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

1. Yes, @FareedZakaria's new book, Ten lessons From a Post-Pandemic World argues we don't need a big or small gov- we need a GOOD one.

We don't have that now & that is bc for decades now, the GOP has intentionally hallowed it out. Stripping it of funding under the auspice that

2. the only goal should be small. And as it turns out- that was stupid. And now we have a dysfunctional, as @maddow says, "big, bad" gov. Something that has been "wasted, and rotted and ruined." And its been intentional. Its been murdered, with no thought for how people would

3. suffer for it. COVID just put that suffering in a streamlined spotlight. But as @FareedZakaria points out- its the cherry on top of a 40 year plan that Bannon termed the final "deconstruction of the administrative state." As with the decimation of the economic tools that had

4. allowed the world's 1st middle class to emerge & flourish before The Great Lie ushered in the greatest wealth transfer in history. Not only were Americans bamboozled into voting away their wage increases, their pensions, & their health care (at least till 2010)- they were also

5. tricked into pissing away their country's superiority- its claim to fame, its ability to puff its chest out & say "look over here, we have the best _____. " I had no idea when I was a kid that we were not, in fact, the greatest country on Earth- at least not if you care about

1. IMP ANNOUNCEMENT

I want to let you know when I made the decision to launch @StrikePac & directly get into electioneering I realized I wasn't going to continue issuing "race ratings" & "forecasts" each cycle- OBV that's a conflict of interest!

The hostility & sexism of

2. that world, I have to be honest, makes it very easy to walk away- the misogyny in the top tier of the election analysis community outside of @Center4Politics folks who are awesome & also more accurate than anyone else is intolerable. I'll still analyze politics, political

3. events, issue commentary, write articles, run the pod, go on TV, and generally succeed in ways that drive those men nuts but no, I won't be putting out ratings or "forecasts" anymore. Now, lots of people are asking me "what's going to happen in 2022?" The Midterm Effect, the

4. the long standing pattern of the president's party losing seats in the Midterm happens virtually every single cycle. I believe there are 2 recent exceptions: post-9/11 in the 2022 midterms and 1998 post-Lewinski gate. What I'm trying to do in building @StrikePac is completely

5. redesign/overhaul/modernize & reshape the way that Dems currently approach electioneering. I want to build a new organization with the funds capable of coming into cycle's like VA's 2021 cycle and the 2022 midterm cycle and start to deploy these new methodologies into the

1. When I hear @clairecmc talk about Dems learning to talk to the Piggly Wiggly crowd, I hope she'll want to join/help w my moderate messaging electioneering overall for Ds effort. BC its CRUCIAL to understand- Ds & outside groups tried already to cater to these voters on the

2. persuasion. That in fact, this cycle was the product of a very concerted effort of that strategy driven by high profile data firms on the D side (many of which who've been critical of my work) & it was a complete and total failure for 2 reasons. The main 1 is that it wants

3. to ignore the effect that polarization is having on voter behavior & the limitations that is placing on certain electioneering techniques that USED TO BE EFFECTIVE and are now not. I want to make something really clear- it is only in places where at least 1 element of the D's

4. operation "went rogue" that Biden pulled out wins: GA, where Abrams made electioneering about turning out the new coalition, AZ, where the AZ state party did the same, but with Latino voters, MI & WI where the state parties put into effect base-centric voter turnout strategies

5. at odds w the party's conventional playbook to focus on turnout, and/or places where concentrations of the D's new coalition: college-educated whites + minority voters (and young voters) are so high (like NE 2) that sub-par strategy doesn't matter, turnout surges are naturally