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An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter (Rachel Bitecofer)
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/06/rachel-bitecofer-profile-election-forecasting-new-theory-108944
Rachel Bitecofer’s radical new theory predicted the midterms spot-on. So who’s going to win 2020?
By DAVID FREEDLANDER
02/06/2020 05:09 AM EST
What if everything you think you know about politics is wrong? What if there aren’t really American swing voters—or not enough, anyway, to pick the next president? What if it doesn’t matter much who the Democratic nominee is? What if there is no such thing as “the center,” and the party in power can govern however it wants for two years, because the results of that first midterm are going to be bad regardless? What if the Democrats' big 41-seat midterm victory in 2018 didn’t happen because candidates focused on health care and kitchen-table issues, but simply because they were running against the party in the White House? What if the outcome in 2020 is pretty much foreordained, too?
To the political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, all of that is almost certainly true, and that has made her one of the most intriguing new figures in political forecasting this year.
Bitecofer, a 42-year-old professor at Christopher Newport University in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was little known in the extremely online, extremely male-dominated world of political forecasting until November 2018. That’s when she nailed almost to the number the nature and size of the Democrats’ win in the House, even as other forecasters went wobbly in the race’s final days. Not only that, but she put out her forecast back in July, and then stuck by it while polling shifted throughout the summer and fall.
And today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics. Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”
</snip>
Rachel Bitecofer’s radical new theory predicted the midterms spot-on. So who’s going to win 2020?
By DAVID FREEDLANDER
02/06/2020 05:09 AM EST
What if everything you think you know about politics is wrong? What if there aren’t really American swing voters—or not enough, anyway, to pick the next president? What if it doesn’t matter much who the Democratic nominee is? What if there is no such thing as “the center,” and the party in power can govern however it wants for two years, because the results of that first midterm are going to be bad regardless? What if the Democrats' big 41-seat midterm victory in 2018 didn’t happen because candidates focused on health care and kitchen-table issues, but simply because they were running against the party in the White House? What if the outcome in 2020 is pretty much foreordained, too?
To the political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, all of that is almost certainly true, and that has made her one of the most intriguing new figures in political forecasting this year.
Bitecofer, a 42-year-old professor at Christopher Newport University in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was little known in the extremely online, extremely male-dominated world of political forecasting until November 2018. That’s when she nailed almost to the number the nature and size of the Democrats’ win in the House, even as other forecasters went wobbly in the race’s final days. Not only that, but she put out her forecast back in July, and then stuck by it while polling shifted throughout the summer and fall.
And today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics. Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”
</snip>
Excellent read & I recommend following Rachel on Twitter @RachelBitecofer
34 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Very important in redistricting (and undoing all the damage DeLay did in the late 90's-early 2000's).
I just hope the census isn't fucked with too badly by Trump. 
Near as I can tell, they're all equally capable of doing that.
From the same article:
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.”
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.”
Nailed it!
She was something of an outsider from the start; she had grown up a Navy brat, mostly in the D.C. area, and spent her youth following the Grateful Dead and Widespread Panic, reading The New York Times in the parking lot between shows. She was living in Eugene, Oregon, a single mom at a dead-end administrative job at a Republican polling firm, when she heard Rachel Maddow on Air America mention her doctorate in political science.
“I was like, ‘Wait, you can study politics?’” she says. She enrolled in community college, then the University of Oregon, then on to the University of Georgia for a Ph.D., and was soon hired by Christopher Newport University to work in its public-policy division. (She has since been hired away by the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank based in Washington, D.C., while maintaining her academic post.)
“I was like, ‘Wait, you can study politics?’” she says. She enrolled in community college, then the University of Oregon, then on to the University of Georgia for a Ph.D., and was soon hired by Christopher Newport University to work in its public-policy division. (She has since been hired away by the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank based in Washington, D.C., while maintaining her academic post.)
I mean, I don't know
