Lefty Coaster posted a diary on scholar and statistician Rachel Bitcofer’s startingly accurate predictions about the 2018 midterms here on July 1 (www.dailykos.com/...). It’s not too soon to revisit her work and check out what she has to say about 2020. AND pound home her message every damned day until next November.
This article on Salon.com by Paul Rosenberg is required reading for anyone on the left who still thinks that a moderate approach is what will shift our country out of the danger zone come next year’s elections.
www.salon.com/...
...newcomer Rachel Bitecofer, assistant director of the Judy Ford Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, released her prediction of a 42-seat "blue wave," while also citing the Arizona and Texas U.S. Senate races as “toss-ups.” Her startling prediction was numerically close to perfect; Democrats will end up with a gain of 40 or 41 seats, depending how the re-run in North Carolina's 9th district turns out. (Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won the Arizona Senate race, in a major historical shift, and Beto O'Rourke came close in Texas.) Furthermore, she even strutted a little, writing on Nov. 2 that she hadn't adjusted her seat count, but that “the last few months have been about filling in the blanks on which specific seats will flip.” Her resulting list of those was also close to perfect.
And yet the model that she used to make these predictions barely made a dent in the thinking of pundits and Democratic Party leadership alike. In fact, she was widely ignored.
One of the biggest problems she cites:
...the mistaken belief that Democrats won in 2018 by gaining Republican support (aka winning back "Trump voters") fuels an illusory search for an ill-defined middle ground that could actually demobilize the Democratic leaners and voters who actually drove last year's blue wave.
The problem with moderates:
...because Democrats have poor electoral strategy, they’re going to compound that problem, probably by not appealing to Democrats to get them to the polls. So no matter how moderate you keep your Blue Dogs' legislation, they’re all going to get wiped out anyway. So use your power where you have it. No. 2, there are ways to keep them in office, but the ways they’re choosing are not the ways to do it.
The problem with political junkies (such as Kos readers):
People reading your article, people following me on Twitter — we forget how atypical we are, even in terms of those who are going to vote in the Democratic primary. Primary voters are already more active and aware and more typically engaged than average Americans, but still not like us. They’re not paying attention at all, not watching the debates, they're not reading news stories, they're not on political Twitter, reading political news sites, but they will vote.
So multiple blue-check reporters on my feed have said, "Oh it's interesting that Bernie Sanders voters choose Biden for their second choice." No, that's not interesting at all. That's the only other person that voters have ever heard of. So the problem is the proliferation of analysis that's happened that's completely analyzing shit that's totally wrong. It’s in the data, okay? But it’s being driven by this name ID problem.
There’s a lot to chew on here. This woman can help us to understand what’s wrong with popular misconceptions about what went wrong in 2016 and how we can create a winning strategy for 2020, but only if we’re willing to admit what we were wrong about.
Again: this is an absolute MUST READ.