of 0s & 1s and is concerned w how those 0s & 1s interact w each other, spatially. Its really
25. smart! Whether its capturing member's sincere ideological preferences or not, one thing is clear, it documents significant behavior changes in our Congress over what we argue is the polarized era AND verifies that the change is primarily isolated in the GOP. I threaded on
26. today bc the super pac launches Monday and is focused on drawing attention to the radicalization of the Republican Party- from the top (electeds/leaders) the bottom (average Rep voters) & how that has destabilized democracy in the US- placing continued stability of democracy
27. at threat. BC Trump was assisted so widely with his effort to steal the 2020 election by his Rep Party peers- including congressional party leaders who went so far as to hold that charade of the certification of the EC vote under the false premise of potential election fraud
28. the threats we are facing will extend beyond Trump's tenure in office & will require Americans to be diligent and aggressive in fighting the GOP, trying to force the party back to the mainstream. Along w the pac, I'll be releasing an analysis of polarization via my @substack
29. @The__Cycle expands on the topic of this thread, shows that the Rep Party has polarized significantly over the past couple decades and is significantly more radical than the Dem Party. It is very important that the American public be brought up to speed as to what is at stake
30. in the 2022 midterms- winning 2020 will not be enough and people who wish to see America navigate this dreadful period need to buckle in- the work is just beginning. Happily, what we've seen from GA is the deep well of possibility!

More from Rachel "The Doc" Bitecofer 📈🔭🍌

Yes, actually that's kind of the problem these days.

All the 🔥takes will be shown to be wrong once the voter file data & analysis like this one w the FULL RESULTS get done, which is why I'VE NOT PUBLISHED MY 🔥TAKE IN NYT yet

We'll have to decide if we want it fast, or right


There is ONE STORY in elections right now and its education. Its not rural vs urban, or Black and White, Latino and White

Its educated versus non-educated

And its global

1. I'll add that it's very imp that Ds understand, crystal clear, this fact (that edu is the divide that rules all other divides). After Parscale's success in 2020 the GOP will now double down on their efforts to come after non-college educated, non-white voters bc now they KNOW

2. they're gettable. The 2018 and 2020 cycle were "feelers." No doubt donors and strategists were skeptical. Now they have the analytic proof and the $ will be flowing. This is one reason that I decided that I had to get into electioneering myself. Someone is going to need to be

3. there talking to these voters from the Left (and talking to them with effective messaging- for ex they don't give two shits about insider trading corruption) or you'll see even more erosion in the D's vote share among non-college educated non-white voters, I'm sure of it. Its
1. Friends, yesterday we released a sample ad of what how @StrikePac will message against the GOP. Frustratingly, voters were never approached which the frame of the Rep Party's collapse into extremism in the 2020 cycle aside from work from outside groups like @ProjectLincoln,


2. @MeidasTouch, @votevets & other "super pacs" which are essentially grassroots funded organizations that are making use of the "super pac" designation to electioneer. Organizing as a super pac actually affords groups a great deal of flexibility to perform pro-democracy work

3. so despite the "ewww, yuck!" factor of that designation, not all SP's are, in fact, evil entities (other than the fact that so many of you I wholly support a fully publicly funded system w very strict limits & honestly, a 30 day electioneering window per cycle which would

4. decimate a multi-billion $ industry BUT do a great deal of work to save our democracy & that type of system, by the way, is BY FAR, the norm among western democracies. Ours is literally the Wild West of electioneering systems and if there is 1 "fix all" reform that would have

5. the greatest & most immediate impact on pulling our democracy back from the precipice of our democracy it would be a fully publicly funded, tightly regulated election/campaigning system. We don't have one of those right now & if we ever want to reach the majorities that could
1. SO MUCH more than that. What Barr & the GOP pulled off w the release of the Mueller Report was demonstrated mastery of the American media & the news cycle.

They manipulated both brilliantly.

The reason reporters are conditioned to report a stalled bill as "Congress failing


2. to pass a covid relief bill"- the norm of objectivity- has allowed the RNC/GOP/Trump to develop a system to manipulate the media into doing their dirty work. But never have we seen it orchestrated so deliberately & cleanly as it was to neutralize the Mueller Report. By his

3. "Letter to Congress" where he intentional mispresented the findings of the report on 2 crucial areas- the investigation's conclusions regarding the activities of the Trump campaign and Russia and whether or not the President's actions to damage/disrupt the investigation

4. constitutes obstruction of justice, Barr & the GOP team understood that if the report was released, the media would likely get out on its own this meaning: Trump campaign's contacts with Russia did not rise to criminal charges and that Trump can not be charges w obstruction

5. while being president. BUT, by sending out this letter that interprets the report for the media in advance (well in advance!) of the actual report- Barr can instead tell the media a different narrative, far more favorable to Trump. These, of course, go on to become the

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