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On The Cycle, nationally-recognized election analyst and political strategist Rachel Bitecofer brings a rare fusion of data-based political analysis & cutting edge commentary. Get a backstage pass to the frontlines of the war to save American democracy.

Friends,

This will have to be short as I am just barely recovering from the 2nd worst disease I have ever experienced in my life: vertigo.

Since Monday morning after I sent the memo I’ve literally been flat on my back wishing to die.

Head spinning is the one thing I hate the most which is why I have never been a drinker.

So I apologize about the distribution of services this week.

Obviously I’m horrified about what happened to our friends in Minnesota and that over the course of 3 days on my back Dummy Don has been working hard to start WWIII.

As I told twitter today, Trump ran as the No Wars candidate and so did someone else.

You guessed it: Adolph Hitler

Now onto the stat: its a couple days old but given recent events I doubt its improving and along with the No Kings movement, its a good sign that normal people are starting to wake up to the shit show that is Trump 2.0

OK, that’s all I can handle for the day. I’m very weak.

Love you all, stay strong, keep fighting!

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This weekend, America took a long look at the idea of a dictator’s birthday parade—and said: hell no.

Across the country, the No Kings Day rallies reminded us what resistance looks like.

From San Diego to Charlotte, people showed up with cardboard crowns, upside-down flags, and enough “Fuck Around and Find Out” energy to short-circuit Truth Social

Because let’s be honest: Trump’s birthday parade was always for him. It wasn’t about veterans. It wasn’t about the troops. It was about cosplaying Caesar with tanks rolling through DC while he watched from a balcony like Mussolini, bloated with power and possibly also cake.

And in true Trumpian fashion, his most loyal followers got their military parade—and the realization that their king has no crowd. In fact, there was more crowd control than there was crowd!

Meanwhile, No Kings Day packed city after city with people saying what the press still won’t: we are not sleepwalking into fascism—we are racing toward it in a MAGA golf cart.

And now, as the echo of protest chants fades into the new week, the question becomes: what’s next?

Keep the Fire Lit 🔥

These rallies weren’t a one-off. They were the starter pistol, not the finish line. So let’s be real:

The media can’t save us.
The courts can’t save us.
And the Democratic Party? Well… I’m still working on that.

If you showed up this weekend, stay loud. Stay organized. Make “No Kings” not just a chant—but a campaign. A movement. A voter guide. A damn T-shirt line.

And maybe, on the 4th of July, the last time we vanquished a king.

And Now, In This Week’s Episode of “Trump Screws His Own Base”…

On Friday, Donald Trump hit send on this masterpiece of a truth bomb (see below), claiming his immigration policy was never meant to deport the good ol’ workers and farmers—just the criminals. You know, the imaginary hordes Stephen Miller dreams about when he’s not polishing jackboots.

“In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good.”

— Donald J. Trump, 06/14/24

You can practically hear Stephen Miller’s blood pressure spike.

Because here’s the deal: while Trump plays populist karaoke for his base, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn are the ones holding the deportation whip. They’re deporting everyone. Field workers. Line cooks. Abuelas, Housekeepers. Even MAGA-voting immigrants who thought the red hat came with job security.

And now? Trump’s business base is turning on him for saying the quiet part out loud: they need the labor.

Call it what it is: the fascist feedback loop just glitched.

Bottom Line

No King’s Day was a reminder that Americans still know how to say hell no to tyranny. But Trump’s immigration blunder reminds us why staying mobilized matters:

He’s not just coming for Biden voters.

He’s coming for his own voters too.

So this week, keep shouting. Keep organizing. And above all—remember there’s no such thing as neutral when the parade floats are being pulled by tanks.

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Folks,

Today we’re living history with Joe Walsh—-Tea Party congressman to Never Trump activist, to an card carrying Democrat!!

I’m excited to announce that last week Joe decided to put a ring on it and officially become a Democrat.

And here is one thing that makes him a fairly unique Democrat, the very kind we desperately need: he’s a fighter.

I hope you’ll agree with me, these the days for heroes and I for one and ecstatic to add Joe and his arsenal of rhetorical weapons to the party.

In fact, I welcome everyone to go read through some of the content on Joe’s Substack The Social Contract with Joe Walsh.

The Republican Party’s propaganda machine has done an excellent job of defining democrats, a party dominated by moderates, as a party of extremists.

There is nothing more extreme than pretending an election was stolen and then trying to sick a mob on the Capitol to violently seize power after his party-wide coup plan failed.

Now, if you are member of Joe’s audience, and not mine, I am a former political scientist turned political analyst/strategist who has devoted her entire life to trying to get Democrats to make electoral war, not love. You can check out my work and order by book at here.

Ok, back to this Living History episode. Living History is based on the idea that the present now will later be past. Future historians will be writing books about what we’re living through RIGHT NOW. So its important to both record and make history ourselves right now.

When the books get written about America in the early 21st century, lets make sure the books are about the true Patriots who stood up to stop fascism.

-Rachel

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Folks,

You might have noticed I missed STATS of the Week yesterday so you are getting it today and I’ll drop episode 2 of Living History, which I have to tell you was pure 🔥on Sunday.

Don’t miss it!!

Anyway, I’m not going to let a little thing like a migraine or the assault of a senator deprive you of some very good information about where public opinion currently stands.

The most recent Quinnipiac poll was TERRIBLE for Trump across the board but above I have highlighted just how far underwater he is on issues he should be dominating like the economy.

BUT THAT”S NOT ALL!

Voters HATE the Big Ugly Bill and have 0 desire to gut Medicaid, Social Security or Medicare.

Voters be like ain’t nobody got time for that!

And Elon?! The reason Trump dumped Elon is because after the Wisconsin Supreme Court Trump figured out the Elon is political kryptonite. It may not be a stretch to call him the most hated man in America.

Trump thinks by sowing chaos on cosplaying martial law voters will reward him, but recent data from the YouGov/Economist poll suggests otherwise.

Even Trump’s own people don’t want to deport otherwise law abiding illegal immigrants and especially find the idea of deporting Dreamers.

That said, if we ever want the general public to see Trump ripping families and businesses apart, WE (Democrats in elections) have to bring it to them in the form of ads.

We see this is video after video on socials, people who voted for Trump only to find out their abuela is deported or that they can’t staff their businesses anymore.

Hypothetical ideas such as fixing healthcare and deporting illegal immigrants often poll much better than the actual politics they produce and these numbers suggest that as more immigration raids occur, public opinion can easily turn against Trump.

That’s why he needs chaos in major cities. And although obviously I find the deployment of the national guard and marines into LA abhorrent I want to point out that Trump really fucked it up. By moving too quickly he killed off his chaos narrative and appeared to overreact. If they were smart they would have let LA go for days.

In fact, yesterday Trump dropped a BOMB on MAGA by issuing this statement:

“Our great farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote. “That is not good…Changes are coming!”

let me tell you. I was monitoring MAGA is real time, as I am wont to do, and MAGA absolutely lost their shit over this post.

A small silver lining I know, but its one I wanted you to have going into your weekend.

Finally, there is one other important thing to highlight from the Quinnipiac poll.

Just 21% of Democrats approve of the job congressional Democrats are doing.

I want to make the reason CYRTSAL CLEAR

Democrats want the party to meet the moment. They want you to treat the emergency we are in as an emergency.

Until and unless Democrats follow Gavin Newsom’s lead on taking the fight right at Trump, don’t expect the party’s base to come home.

Finally, a personal appeal from me. We are working hard to spread the word about The Cycle so it can grow and need YOUR help!

Would you consider sending The Cycle to your friends, families and networks? Did you know you can even buy people gift subscriptions?! That’s an awesome way to attract more Cyclers!

See you on Sunday!

Rachel

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This week we bring you into the strategy driving Trump’s decision to send the National Guard and the marines into LA. Rachel compares the fiery I.C.E. protests with how the Nazis rose to power in 1930s Germany, plus how does Elon’s and Don’s Big Beautiful Breakup threaten the President’s tax cuts for billionaires? We also unpack the DOJ’s fishy case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

LINKS:

Newsom to Defense Secretary Hegseth: Rescind National Guard Order
LA Protesters Angry w/ Mayor Karen Bass & Governor Gavin Newsom
Justice Department documents re: Kilmar Abrego Garcia
The Cycle Monday Memo: Something Wicked This Way Comes (Substack)
POLITICO: ‘You essentially destroyed any chance I have,’ DNC chair told David Hogg in private meeting
Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game

Folks,

Shit has hit the fan in LA and other Blue cities as the realities of rounding up millions of people, many of whom have lived in the U.S. for years or came as children and have grown up American begin to take root.

For those of us who’ve spent the last 6 months discussing how Trump would use mass deportations to create chaos is the Blue states and then use that chaos as an excuse to declare a national emergency and seize total power, things are right on schedule.

Although MAGA seems to think Democrats created the illegal immigration problem, the issues with illegal immigration dates back decades and is a byproduct of decisions made by the last 8 or 9 presidents combined.

Here’s the truth they don’t teach in high school civics or scream about on Fox News: America didn’t always have a “border crisis.”

For decades—especially through the 1940s and 1950s—the U.S.-Mexico border was open in a practical sense. Workers flowed in from Mexico to pick crops, build railroads, do the hard labor Americans didn’t want, then flowed right back home at the end of the day or the season.

It was fluid. Informal. Human. We didn’t care—until we did. What changed?

America decided to close the border. No, not to “protect jobs” or “secure the nation.” We did it because the politics changed. We shut the door on circular migration, criminalized the same movement that had once been encouraged, and froze a system that had worked, not perfectly, but functionally. That’s how you end up with 11 million undocumented immigrants—because once you can’t go home and come back, you just stay.

So now it’s the 1980s, and surprise—Reagan looks around and sees the logical result of that closure: a massive undocumented population that’s woven into the American economy. What’s he supposed to do? Deport 11 million people at gunpoint? Turn Los Angeles and Chicago into war zones? Even the Gipper knew better.

So he did the thing that today’s Republicans would call treason: he gave them amnesty. Legal status. A path to citizenship. Because deep down, everyone knew the alternative was chaos—and here we are in 2025, watching ICE raids light up immigrant neighborhoods in Los Angeles and across blue states, watching protests erupt, watching the country act shocked that people don’t want their families ripped apart over a broken system we created.

We built the crisis. We pulled the rug out on circular migration, then scapegoated the people who were caught in the middle. And now we’re still paying the price—for our fear, our politics, and our own historical amnesia.

And worse, we may see mass deportations and the blow back to mass deportations exploited in Trump’s stated efforts to create a one party autocracy.

Nothing provides cover better than civil unrest and as much as MAGA will call the protestors and especially the rioters Democrats, the truth is that many of the people who are citizens on the streets are not political. They are responding to a political event but they are not “the resistance.” They are regular people, some of who likely voted for Trump.

And although liberals like to pretend otherwise, we are not going to see protests in the style of the Women’s Marches with funny signs and pink pussy hats. Instead we are going to see rioting similar that of the late 60s after the assassinations of MLK Jr and Malcom X.

Rioting that affirms Trump’s message that America is facing an “invasion.”

Violence in the streets means we’re hitting a critical juncture we knew was coming months ago. Trump has been quick to seize on the violence in LA by nationalizing the CA National Guard and sending them in to the city with Governor Newsom’s permission.

As much as WE know Trump is the one that kicked the hornet’s nest how will the tuned out masses of America see it?

We’ll find out.

Things are dark, but here’s a little light.

Rachel

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Folks!

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Living History pod. I’m excited to bring you this unique conversation with Don Lemon, former anchor at CNN but current anchor of his new independent media project The Don Lemon Show on YouTube.

And Don is covering all his new media bases, offering his content via youtube, X, Bluesky, Insta, and Subtack.

The premise of the show is that we’re living through extraordinary times, a time period future historians will write books about.

Thus, it behooves us all to keep records of what it was like to live through this, from a variety of different perspectives: journalists, authors, politicians, and others who each bring their own distinct perspectives to assess what we’re seeing under Trump 2.0.

The present now, will later be past. Its important that we capture this moment in time.

We’re living history.

Rachel

PS: I hope you enjoy this free premier of Living History!

If you like the concept of the show, let me know what you think in the comments.

Want these interviews to run a full hour or do you like the 30 minute format?

Do you have people you’d like me to bring on to the show? Let me know!

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The honeymoon is over folks!

I am jettisoning the STAT(S) of the week post this week to bring you into the still unfolding Civil War between Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

For those of you with busy lives, let me bring you up to speed on the last couple of days.

As you know, on This is America, we highlighted Elon’s weird interview where he announced he was quitting political spending and seemed unwilling to discuss politics with CBS.

Yesterday, Elon finally blew his vow of silence, tweeting out that Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill adds trillions in new debt and that anyone who voted for it should be kicked out the the Republican Party.

Predictably, Trump didn’t like that much.

So the bromance is over, imploding in real time over on the platform that shall not be named.

I’ll let the other outlets cover the circus elements of this ongoing break up so be sure to go get your schadenfreude on.

Here, we’re going to focus on the implications of the end of Elon and Trump’s partnership because it is a majorly good development for those of us interested in keeping America from collapsing into fascist autocracy.

I have mentioned before even having Elon exit state left was great news for us, but a messy divorce?

Well, that could change everything.

Especially because Elon is already tweeting out shit like this:

I have been gleefully cheering him on, suggesting he go form his own political party. Would be a real shame for Republicans if that was to happen. A real shame.

So, be sure to do everything you can to encourage Elon to turn his eye of Sauron on The Don.

Not only may we end up in a 2026 scenario where a major player (and his money) have removed themselves from the game, now we might even see Elon actively undermine Republicans up and down the ballot.

I would forfeit every Christmas gift I get from now to the end of time if we could only get Elon spending and working against Trump.

But wait….because it gets even better!!

By turning against the Big Ugly Bill Elon has put Republicans in a clusterfuck of a bind and I want to be sure you get to enjoy it as much as I do.

Here’s why: It is starting look like there is a real chance the Republican majority, despite control of the House, Senate, and the presidency may never be able to pass a spending bill.

Here’s why:

Team Trump understands that this is only piece of legislation Trump has that only has to get 50 votes in the senate.

Hence, his preference for “one big beautiful bill.”

The only way he can deliver on multiple fronts is in one combined bill. For example the GOP’s 1,000 Well, We’re All Gonna Die bill has a ton of extra shit in it aside from the billionaire tax cuts which are the heart of their spending bill.

The smart Trumper’s know and understand this:

What team Elon is asking for (multiple skinny bills) would leave Republicans unable to pass most of their policy goals because there is no way any of this gets past the Senate filibuster.

But Elon, Rand Paul, and Ron Johnson can’t be reasoned with. This time that’s a good thing for democracy.

So we have a situation where half of MAGA is fighting to pass a Big Beautiful omnibus bill and half is fighting against it.

As I noted on This is America, the Big Ugly Bill was facing steep odds in the Senate before the events of the last 24 hours. I can’t see it passing now.

And guess what? Republicans only have to September at best to pass something to deal with the next debt limit deadline.

Its not impossible that we could end up in an August with Republicans unable to pass something as the clock runs out on the debt ceiling. We would then see Republicans shut down a government they have complete control of.

Its been a dark few months so savor this moment which may prove pivotal to the pro-democracy effort.

More in the Monday Memo!

Rachel

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This week Rachel and Aaron follow Elon “Black Eye” Musk out the door as he whines about the American political system he destroyed. Plus: cracks in the ice when it comes to criticizing Donald Trump and the Big Ugly Bill, a weird reminder of death from a U.S. Senator (and a weirder “apology”). What happens when you call a fascist… a fascist? And we take a hard look at the Great Replacement Theory through the lens of Tucker Carlson.

LINKS:

New York Times: On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama
Associated Press: Musk put a spotlight on federal spending, but cut less than he wanted
Elon Musk interview on CBS This Morning
Sen. Rand Paul on Face the Nation
Sen. Joni Ernst: “We’re all going to die”
Ernst makes sarcastic “apology” in graveyard
Woman calls out Rep. Mike Flood as a fascist
Trump confronted by TACO Theory
Tucker Carlson interview with Canadian MP Maxime Bernier
Trump throws 500-word hissyfit about Leornard Leo and the Federalist Society
The Cycle on Subtack
Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game

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ICYMI: The Cycle is now publishing five days a week.

Paid subscribers get strategy breakdowns, live briefings, exclusive interviews, and election analysis you can’t find anywhere else—starting this week!

Hey folks,

BIG NEWS: The Cycle is moving to a five-day-a-week publication schedule for paid subscribers.

Mondays: The Monday Memo (free)
Tuesdays: This is America Pod (free)
Wednesdays: Live Chat with Rachel at 4pm pacific time (Insiders only)
Thursday: STAT(S) of the Week Analysis (Insiders only)
Friday: The Living History Pod (Insiders only)

Speaking of the Living History Pod, I’m excited to announce a new format for my conversational pods with various movers and shakers called Living History. The premise of the show is that the present now will later be past and that we are, in fact, living through one of the most interesting and perilous times in human history. Yeah us!!

Don’t worry—if you’re a free subscriber, you’ll still receive plenty of content, including the Monday Memo and access to the This Is America podcast, which I hope you agree has been a smashing success!

That said, this is a GREAT time to consider an upgrade to a paid subscription and join The Cycle Insider’s Club.

Cycle Insiders receive: * The Monday Memo from Rachel * This is America Pod * STAT(S) of the Week * The Living History Pod * Substack Chats and Lives * Special Content

Cycle Insiders will also get exclusive access to my election analysis work which will be featured in Thursday’s STATS(S) of the Week. Along with national politics I will be analyzing this year’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania which I expect to produce massive “Trump Effects” both on turnout and on the vote choice of swing voters as well as the 2026 Midterms. .

AND THAT”S NOT ALL!

I’m making a BIG ADDITION to The Cycle team. I’m excited to announce that as part of this expansion Jennifer Brown, formerly of the Don Lemon Show on CNN, is coming on board as a producer for The Cycle. Jennifer is madly talented and has decades of experience connecting newsmakers with media analysts so I’m beyond excited about the caliber of guests we will be bringing onto The Cycle as we progress.

NOTE:

If you are already a paid subscriber, thank you for your support growing The Cycle. It wouldn’t and couldn’t exist without you. All paid subscribers will automatically be converted to The Cycle’s Insider Club. If you are a free subscriber that likes The Cycle please consider putting a ring on it so you can be an Insider too!

Want to be a Cycle Insider? Go paid!!

Become a Cycle Insider by converting to a paid subscription right here 👇

P.S. Our first Cycle Insider-only live chat is happening this WEDNESDAY at 4pm PST—be there or be square.

-Rachel

Here’s the good news: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s disastrous exchange Tuesday with Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire got lots of news coverage.

If you missed it, Hassan asked Noem to define the writ of habeas corpus (the right of due process enshrined in the U.S. Constitution). Noem simply didn’t—and probably still doesn’t—know.

The Cycle- On Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

She incorrectly answered by saying habeas corpus is “a right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.” NO. That’s laughably untrue. Look, I don’t expect all Americans to know their basic civics, but we should all expect secretaries who oversee entire departments of the most powerful government on earth to know what is—and isn’t—in our own Constitution. Noem swore an oath to protect and defend it, for chrissakes!

So of course Noem’s idiotic answer made headlines. And any headline that cuts through the noise and chaos of Trump’s intentional “flood the zone” strategy is a headline Americans ought to understand.

The bad news? Plenty of mainstream news organizations—even ones that should damn well know better—failed the simple task of writing a fair headline that accurately summarized what Noem just proved to America, and what American citizens urgently need to know: Kristi Noem is an unqualified moron who dangerously doesn’t know fundamental Constitutional rights.

That’s it!

That’s the only takeaway from this story that truly matters. Sure, “unqualified moron” is loaded language that a news editor would probably never allow. But no matter how you slice it, it’s as true as gravity pulling down, and too many legacy media organizations failed to convey this plain truth.

Take the world’s largest news-gathering organization, The Associated Press. This is the AP’s headline:

Yikes. Technically that’s accurate. But wtf? This headline, published on the websites of countless AP-member newsrooms across the world, does not convey the objective fact that Noem is WRONG. And that really, really matters. Noem is one of the most influential “leaders” of our government, and her moronic answer makes it clear she has no fucking clue what she’s doing. AP: You get an F for this headline.

Remember, most Americans skip reading political news stories altogether—at least in a meaningful way. The only news about the death of American democracy they get is from the headlines their friends might share on social media, or that become punchlines on late-night TV. As an editor and former TV news producer, I’ve written countless headlines. Twenty years and two Trump administrations later, I’ve had it with media organizations that still believe they need to truthwash their headlines in what is now a laughable effort to appear objective.

The problem, as I hope to show you here, is that truthwashing headlines isn’t just bad journalism; it’s dangerous for our democracy. To be clear, I only expect fairness and accuracy from the news media. But as we detailed in our book Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts, lots of news organizations worry about telling the full truth because doing so might seem like they’re taking a political side. This results in unfair overcompensation, usually giving more weight to the political Right. News outlets think they appear objective, but news consumers get screwed out of getting the truths they need to keep our democracy functioning.

After seeing the AP’s crappy headline, I looked up other mainstream media headlines for this particular story, and I assigned them grades. The idea here isn’t to change the media (if only I had that much power!). The idea is for folks to process the rainbow of political headlines with a more critical eye—for you to hold your own news sources to the highest standards possible. Words are powerful, and they matter, especially in political news headlines.

First, let’s get this out of the way: Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t find any coverage of Noem’s exchange with Hassan in the premier organizations of the rightwing media ecosystem, which delivers what it says is news to millions of Americans. I found nothing from Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, NewsMax or One America News. That’s a whole different problem, but we shouldn’t consider them “news” organizations anyway.

Now onto the Noem headlines and my grades for them. And, wearing my editor hat, I added my own comments.

Grade: F (FAIL)The Associated Press: Kristi Noem says habeas corpus lets Trump ‘remove people from this country’

Buries lede & lacks critical context. Headline must convey fact that Noem is wrong

Breitbart News: US Immigration chief mistakes key legal term at Congress hearing

Improper use of “mistakes”—implies harmless ignorance. Props to rightwing Breitbart for even covering though

CBS: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem asked what habeas corpus is in Senate hearing

Who cares what she was asked? Headline should reflect how she answered!

The Economic Times: Kristi Noem spars with Senate Comm on 'Habeas Corpus' issue**

Don’t use “spars”—implies that news is the exchange itself and not Noem’s wrong answer

The Hill: Hassan, Noem lock horns over habeas corpus**

“Locking horns” isn’t the news here; the news is that a sitting secretary doesn’t know Constitution or basic civics. Also, “locked horns” can imply a stalemate. F-Minus. Go back to Journalism School!

NBC News: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem struggles to define habeas corpus at Senate hearing

Wrong verb. Noem didn’t “struggle;” she answered with arrogant confidence and was simply wrong

Newsweek: Kristi Noem's 'Habeas Corpus' Response to Senators Raises Eyebrows**

WHY WERE EYEBROWS RAISED? Because she was laughably wrong! Fix headline to convey

New York Daily News: Kristi Noem appears not to know what ‘habeas corpus’ means**

No. Inaccurate use of “appears.” Video of exchange reveals she clearly did not know. Our job is not to give powerful people benefit of doubt

Grade: D (FAIL)HuffPost: Democratic Senator Totally Schools Kristi Noem Over This Key Constitutional Right

Noted attempt at clickbait, but the news isn’t about Noem being “schooled”; it’s about the reason Noem was schooled: she is a moron and unqualified for this job

Mother Jones: Does Kristi Noem Even Know What Habeas Corpus Is?**

No. That’s pretty fucking clear to anyone with eyes and ears. D-Minus. Almost gave you an F. Avoid rhetorical questions as headlines

NPR: DHS secretary misstates meaning of habeas corpus under Senate scrutiny

Improper verb. “Misstates” implies harmless ignorance. She is a sitting secretary who should know better. Use more accurate verb, like “incorrectly defines”

Grade: CCNBC: Noem says Trump can deport who he wants, botches what ‘habeas corpus’ means

Buries lede. Avoid double clauses. Switch clauses at least. Also, headline doesn’t indicate their assertion is wrong.

Politico: Noem defends potentially suspending habeas corpus, flubs definition as Trump’s right to ‘remove people**

Buries lede; switch clauses at least (better yet, avoid double clauses)

Grade: B

For these headlines: The verbs fumble, flub and botch are getting warmer and they’re common headline words, but they connote harmless ignorance, a mistake, or an accident. A football player fumbles a ball after catching it. It’s clear Noem never even caught the ball. Gary Johnson’s famous “What is Aleppo?” moment was a flub. Of course he knew Aleppo was a Syrian city, but in the format of a live interview his brain was trying to process what he initially thought was an unfamiliar acronym. Johnson’s was a consequential mistake, but not nearly as serious as Noem not knowing the Constitution. That’s not a mistake; it’s a disaster. Better verbs: incorrectly defines, fails, flunks

ABC: Kristi Noem fumbles habeas corpus, denies DHS will host citizenship TV showAxios: Noem botches habeas corpus questions at Senate hearing*New York Post: Kristi Noem flubs habeas corpus in Senate hearing, calls it Trump’s right to ‘remove people from this country’PBS: Noem fumbles definition of Habeas CorpusUSA Today: Kristi Noem botches definition of 'habeas corpus' at Senate hearing*Washington Post: Kristi Noem botches the definition of habeas corpus in Senate hearing**Grade: A

These headlines are all fair, objective and accurate!

BBC: Kristi Noem incorrectly defines 'habeas corpus' in Senate hearingCNN: Noem incorrectly says habeas corpus allows Trump ‘to remove people from this country’MSNBC (Maddow Blog): Kristi Noem flunks an important test on the basic meaning of habeas corpusNew York Times: Noem Incorrectly Defines Habeas Corpus as the President’s Right to Deport People*Grade: A+Daily Beast: ICE Barbie Offers Her Own Made-Up Definition of Habeas Corpus*The Cycle- On Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This week Rachel and Aaron translate Trump’s Marie Antoinette “Let Them Eat Tariffs" moment. Plus, an alarming shakeup in the national intelligence community with echoes from history. In Trump’s DOJ if you can’t charge ‘em, shame ‘em.

LINKS:

Trump post: Wal-Mart should ‘EAT THE TARIFFS’
Associated Press: Gabbard fires 2 top intelligence officials and will shift office that preps Trump’s daily brief
NBC’s Meet the Press: Interview with Mike Pence (May 18, 2025)
Fox: Sunday Morning Futures: Interview with Kash Patel & Dan Bongino (May 18, 2025)
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins on Trump banner
NBC News: DOJ 'weaponization' group will shame individuals it can't charge with crimes
CNN: James Comey’s ‘weird’ social media approach lands him in hot water
VIDEO: Rep. Swalwell presses HS Secretary Noem on doctored photo
The Cycle on Subtack: Trump's Executive Orders Serve One Sinister Purpose
Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game

My conversation with Richard Hanania, author of The Origins of Woke and contributor on Project 2025 is one of the most important conversations I’ve had on this show.

Important for you and important for his audience too.

If you want to know why I say that, you’ll have to give it a listen because I’m way too smart to lay it out here for you!

You’ll learn from the conversation Hanania’s break with the Trump Cult over the insanity of DOGE and Trump’s tariffs has produced a predictable backlash from MAGA.

There is only one rule of MAGA Fight Club and its never, ever insult the boss or admit he’s wrong.

Last week Hanania put up a really compelling article on his own Substack you can find right here titled: What I Got Wrong About Trump.

Again as a political behaviorist, let me reiterate that two things are particularly hard psychologically for anyone to do (and most can’t do at all) and those two things are:

admitting you got something wrong
Breaking with your own “tribe” to do so.

Show Richard Hanania some grace folks, and give his mea culpa a read:

Richard Hanania's NewsletterWhat I Got Wrong about TrumpI’ve been doing something of a media tour on my Trump regret. See The New York Times, Breaking Points, Destiny, and Vox/NPR. As we approach Trump’s 100-day mark, it feels like I should explain in a more comprehensive way why I believe things have gone so poorly, how I was wrong, and how this experience will influence how I see the world going forward. T…Read more2 months ago · 391 likes · 197 comments · Richard HananiaGet content you won’t find anywhere else.

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Many times I’ve asked you to imagine what it would be like, what your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about contemporary America would be like, if you were one of the 100 million plus Americans who can’t name their own state’s senators.

Vox dropped a recent piece that is firewalled, but I want you to read this short excerpt from their reporting:

Now, don’t focus on the particular demographics of this particular disenchanted voter.

She could be anyone: a man, a woman, old, young, Black or White. Believe it or not, there are even college educated Americans who have this kind of limited, simplistic frame for interpreting political events.

Anyhoo, that is a long wind up to get to what I want to talk to you about today which is the sensitivity of the low information public to lies intended to radicalize them.

Team Trump has a shrewd strategy to use obviously illegal executive orders to prepare the MAGA base for rebellion when they are inevitably struck down.

An important concept from Introduction to American Government courses is something called the Expectations Gap.

The Expectations Gap refers to the gap between what a president must promise to win election (especially to win their party’s nomination) and what he or she can actually deliver through a system intentionally designed to make governing very hard.

Unless a president is extraordinarily lucky, like FDR who governed through two crises and used both to reshape the size and scope of government, a president is doomed to over promise and under deliver. All of them.

And that is during the best of times.

These are not the best of times.

Back in late 2009, early 2010, Republicans developed a keen strategy to try to make Barack Obama a one term president. That strategy was designed to increase the expectations gap by purposefully obstructing major legislation to deny Obama legislative wins.

Its a strategy that benefitted Republicans politically so much, it became their go-to strategy throughout the full 8 years of Obama and for 4 years of Joe Biden, with one recent exception: Biden’s Infrastucture bill.

They architects of the GOP’s opposition strategy had no idea at the time, but their strategy to starve the public of good government went on to play a key role in creating both the MAGA movement (right wing populism) and the Bernie Sanders movement (left wing populism).

When people see their government can’t deliver solutions to their problems (or are told hyperbolic lies like Death Panels) they go a little crazy. And as demonstrated above, few voters have the sophistication to understand that Barack Obama failed to deliver on immigration reform because the Republican House simply refused to allow a vote on it.

For most voters, Obama promised to deliver immigration reform and he failed.

Its just as simple as that.

So here we are in 2025 reaping what was sowed in the 2010s, and its a bad crop indeed.

That said, its about to get a lot worse.

Since the start of Trump 2.0, Team Trump has been very busy, but not at making new legislation. In fact, despite unified control of government, the 119th Congress has been even less production than the 118th session, which played out during divided government.

Republicans are such a hot mess they can’t even seem to pass Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill out of a committee.

But ask your average MAGA and they'll tell you Trump’s first 100 days have been transformational.

It certainly has been transformation in terms of corrupting the rule of law and institutionalizing gross corruption.

But what MAGA is referring to are Trump’s executive orders and all the great stuff he’s “delivered” for America through them.

From caps on prescription drugs, to promises to purge schools and universities of liberals, to deportations of “illegals” to gulags, Trump’s base has spent the same 4 months we’ve spent horrified, reveling in all of Trump’s “victories.”

There’s just one problem: most of the executive orders Trump has issued to “finally achieve results for the American people” are illegal. Some are so grotesquely illegal they have Supreme Court justices gasping at the lunacy of the arguments coming out of what were once well-respected government lawyers.

MAGA doesn’t know it yet, but most of Trump’s executive orders will never have the force of law. They will die quick deaths by a judiciary that overall seems inclined to protect the Constitution’s separation of powers system and maintain the power of the courts to review and determine the legality of actions taken by the Congress, the President, and the states.

Unfortunately, Team Trump has been radicalizing the MAGA base for weeks in terms of the legitimacy of the courts.

From the Lord of the Shadows Stephen Miller to Puppy Killer Kristi Noem, MAGA has been hard at work convincing their base that the courts have no authority to decide if a president’s actions are legal and thus should be ignored if they rule against the MAGA agenda.

For those of us whose jobs it are is to monitor the pig trough that is online MAGA, we’ve seen hundreds of tweets from MAGA influencers repeating one talking point: the courts are acting unconstitutionally to destroy Trump’s agenda.

That brings us back to Sharita White.

When Team Trump decides to ignore the “unconstitutional” Supreme Court and go rogue, millions of Americans will get Big Mad.

When Trump tells them the Supreme Court is making an unconstitutional power grab, they will believe him just as they believed him in 2020 about election fraud despite it being an obvious and easily disprovable lie.

When Donald Trump tells his base to ignore the courts, it undermines the rule of law—the foundational principle that no one is above it. It sets a dangerous precedent where political loyalty trumps legal authority, edging the country closer to authoritarianism and civil unrest.

And its all by design.

Do you appreciate my fusion of political science, history, economics, and public opinion? Consider becoming a paid subscriber!

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Note from Rachel:

For the second time I’ve invited a guest author onto The Cycle because he has very important information to convey to you.

As you know, I am working hard to get more directly involved in shaping the party’s strategic posture going forward. A large part of that work involves getting Democrats on offense about the Republican Party’s dismal record on the economy since they implemented Project 1980 (otherwise known as Reaganomics). “Voodoo Economics” (nicknamed that by one, George Bush Senior because he was quite correctly pointing out that if you cut revenue, you get deficits and boy was he ever right) which depressed wages for the middle class, crushed upward mobility, and destroyed small town America.

Those of you who have been on this journey the whole time with me might remember when I launched Strike PAC (some of you no doubt contributed to that effort, thank you, your investment helped me get to this point) which I wanted to use to spend a billion dollars smearing the Republican Party’s brand. Instead that money went to Future Forward, who wasted it all on positive ads and left swing voters in the exit polls with a positive memory of Trump’s 1st term.

No, I’m never, ever getting over it and if it kills me, I swear this will not happen going forward.

One of the first ads we created and the one I took to Morning Joe was called “Win” and it was designed to correct the record that the Republican Party has a good record of economic performance.

Anyhoo, back to the main point. Today I have invited Ron Gebhardtsbauer, Emeritus Professor of Actuarial Science at Penn State University, to publish an analysis he has conducted to answer what I think will be the defining question of the party’s strategy going forward: which party has the back of working Americans.

Spoiler Alert: Its Democrats!

Over to you, Ron.

The US Economy by President and Party from 1981 to 2024Ron Gebhardtsbauer

In the runup to the 2024 election, polls showed that a majority of people believed Republican Presidents do a better job on the economy. While I knew that wasn’t true on certain economic indicators, I didn’t know whether it was true for all of them. So, I investigated data from 1981 through 2024 on nine of them.

What I found was that the Democrat average was better on every one of them, as shown in the top two rows of Table I: under Democrats, the US had higher real stock returns, lower inflation, greater productivity and wage increases, greater increases in jobs (and business startups), lower unemployment, and greater reductions in crime. In addition, deficits as a percentage of GDP always had a net increase over each Republican Administration and a net decrease under each Democratic Administration.

Subsequent to my analysis, I found research over earlier time periods showing the same thing: “the US economy performed significantly better on average” under Democratic presidents than Republican presidents. Research on 1949 to 2012 by Princeton economic professors Alan Blinder and Mark Watson showed the same results. They also found that business profits and labor productivity were higher under Democratic Presidents. I then looked at Real GDP growth going back to 1921 and found that it was always higher under Democratic Presidents over any long period (22 years or more).

Table I provides a synopsis of my analysis. The party (and President) with the better averages are highlighted in color (red for Republicans and blue for Democrats).

The third row shows that a Democrat President was the best on each economic indicator. Biden was the best on three of them (four if 2022 is excluded from his average for real stock returns, as COVID was not his fault) and second best on three more. Trump was second best on four of them, but never the best. The last two rows compare Biden and Trump. Biden was better than Trump on seven of the economic indicators, while Trump was better on two (eight to one, if 2022 was excluded from the real stock return average as noted above).

The fact that Democrats had better averages on all 9 indicators and higher GDP growth over any long time period suggests that this is not just coincidence, but causal. Maybe it’s because Republican Presidents had many more recessions than Democratic Presidents. That may be because Democrats are Keynesians (i.e., believers in using government to stimulate the economy) and their policies directly support the lower and middle classes, whereas Republicans generally have pursued policies that reduce taxes for the rich (and the rich are less likely to use their tax cuts to increase production than if the government used the funds). Or the recessions and less productive economies could be due to:

Oil shocks (which impacted Republican Presidencies more, but sometimes they were caused by war which the President caused),
COVID (impacting Trump and Biden),
Increased Interest Rates (the Fed increased interest rate on average by 3.3% under Democratic Presidencies, but decreased them over Republican Presidencies by 2.8% on average, which should have hurt the Democrat average more, if nothing else happened, but the Democratic Presidents still did better on average),
Increased war budgets during Democrats (which increase production) and decreased war budgets under Republicans, or
Better resource utilization under Democrats (as shown by Blinder’s analyses of TFP - Total Factor Productivity). That could be influenced by the President’s policies (e.g., Republican supply-side tax cuts vs. Democrat demand-side policies which directly encourage production).

The fact that the results are similar in every area also suggests that the indicators are correlated. More stimulus decreases unemployment, increases jobs and business startups, and increases productivity, which increases earnings (which decreases poverty and crime) and real stock returns and can reduce deficits as a percentage of GDP (due to higher GDP, higher tax revenues, and lower costs for the unemployed).

Donald Trump has said Biden and the Democrats “destroyed the economy”. The above shows that is not true. Many were unhappy with Biden due to high inflation and it may have been the reason Trump got elected. However, experts argue over what caused the high inflation. Many say it was caused more by COVID’s factory closures and supply disruption. Others say it was caused more by the six stimulus bills Trump signed costing well over $4 trillion than by Biden’s one stimulus bill costing less than half of that (which in fact, President Trump had urged Congress to pass in December of 2020).

Trump also said he handed over a good economy to Biden. While mostly caused by COVID (not Trump), inflation had already gone up to an annualized rate of 6% when handed over, unemployment was at 6.7% in the fourth quarter of 2020, the federal deficit for 2020 was 14.7% of GDP (the highest ever in US history), and violent crime was up 6% in Trump’s last year. While we may not remember 2020 as well, the economic indicators show that the economy was better at the end of Biden’s Administration than four years earlier at the end of the Trump Administration. In fact, Democrats on average provided higher GDP growth to the next President (corroborated by the Blinder paper in their Section III). Blinder noted that “growth slows sharply and quickly when a Republican is elected, but accelerates on a dime following the election of a Democrat.” The recent crash under Trump after good growth in 2024 is an example of this.

Also important are the policies that affect inflation. According to 16 economists who won the Nobel Prize and the conservative Peterson Institute for International Economics, “Trump’s pledges to impose huge tariffs on imported goods, deport millions of refugees, and demand a voice in the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policies would likely send prices surging”. It may take a little while for us to see the full impact of all his policies (on tariffs, deportation, and the Fed), but the supply chain is already being impacted at the west coast ports, so we may see some impacts on empty store shelves and prices soon.

For this reason, the public needs to see what the data says. This analysis “substitutes facts for appearances and demonstrations for impressions” the long-standing motto of the Society of Actuaries (and famous quote by John Ruskin in 1893).

Attribution: I’ll note that associating economic events to Presidents is an inexact science. Events in a particular year may not be caused by that year’s President. For example:

Problems in an administration could have been caused by the prior administration or by neither administration (such as Covid in 2020 or the OPEC oil shocks in the late 1970s).
Stock market increases (and other good economic results) right after an election could be partially attributable to the winner of the election or due to eliminating election uncertainties that hurt businesses, or both.
Laws are passed by Congress, not the President. On the other hand, Presidents have lots of influence and can veto what Congress passes, so the consequences can also be attributed to the President.

An analysis of the nine indicators are discussed on the following pages.

Real Returns on Stocks (net of inflation)

The dots in the chart below show the real S&P 500 stock returns each calendar year from 1981 (when Reagan became President) to 2024 (Biden’s last year as President). Bold bars were added to show the average returns under each President (red for Republicans and blue for Democrats). The average real return under all Democrats (12.2%) was more than twice the Republican average (5.2%). The lower return for Republicans is partially due to the negative returns under George W. Bush (who had two recessions, including the Great Recession).

If one wants to compare individual Presidencies, we may want to adjust the averages when a President is not responsible for an event which hurts their average. Negative returns were included in the averages, even when not caused by the administration, if later returns in the same administration compensated for them by being higher. A case could be made for excluding 2022 from Biden’s average (due to the Fed keeping interest rates higher than at the beginning of his administration). In this case, his average would be 21.1% (instead of 8.1%).

The Blinder paper noted that stock returns, labor productivity, and business profits were significantly better under Democratic administrations, so it is surprising that business people are more likely to vote Republican.

Inflation

Inflation was high from 1979 to 1981 due to OPEC oil price hikes, so Carter nominated Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve in 1979, knowing he’d immediately increase interest rates to bring down inflation (to just below 4% under Reagan). Recently, inflation returned to rates almost as high due to COVID. The Fed again raised interest rates and inflation went down to just below 3% this time.

The Obama Administration had the lowest average inflation rate of 1.7%. Due to attribution concerns, the chart below shows a second average inflation rate (in pale red) for Reagan. It excludes 1981 from his average, because Reagan was not the cause of the high inflation in 1981. The pale blue bar for Biden excludes 2021 and 2022 from his average for similar reasons. The average inflation rate under Republicans is higher than the average for Democrats (whether the above years are excluded or not). This may be surprising, since the Phillips Curve would have predicted higher inflation (due to lower unemployment under Democrats). On the other hand, inflation decreased more under Republicans primarily due to the higher rate in Clinton’s last year and the big drop in the 1980s, and inflation was lower in the last year of Republican administrations on average (due to it being so low in Bush Jr’s last year).

Globalization reduces prices (and thus inflation, as foreigners work for less) and increases investment returns (for the owners of industry). In theory, people in both countries are better off, as foreign workers get better jobs and we get cheaper goods, but many in the US lost their jobs. This is oversimplified, but globalization initially helped Republican Administrations as they initially encouraged it, but eventually Democratic administrations got on board after enacting laws to (a) train people for new jobs, (b) provide moving and Housing assistance, (c) set minimum standards for imports (they should at least meet the same standards that companies in the US must meet), and (d) gradually improve pay, benefits, working conditions, and environmental rules for the foreign workers to US levels if they want to sell in the US.

Unfortunately, accumulated job losses and wage stagnation created terrible malaise in the US, particularly among the lower and middle classes in rural areas and inner cities, while the upper classes benefited from their stock ownership of global companies, as shown in the next chart. Rural areas need more infrastructure bills to create more jobs (as in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act) and items in section 5 (and footnote 22) below, such as an increased minimum wage. In addition, reciprocal tariffs (where we tariff another country’s exports if they tariff our exports, not the tariff that Trump imposed) and tightened restrictions in our Trade Agreements could help, but they are complex and have negatives, such as: they will increase inflation here and other countries may retaliate with their own tariffs against US products (including services from banks, Wall Street, and our high-tech industry). In addition, our industry and jobs may not come back, as US wages are much higher than wages in the poorest countries, and rebuilding our infrastructure is expensive and takes time (CEO’s may not want to gamble on the tariffs being permanent unless they can fully automate jobs or hire immigrants).

By HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW (HBR) - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 (N.B. this does not reflect the benefits of reduced inflation that everyone receives, and is especially valuable to low-income people.)

The following chart shows the high tariffs that the US had in the past when it was trying to protect its “infant industries”. We reduced them post-WW II after our industry was strong. They jump back up in 2025 exceeding the tariffs that helped cause the Great Depression. Trump’s tariffs are not reciprocal. They are intended to eliminate our trade deficit, by setting them equal to our trade deficit with each country divided by their trade with us. If a country increases their purchases from the US (along with our domestic industries producing more here) enough to eliminate their trade surplus with us, then that will eliminate the tariff on them. Many economists doubt that it will work.

Real Growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

Average growth in real GDP between 1981 and 2024 was 2.9% for Democrat Presidents and 2.5% for Republican Presidents. All of the Presidents during that time had average annual real growth between 2% and 4% if we reflect the following adjustments:

We could exclude the low 2020 growth rate (due to Covid) from the Trump average (improving it), as COVID was not his fault.
We could exclude the low 2009 real growth rate from the Obama average (improving it) as the Great Recession started in the prior Administration and was not his fault.
The high 2021 growth rate could be dropped from the Biden average (hurting his average), as it was high due to the GDP rebound from COVID. Some analysts might argue to include 2021, but excluding it is a more careful response, and still the Democrat average is better.

The Democrat average exceeded the Republican average, whether the above years were excluded or not. It makes sense to include the 2008 recession in George W. Bush’s average, as it happened after many years of his Presidency. Prior recession years were included in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush averages, as their offsetting recoveries were also included.

Recessions: From the chart below, one can see a reason why the Republican average was lower than the Democrat average - all the recessions in this period started in Republican years. The Appendix providing Recessions since 1900 shows almost three times as many recessions occurred during Republican Presidencies (17 to 6), even though Republicans and Democrats had about the same proportion of years holding the Presidency (52% and 48%, respectively). Also, the worst two recessions prior to the COVID recession (the Great Depression and the Great Recession) occurred after many years of Republicans being President. Interestingly, the only presidents since 1900 without any recessions starting in their terms were all Democrats (Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, Obama, and Biden) and they were all post-1960. In the years 1900 to 1960, there were 15 recessions (one every 4 years on average), whereas after 1960 there have been only 8 recessions (one every 8 years). Thus, recessions are only half as frequent now as in the years 1900 to 1960. Some things do get better.

Budget Deficits (as a percentage of GDP)

The chart below shows that US Budget Deficits (as a percentage of GDP) decrease under Democratic Administrations and increase during Republican Administrations. Although not shown in the graph below, this was also true during the Ford and Carter years.

For the prior economic indicators, I compared the averages in each Administration, sometimes after dropping years that shouldn’t be attributed to them. However, for this one, there is a question as to how many of the Great Recession years should be excluded from the Obama average. Since that is subjective and the decision could unfairly help the Democrat average, a better measure is needed.

Analyzing the decreases in budget deficits during an Administration reduces that problem. As you will notice from the chart, Obama reduced the budget deficit the most (6.7% of GDP) and Clinton was second (6.1% of GDP). For purposes of this calculation 2020 and 2021 were excluded, as it wouldn’t be fair to Trump to attribute COVID to him. For similar reasoning, credit for the drop in deficit from 2021 to 2022 was not given to Biden. That changed Biden’s 5.5% reduction in deficits to a 1.2% increase. Even with that change, Democrats still had a much better average than Republicans. Democrats reduced deficits over the course of their Administrations by 3.9% of GDP on average (and in fact, Clinton had 3 surpluses), while Republicans increased deficits over the course of their Administrations by 2.0% of GDP on average.

The chart below ranks the Presidents. It is easy to see from that chart, that budget deficits (as a % of GDP) went down during all Democratic Presidencies and went up during all Republican Presidencies.

Jobs Added (as a percentage of the employed population)

As Bill Clinton noted in his talk to the 2024 Democratic National Convention, the number of jobs added in Democratic Administrations is much higher than in Republican Administrations. While his numbers were correct, he started with 1989, which helped his numbers. My analysis corrects that by going back to 1981 and determining jobs added as a percentage of the employed population to be fair to the earlier administrations like Reagan’s. The year 2020 is excluded from the Trump average as he was not responsible for COVID and he didn’t get the rehiring boost in the following year (Biden did).Reflecting that, the average percentage in Democrat years is 1.6% and 1.0% in Republican years. If all years are included, the Democrat average is also better than the Republican average.

As noted earlier, there were more recessions under Republican Administrations. This may be because Republicans prioritize supply-side legislation such as tax cuts for the rich (Note that the rich are less likely to increase production with their extra income than if the money went to lower-income people). Democrats prioritize demand-side legislation which is more likely to go to lower-income people, create jobs, and stimulate the economy, which helps avoid recessions. Others note that the economies under Democrats benefited from the two World Wars, but that wouldn’t apply to the years I studied. In addition, the US economy has been less volatile since the Great Depression and World War II and recessions have been much less frequent since 1982. The markets are less volatile under Democratic Presidents possibly because they are more likely to regulate industry. This might be another reason (in addition to being Keyensian) for them having much fewer recessions than Republicans who prefer less regulation and more freedom for industry.

Percentage Increase in Business Startups

The Small Business Administration said the 4 years under Biden were the top 4 years in our country’s history for entrepreneurs’ filings of business applications (more than 20 million). That could be due to more people starting up their own businesses post-COVID. Business startups are also at an all-time high, per Census’s Business Formation Statistics. Biden had the highest percentage increase in startups (4.4%) and Reagan had the second highest (2.0%). Democrat administrations also had a higher average than Republican administrations (0.6% versus 0.5%).

Unemployment Rates

For determining average unemployment rates, the years 2020 and 2021 were excluded due to COVID being an aberration not attributable to either the Trump or Biden Administrations. However, as with budget deficits, it would be subjective to decide how many years to exclude for the Great Recession not being Obama’s fault, so I included all of Obama’s years. Even using that generous rule for Republicans, the average unemployment rates were 6.1% under Republicans and a lower 5.9% under Democrats.

If 1981-1982 and 2009-2010 were excluded (from the Reagan and Obama averages), the comparison would have been 5.7% to 5.5%, so the Democrat averages would still be better. The lowest average unemployment rate was 3.8% in the Biden Administration.

A comparison that reduces the above problem would be to determine how much unemployment rates decreased during a Presidency. They decreased 2.9% on average when Democrats were President but increased 0.1% when Republicans were President (excluding 2020 from the Trump average as COVID was not his fault). In fact, unemployment rates always decreased when Democrats were President, but not for the two Bush Presidencies. Alternatively, one could compare the unemployment rates at the end of a Presidency to reflect their accomplishments. In that case, the Democrat average was 4.3% and the Republican average was 5.6%.

Real Earnings Growth

The growth in real earnings is especially important for low-income workers when inflation is high. The chart below shows that real growth in hourly earnings was negative in the 1980s and early 1990s, which means people’s earnings growth was less than inflation. Thus, the purchasing power of low-income people without assets decreased each year.

Unfortunately, earnings data has problems. During the Great Recession and COVID, job losses were higher among lower-income people, so the official growth in real earnings was misleadingly way higher than the actual growth in earnings for people who remained in the workforce. So when I determined the average real growth in earnings, I excluded 2008 and 2020 to 2022. With that adjustment, the average growth in real earnings was -0.1% under Republican Presidents and 0.7% under Democratic Presidents. If all years were included the Democrat average would still be higher.

As noted above, growth in earnings is most important for low-income people for whom the costs of living can exceed their earnings. A couple studies have looked at earnings by income level. Wikipedia says that professor Larry Bartels found that incomes from 1982 to 2013 grew faster for low-income people during Democratic presidents and that the growth for all income groups was more equal during those times. He also found that the real value of the minimum wage increased under Democrats and declined under Republican Presidencies.

A Center for American Progress (CAP) paper found that after COVID’s onset, the growth in average hourly wages:

was more than inflation (CAP Figure 4),
was highest for low-wage workers (CAP Figure 7), and
was higher than ever, even after adjusting for purchasing power (CAP Figures 5A & 5B).

My analysis of the growth in real hourly earnings corroborates (1) and (3).

Violent Crime Rates (Murder, Rape, Robbery, and Aggravated Assault)

Although not an economic measure, I included violent crime rates (as a fact-checking exercise) as Trump campaigned on his crime rates being the lowest and that crime increased under Biden. Actually, crime rates went down under Biden. In fact, recent information shows murders decreased 16% in 2024 alone.

The average annual decrease in the violent crime rate under Biden was 3.0%, while the average was 0.0% under Trump (i.e., no decrease in the crime rate) because his last year saw a 6% increase in violent crime. The best crime rate decreases were under Obama and Biden, while the worst were under Bush Jr and Trump. The average decrease in crime rates was 3.4% for all Democratic years. It was a 0.7% increase for all Republican years. Increases in crime didn’t correlate to higher unemployment, but it did inversely correlate with increases in earnings (and other studies show it increases with poverty).

Conclusion: Hopefully, this article (and other similar research) shows that the US economy has performed better on average under Democratic presidents than Republican presidents by “substituting facts for appearances and demonstrations for impressions” and helps people make better decisions. This is my first attempt at associating economic indicators to Presidents and parties. I hope that others (especially people who know our history and economics) might further investigate ways to associate events to Administrations.

Ron Gebhardtsbauer, FSA (rug16@psu.edu) is Emeritus Professor of Actuarial Science. Before retiring, he was the head of the Actuarial Program at Penn State (the largest actuarial program in the US at that time), Senior Benefits Advisor to the Chairman of the US Senate Finance Committee, Senior Pension Fellow and Spokesperson for the US actuarial profession at the American Academy of Actuaries (where he testified frequently before Congress), and Chief Actuary of the PBGC (the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation).

The Cycle- On Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Trump pushes socialist price controls for pharmaceuticals, refugee status for white people and free flights out for everyone else. Rachel and Aaron also dive into the effort to suspend the U.S. Constitution, and compare how Trump’s chaotic presidency parallels the rise of Vladimir Putin. Plus…Da Pope offers inspiring words for the world.

LINKS:

Trump wants drug price controls (
Trump bashes price controls on Truth Social (August 2024)
White House: TO ALL ILLEGAL ALIENS: BOOK YOUR FREE FLIGHT NOW
Cardinal Prevost (Pope Leo XIV) tweet re: JD Vance (Feb 3)
Bannon’s War Room: Marjorie Taylor Greene
Rachel on white South African refugees
OANN on Twitter
Pope Leo XIV: “Evil will not win”
Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
The Cycle on Substack

History is certainly echoing now!

Folks, I’m returning to my conversational pods with interesting people talking about interesting shit. I’m kicking things off by living by example and doing a crossover show with THE Mr. Beat, who hosts a very popular You Tube channel.

There’s a whole world out there that doesn’t engage with or see any of the political content that are the staples of our lives.

AND that world is much, much bigger than our world.

This is why we’re seeing a concerted effort by Democrats to do something they have always feared: have real conservations with real people on media people actually watch.

Don’t forget, the average daily audience of MSNBC is 700,000 people. That’s about .000000001% of the country watching Deadline, in case you’re wondering why people voted for fascism.

In fact, on Monday you’re going to get a very important announcement about the future of The Cycle and the cool shit we’re going to be dropping as the year progresses.

Anyhoo, Mr. Beat was kind enough to come have a conversation with me about what my new major thesis: American history is actually just one book with different chapters, those chapters being:

The Great Compromise (AKA: The Constitution
The Expansion of the American West
Civil War
End of Reconstruction and the introduction of Jim Crow
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s

ANNNNDDDD Chapter 6: Whatever the Fuck it is That This MAGA Thing is Going to End With.

Because that book is still be written. Right now. By us.

Now, before any of you get too excited about that you should know this is what I’m noodling on in terms of my next book proposal: preemptively titled as Living History. Once I go to sell it, it will end up with a 15 word subtitle so I’m going to enjoy my two word title until they pay me money to get over it.

As subscribers to The Cycle y’all are the very first people to hear about this new project which is still in its early planning stages.

Back to Mr. Beat, who figured out he could make more money swinging history videos on You Tube than he made after 11 years of being a high school history teacher (which you should read as a testament to how shitty teacher pay it is).

He is also a published author of The Power of Our Supreme Court: How Supreme Court Cases Shape Democracy and you should check it out!

I hope you enjoy our crossover conversation!

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This week Rachel and Aaron investigate the three words that hit hardest from Donald Trump’s recent interview on Meet the Press, and the one word missing from the New York Times’s editorial criticizing his first 100 days. Plus the Lord of the Shadows, Stephen Miller, wants you to know MAGA has BIG plans for your children and grandchildren. Don’t miss an eye-opening comparison between Trump’s “Lord of Shadows” and the Nazi Party’s youth indoctrination programs.

LINKS:

NBC’s Meet the Press: Full interview with Donald Trump
NBC News: Fact-checking Donald Trump’s May interview with ‘Meet the Press’
60 Minutes: How law firms targeted by Trump are responding to White House pressure
Marc Elias: Democracy Docket
SNL: ‘Lord of the Shadows’
Stephen Miller: ‘Children will be taught to love America’
New York Times: Editorial: There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab
Mike Pence Receives JFK Profile in Courage Award
Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
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SourceFolks, if you’ve been following along with Trump’s 100 day report card you already know that he has begun to collapse in the polls.

But I want to make sure you understand just how much he is collapsing, and how much worse things will soon get for him.

First off, his report card from voters is dismal.

Trump has already shaved double digits off his “good for the economy” numbers, and this is before the effects of Trump’s Trade War really hit.

Independents have yuge buyer’s remorse.

And although “Liberation Day” was a few weeks ago, the effects of the Trump tariffs are just starting.

This is the S&P 500 returns for the first 100 days.

And here is the Dow Jones

I mean just look at what Trump has done to value of the dollar. All of this in just 100 days from an economy set to grow at 3%!

U.S. Ports are seeing dramatic drops in imports and UPS is laying off drivers over the expected impacts of Trump’s tariffs. Its a slow moving tsunami that hit Wall Street first, but is coming for Main Street next.

Consumer sentiment has collapsed and Americans brace for a Trumpcession, which by the way economists are now warning may be the very worst kind of recession: stagflation. Stagflation means both high interest rates AND high unemployment.

That’s probably why so many Americans are bracing for the effects.

The top word voters use to describe Trump 2.0? Chaotic.

And even Fox News is trying to ring the alarm bell. Democrats have one message and one message only they need to pound between now and election day 2026: Trump made you broke.

In fact, Trump’s approval is the lowest approval rating in 80 years. By the way, that’s the entire history of polling!

So friends, we may all be about to go broke BUT the silver lining is: so is the rest of America.

Trump single handily shifted the Canadian electorate from their traditional “time for a change” preferences into reelecting the liberal party to another 4 year term.

Along with rejection of Trump’s dumbass tariffs, no one voted for MAGA’s crazy shit. I talk a lot about how Democrats tend not to understand how much more informed and engaged they are compared to the average American voter. Well, so do Republicans. Online Republicans have grossly misinterpreted Trump’s win in 2024 as a mandate for Project 2025, but they could not have been more mistaken.

Of Trump’s 75 million voters only about 40 million of them are bat shit crazy cultists. The other 30 million are tuned out swing voters who just wanted cheap shit and believed Trump when he said he would lower prices DAY ONE.

You can see this reflected in the polling data:

And that, my friend, is why Democrats have already pulled into the lead on the generic ballot for 2026. The last time we saw this was in 2018 but we’re seeing it now in his honeymoon.

My assumption is that by next year Democrats will hold a double digit advantage on the generic ballot.

In 2018 that was enough for Democrats to gain 40 House seats.

I’m working hard to make sure we beat that in 2026.

On a side note: 56% of Democrats and even 17% of Republicans now see Trump as a dangerous dictator. Better late than never.

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As another texting scandal jolts the Pentagon into “full-blown meltdown,” Rachel earns national attention for her internet sleuthing skills and gets vindicated in the aftermath of the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Plus, she and Aaron take a close look at the first rule in fighting tyranny… and share a masterclass from a European internet troll.

LINKS:

Politico Opinion: Former Top Pentagon Spokesperson Details ‘Month From Hell’ Inside the Agency
The Daily Beast: Rachel catches bad White House photoshop job
George Carlin: Methods of Execution
SplitTicket.org tweet: The story of Wisconsin's Supreme Court election was turnout
Timothy Snyder on Substack: Obeying in Advance
European Parliament Member Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy trolls Trump’s New York
Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
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Blunting a midterm effect is hard.

In fact, its so hard that when I set out in the winter of 2021 to teach Democrats how they might do it, I assumed it was an impossible task we’d ultimately fail at.

And we well might have, if not for Dobbs.

The day the Dobbs memo leaked I knew that Democrats now had a powerful wedge issue they could use in the midterms to potentially disrupt one of the most reliable patterns in American politics, the midterm effect.

Believe it or not though, it was not easy to convince top tier campaigns that wedging Roe/Dobbs was the only path to victory in 2022. That rather than doing what their traditional strategists were privately and publicly telling them to do (play defense on crime and inflation), Democrats who wanted to actually win needed to go hard on offense on abortion.

At the end of the day those old school consultants had far more access to top tier campaigns than an outsider like me. As such, some of the most important races of that cycle, especially the 4 marquee senate races and the House races in both NY and CA played defense and predictably lost.

Meanwhile individual campaigns like Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s in Michigan wedged Dobbs and cruised to a victory that was not even in question by September. Against a midterm effect, no less!

Wedging freedom (abortion) also delivered big wins in Arizona with Katie Hobbes’ close win against extremist Kari Lake and with Adrian Fontes, who used a “Protect Democracy” frame to build a massive bipartisan coalition to outperform even Mark Kelly in some precincts in his race for Secretary of State.

We will see free and fair elections in Arizona in 2024 because of those victories.

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It took awhile to get the ad data from 2022, but once it came in, it told a tale of two strategies.

In one strategy, Republicans set the terms of the debate on two issues most damaging to Democrats and let the Democratic campaigns do a purely defensive dance that focused on “correcting the record” and touting both their superior biographical qualifications and their deep, abiding love of bipartisanship and “standing up to their own party.”

They all lost, as I knew they would.

Meanwhile, a few races like Whitmer’s went all-in on abortion overreach. The combined result produced an over all rate of abortion-focused ads of about 31% of the total ads aired by Democrats that cycle.

Sadly though, most swing race Democrats never ran an ad on abortion, let alone the multiple ads they would need to create a successful referendum effect against their Republican opponent. Yes, Whitmer benefited from an abortion initiative on the Michigan ballot, but she did so because she explicitly tied it to her Republican opponent Tudor Dixon. Voters will not make that connection on their own. Absent a strategy to link the abortion initiative to Republican candidates, we will see voters in state’s like Arizona, Nevada, Missouri, Montana, and Florida, all of which have abortion initiatives on the ballot this cycle, vote to save abortion access while simultaneously sending abortion-banning Republicans back to the Senate and the House.

We can not let this happen in 2024, especially not in the senate races where there is no room for error!

So, it was with baited breath that I’ve been waiting for Ad Impact to drop the abortion ad numbers thus far for the 2024 cycle. Although some top tier campaigns have adjusted strategy and are running hard on reproductive freedom, the data makes clear that many more still have not.

Dobbs has created a powerful effect which will benefit Democrats across the board to a small extent, but to really benefit from it, the campaigns must centralize their strategies around abortion by defining their Republican opponents, incumbents to challengers, as dangerous abortion extremists.

When the chips fall on November 5th both the House and Senate majorities will be determined by strategy.

The Ad Impact data from 2023 makes it clear that Democrat’s victories both in the Wisconsin state supreme court race and the Virginia House of delegates races, wedging abortion and centralizing strategy around it produced big wins with fundamentals that should have favored Republicans (a Democrat in the White House).

Source: Ad Impact ReportWhether you’re in a pure swing race or a lean red senate state, your pathway to victory is the same: you must push swing voters and moderate Republican independent “leaners” away from their brand allegiance to the Republican Party.

You can not outrun the D next to your name on the ballot. That R and D determines vote choice for about 95% of the electorate and is so powerful that even when you combine “independent leaners” with admitted partisans in the data, virtually everyone voted for the candidate from their own “team.”

Like it or not, the party label on the ballot is by far the most powerful thing on that ballot. It is far more powerful than the candidate themselves.

Like Republicans did to working class voters via wedging grievance “culture war” issues, Democrats MUST break the (growing) brand allegiance voters have to the Republican Party in states like Montana and Ohio.

The Republicans have already showed us how to do it. They have managed to wedge issues like trans people and BLM so effectively, they have millions of working class people voting for a union-busting billionaire who shits into a gold toilet.

Their message was “Democrats have left you behind” and they pounded it so effectively, Democrats repeat it as a fact too!!!

Your 2024 strategy must bring the electorate in your state up to speed on the modern Republican Party’s extremism and the threat it poses to them, personally, not to outgroups only liberals care about. Voters are ill—informed and uninterested. Millions of swing voters still have no idea abortion is illegal, let alone how it ended up so.

Governor Beshear showed folks exactly how to do this in a Red state. He crushed his Republican opponent in 2022 in Kentucky against a midterm effect by defining his race around Hadley Duvall, telling the story of how Kentucky’s barbaric abortion law would have forced her to have her rapist’s baby at age 12.

These are the stories your voters need to hear and the campaigns are the only people with the money to tell them. The Harris/Walz campaign gets this, and it is part of why I feel bullish they will ultimately carry the swing states.

If you don’t tell your voters their freedom is under assault, they will never know. You must tell them.

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When the news that the Trump family had turned the Republican National Committee into a Trump family business, I was ecstatic.

Why?

As my buddy Rick Wilson would tell you, everything Trump touches dies, and I knew the RNC would be no different.

Despite dropping her real last name (Romney) and being willing to help Trump and his associates conspire to submit fake Electors as part of Trump’s broader plot to stay in power, Trump dumped then-RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel and handed the keys to the entire Republican Party’s kingdom to Lara Trump, whose only qualification for the post is that she is part of the Trump family’s crime cabal.

Now, I need to explain exactly why I was so happy that day, and to do that, I need to go into some brief nerd background.

In my area of political science we spend a lot of time, I mean A LOT, measuring campaign activities to see if they affect voter turnout and vote choice. As campaigns first evolved into the TV era, and then into the digital age, these empirical studies have subjected all kinds of hypotheses about voter turnout and vote choice to empirical and experimental scrutiny.

I won’t bore you with that research history aside from to tell you that by far the things that affects turnout and vote choice (persuasion) the most is in-person GOTV (Get Out The Vote) field programs.

I knew that in 2020 when Democrats made the decision to suspend virtually all of its in-person field work due to the pandemic, which is why I immediately panicked.

Now, don’t get me wrong, suspending in person events in the midst of a global pandemic makes absolute sense, especially because the demographic most susceptible to death from COVID, the elderly, are also the vast majority of people that volunteer to knock on strangers’ doors to get them to vote.

However, since the Republican Party was no longer a political party, and now a cult, Republicans decided that since COVID was a hoax and not something that could ever happen to them.

Anti-science Republican governors reopened their states at the height of the pandemic and in the process killed and sickened many Republicans, who believed their lies and thus left themselves intentionally vulnerable to dying.

https://www.axios.com/2022/03/25/coronavirus-pandemics-politics-masks-vaccines-deathsWhile Democrats transitioned to less effective, virtual field operations like texting and phone banking, Republicans kept running full steam ahead. They even resumed Trump’s rallies, each of which became super spreader events.

As soon as I realized we were going to unilaterally suspend our in-person field, I got a sick feeling in my gut because I suspected it would hurt Democratic Party performance, especially down ballot where interest in elections are much, much lower. Indeed, I flew right into the belly of the COVID beast, Texas, BEFORE there was a vaccine so I could make a personal appeal to Texas House and state legislative candidates to find a way to conduct in-person field.

As I watched 19 districts break for Biden but elect Trump cronies to the House as well as the underperformance Democrats suffered in state legislative races I learned a big lesson about the tremendous importance of in-person field and especially the powerful advantages that can fall to one party when the other party’s field game is absent or inept.

That brings us back to the present.

There is something you should know about the Republican National Committee. Until recently, it was the primary organizer for the entire Republican Party’s largely effective in-person field operation. Indeed, the RNC was so good at field that in the 2016 cycle they entirely handicapped the under-funded and chaotic mess that was the Trump campaign that cycle, essentially handicapping Trump from the ineptness of his own operation.

Now, some people would have looked at the RNC’s field operation and think, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” but that is not what happened once Lara Trump took over.

Still reeling from the mistakes Trump forced onto the RNC in 2020 with his lies about early voting and mail-in voting, Ronna McDanielknew she had a big hill to climb to fix Trump’s damage. The results of the 2022 midterms proved that Trump’s election lies were having durable effects on Republican voters, who continued to shift away from early and absentee voting and towards Election Day only voting.

The reason the Republican Party invented absentee and early voting was because relying on a largely apathetic electorate to vote on one special day is bad strategy that produces sub-optimal outcomes.

It took a long time for Democrats to copy Republicans and begin to push early and absentee voting hard in states where they had legislative powers to make electoral reforms.

The Trump takeover of the RNC does seem to have undermined the GOP’s 2024 cycle in-person field operation. 👇

https://apnews.com/article/trump-political-action-committees-voter-canvassing-musk-0c1c095a6516b7bcbc80bf94fe0fe45a As soon as the Republican National Committee became the Trump National Committee, Sheriff Lara, who again has 0 qualifications for her post other than slavish loyalty to her Orange Daddy, defunded two of the RNC’s key operations: early vote “harvesting” and minority outreach operations.

Instead of focusing on turning out the vote, the 2024 version of the RNC is mission focused on suppressing the vote, shifting both attention and resources to building infrastructure to contest the results off the 2024 cycle and building voter intimidation infrastructure, which they call their poll watchers program.

So, if the RNC has divested from in-person field organizing, who exactly is running the GOP’s field outreach this cycle?

The answer to that should fill you with glee because it is, apparently, Elon Musk’s superPAC and right wing grifter and Turning Point USA president Charlie Kirk.

Yes, Republicans have turned their once enviable organizing duties out to the private sector and to people with no experience with field organization, the most logistically complex elements of the modern campaign.

Meanwhile, over at the Democratic National Committee Chair Harrison has built and funded what will be, by far, the most extensive and comprehensive national field program in the party’s history.

Howard Dean dreamed about a 50 state vision for the DNC. Jaime Harrison actually built it.

Its real. Its here. And its about to face off against an RNC that has been gutted and turned into a piggy bank for Donald Trump.

I’ll keep you posted.

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Folks, sorry for the delay this week but I wanted to wait to see how much Harris whooped Trump’s ass in the debate because it would give me a final, vital piece of information I need to give you a sense of what will happen in the Senate.

As prospects for Democratic success for both the presidential and the House map have increased significantly from The Switch, it has also impacted the Senate map, turning it from being all but certain pick up for the GOP to a situation that gives Democrats a real, but exceedingly narrow, opportunity to hold the chamber.

To give you a sense of how difficult the Senate map is this year let me give you some non-mathematical probabilities I pulled out of my ass:

Probability of Democrats winning:

The Presidency: 75%

The House: 75%

The Senate: 40%

See the issue?

This is why I’ve been arguing all year that strategy will make or break us on the Senate map.

So, why is it so hard for Democrats to hold the senate?

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The issue comes from the particular senate seats Democrats have to defend this cycle, combined with almost non-existent pick up opportunities.

This cycle Democrats have no choice but two defend senate seats in two states Trump carried by 8pts (Ohio) and a whoppin’ 16 pts (Montana), respectively.

Although Montana has long been out of reach for Democrats at the presidential level (the last Democrat to win Montana was Bill Clinton in ‘92) Ohio’s story is very different. Over the course of the last 20 years Ohio shifted from THE bellwether swing state (a role the press has anointed to Pennsylvania in the modern period) to reliably electing nothing but Republicans aside from one senate seat: the one Sherrod Brown sits in.

This is because of realignment/dealignment: as states like Arizona and Georgia have moved Left, states like Ohio and other lower midwestern states like Iowa have moved significantly to the Right.

Now, we do have two statewide Democrats serving in the senate in these two states, but I think its important for you to understand how we have them.

The 2018 midterms were the last time both men faced their hostile electorates, and that cycle was especially good in terms of fundamentals for Democrats.

The first way in which the fundamentals were especially good was the massive Midterm Effect that benefitted Democrats across the board from negative partisanship effects from Trump’s surprising Electoral College win in an election people were assured he could not win.

The second aspect favorable to Democrats that cycle was the differential between presidential cycle turnout and midterm cycle turnout. Because far less voters participate in midterms, an electorate like Montana with a vast preference for Republicans can produce a turnout that mitigates the size advantage Republicans hold, especially now that college educated voters have realigned to the Democratic Party. This cycle, the full electorate will cast ballots.

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We have also added another 6 years of education realignment that will help Tester, but the presidential election turnout and the need to get a sizable amount of ticket-splitters is why I can’t sleep at night when my thoughts are on Montana.

And its the same story for Sherrod Brown in Ohio. 6 years of additional dealignment among working class voters is going to complicate his reelection efforts, which will also require a significant amount of ticket splitting.

Enter the importance of strategic approach:

Read more

Source: 538.comThose of you who started this journey with me back in 2018 will remember that once upon a time, I forecasted the size of the 2018 midterm Blue Wave months before Election Day, and long before Nate Silver (much to his chagrin).

At the center of that work was my attempt, coming from academia, to modernize the election analyses provided to the public through well-known site’s such as The Cook Political Report and 538, both of which did not seem to understand the increasing importance of polarization in American elections and weren’t accounting for it in their models or analyses.

Much of this work centered on bringing attention to what is called in political science political realignment/dealignment, which refers to the fact that the American electorate is not static, different demographic/regional groups supporting different parties at different times.

Realignment/dealignment is how the Democratic Party, once the party of rural voters and “state’s rights” segregationists with its main power base in the South is now the party of urban/suburban voters with it’s main power bases in the Northeast and the West coast.

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Though an accepted fact now, educational realignment (college educated voters moving to the Democrats, non-college educated voters moving to the Republicans) was newish back in 2018, and had largely, though not totally, failed to truly penetrate the consciousness of the internet analysts.

Because 2018 was almost a decade after the 2010 redistricting, one of the main tools analysts relied on to decide whether a race is competitive or not, or how competitive it is, the Cook PVI score, was no longer accurately capturing potential Democratic Party performance in certain suburban-heavy districts like Virginia’s 7th district which at that time was coded as an R+7 while simultaneously over-representing Democratic Party performance in dealigning rural districts they’d held for decades, predominately in the Midwest.

I gambled that districts with high rates of college educated voters like Virginia’s 7th and 10th district were going to produce massive swings to the Democrats, powered by something else from political science literature called negative partisanship, which is the fear, threat, and even hate partisans feel in relation to the opposition party. 2018 was a year in which hate was on the ballot.

(Fun Fact: Barbara Comstock and I are friends now even though I predicted her loss, she’s a great lady and a real patriot)

Anyhoo, all of that is just a long wind up to get to the point of today’s election update, which is to clarify exactly what House races provide the best probability for Democrats to flip the House.

Read more

Folks, I thought it would be a great idea to bring you into my world and lay out what I look for in terms of data that can tell us what to expect on Election Day.

We’ve now passed the very necessary one month window since The Switch and although technically week one of the general will be the week coming out of Labor Day, the election is beginning to take shape.

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First thing, and in my opinion the most important thing, is that we are no longer in an environment where Democrats poll poorly, but still perform well in swing races, which was the post-Dobbs environment. Democrats have seen universal polling improvements.

We are now seeing the polling advantage I predicted a few weeks ago when I suggested that the switch to Harris would permanently and significantly alter the fundamentals which up to then, continually favored Trump. 👇

Because the various forecast models rely so heavily on polling, the polling improvements have also led to forecast improvements, with the race on its way to settling into a toss-up, advantage Harris environment. My expectation is the various forecast models will be somewhere around 60/40 Harris in September.

Read more

The data is starting to catch up to the shockwave that is the nomination of Vice President Harris.

One of the biggest problems Democrats faced this cycle was voter apathy towards Joe Biden. Fair or not, Americans wanted a new candidate and as Nikki Haley suggested back in the Republican Primary, the first party that gave them a new choice would have a big edge.

We had another election with “double haters.”

Now we only have single haters.

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What most analysts and pundits opined could be merely a “Harris honeymoon” is translating now into what I expected we’d see the 48 hours after we saw high-profile Democrat after Democrat put their own ambitions aside to help the party coalesce around Harris: Harris will have the edge as we go into the fall.

The fundamentals that once favored Trump/Republicans have completely inverted to favor Democrats, and that shift is powered in big part by something very, very simple: you’ve got to give the people what they want.

So, instead of a redux of 2016’s “Everybody Sucks” election, voters have a young, fresh, exciting, joyful nominee who together with her panda bear-like VP pick Tim Walz are creating an environment on track to at least match the energy of the 2008 cycle.

Thus, I shall call Biden’s decision to pass the torch the Kamala Harris:

The Switch in Time That Saved….Well….Everything.

The forecast and polling aggregator streams have already crossed, they are heading to what I expect will end up as a 3 or 4 point polling advantage for Harris post-convention. Democrats could not be better positioned to see a convention bounce that has little chance to erode as the election season begins after Labor Day because Republicans held their nominating convention in July for some reason. In short, there is nothing that could blunt Harris’ momentum.

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Even worse for Team Trump is their already mentally unstable boss has lost the one thing that always made him feel better: his rallies.

Now Donald is afraid to hold one because he doesn’t want another contrast showing his limp-dick turnout compared to Harris/Walz’s sold out events.

As these fundamentals become more obvious to everyone we should see Democrats move from a “protect” posture to a “gain” posture down ballot. Polling in states like Georgia and Arizona are narrowing and easier-to-win swing states are starting to show Harris with within-the-MOE leads.

The Trump campaign’s latest ad buy tells you everything you need to know about how much the fundamentals have shifted. Republicans have gone from ludicrous fantasies about winning NY to spending $23 million to shore up Georgia after The Devil went down there and spent an hour ranting about their popular governor Brian Kemp.

Like 2016 Trump is his own worse enemy. Unlike 2016, this time Democrats will not be theirs.

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You know I prefer to have solid data to back up my assertions, but in this one special case I have decided for the benefit of your mental health to throw caution to the wind and get ahead of the data.

The temptation to parcel out every poll this past week and next will be high (and the clicks they provoke too tempting) for them not to do so, but I want to make something crystal clear: it will take until heading into the DNC in 3 weeks for the polls to have amassed enough data to tell us how much the dynamics of the race have changed by giving the American people the ONE thing they wanted: a younger candidate.

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If you are surprised by the way Democrats have rallied around Harris I will tell you that Joe Biden pulling a George Washington to walk away from power set the bar and the rest of us have answered the call, washing away what was weeks of debate about the best replacement nominee in a tsunami of enthusiastic endorsements for Harris, the one best positioned to inherit Biden’s campaign organization.

Thus, we wipe away the two things making me ill since debate night: the losses of our two main advantages in the the 2024 cycle: party unity and organization in the swing states.

Hence I have spent the last week rolling around town with a shit kicking grin on my face. In short, I feel like a pardoned death row inmate, and so should you.

All the old polling on Harris’ favorability ratings and the head to head ballot test against Trump became less than worthless once she was elevated to the top of the ticket. Forecasters and aggregators will likely blend this new data into the old, a big methodical mistake.

My next post to you will present data post switch and will give us a picture of where Harris AND down ballot Democrats stand heading into the DNC convention, which I am now over the moon about attending.

We’re NOT Going Back

Rachel

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Those of you who’ve been following along long enough know that at about the same time I walked away from my career as a professor and election analyst to go work on fixing the Democratic Party’s electioneering strategy I started intensively studying world history.

Despite 20 years of education ending in a terminal degree in Political Science, my knowledge of world history at best superficial.

Sure, I knew some specific historical events like the French Revolution, but lets just say I had some considerable gaps in my education when it comes to global history.

I didn’t set out to do so, but I learned a rather unexpected lesson from my research. We teach history as a series of discreet events, books onto themselves. But the truth is the history of humanity is itself one big, ongoing book. Seemingly discreet historical events are mere chapters of a larger, unfolding story that spans millennia.

What that means, of course, is that we’re all living history.

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As a person who built their reputation on predicting the political future I hope you can appreciate the importance of my next statement:

I have no idea what in the hell is about to happen!!!

I can see the next 4 months with stark clarity.

Like the elections preceding it, 2024 will come down to about 100,000 votes in 6 or 7 swing states. Though horserace coverage will continue to breathlessly obsess over every new poll, quality or not, the truth is this race was a toss up 4 months ago, it’s a toss up now, and it’ll be a toss up in November.

So when I say I have no idea what is going to happen I don’t mean in terms of the election. I mean what happens after it.

The whole of the Republican Party is already deeply immersed in planting the antecedents for their Big Lie version 2.0. If they win we get a fascist autocracy through the implementation of Project 2025 which will allow them to give Trump total, personal control over the entire federal apparatus.

By purging out merit-based governmental employees (the civil service) Trump will solve the problem that forced him to have to leave office the first time: bureaucrats loyal to the Constitution, not loyal to Trump.

MAGA is solving this problem in advance by collecting thousands of applications from thousands of young “conservatives” either smart or crazy enough to say Trump won the 2020 election on their applications.

Using Schedule F, Trump will replace professional bureaucrats with MAGA loyalists willing to swear fealty to Trump.

Now, my favorite push back from folks who were also quite sure that Roe would never be overturned and outright scoffed when I predicted Trump would try to seize power after losing in 2020 is: “Trump can’t do ___, its unconstitutional!”

People seem to have a really hard time understanding that the law only protects you when people in power agree to be bound by it.

My research on the rise of 20th century totalitarianism made one thing really clear. Parchment protections cannot protect you against people hell bent on ignoring it!!!

All Donald Trump needs to seize ultimate power is to issue an order suspending the Constitution (BORDER INVASION!!!) and a supporting “cast” with enough power to help him do it (the Republican Party).

Trump has both.

This spring I used Project 1933 to show people how swiftly Hitler went from a weak chancellor with just two Nazis in his cabinet to a dictator a little more than 2 months after being sworn in.

In just those two months civil liberties were suspended, opposition parties were purged from the parliament and made illegal, and Dachau was opened and filled with Hitler’s political enemies.

If Trump gets to opportunity to enact Project 2025 the blowback from the rest of society is likely going to be tremendous.

Believe it or not, only about half of Americans even bother to vote in presidential elections. Even those who do vote likely can’t name their own member of the House of Representatives.

Needless to say, no matter how hard we pound the drum about what Trump has planned for America, millions of people will be absolutely shocked when it happens. It will be the first they’ve heard of it but already far too late to stop it.

Though I am certain Trump will make good on his dictator plans I am less certain as to how the rest of the system will respond.

Will people take to the streets only to be met with their own military deployed against them via the Insurrection Act?

Fact is I don’t know and that’s scary as hell.

As if that wasn’t bad enough let’s consider what might happen if he loses.

Again, the Big Lie 2.0 which is consistently amplified by America’s very own Lex Luther, Elon Musk, tells MAGA voters that Biden opened the borders to flood the country with illegals so we can get them all to vote for Biden and “steal” the election from Trump.

MAGA Republicans in positions of power intentionally help Trump pad the BIG Lie 2.0 every time they use the legitimacy of their positions by saying they will only accept the election results if they win.

So its clear that most of the people in positions of power in the Republican Party will join Trump’s howler monkey cries of another stolen election.

And here’s the part that scares the hell out of me.

What will Republicans do next?

We know what they did last time.

I’m reading Erik Larson’s new book, which you really MUST read, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War.

The book focuses specifically on the time period between Abraham Lincoln’s election and the day he assumed office which back then wasn’t until March.

Southerners were so high on propaganda about Lincoln and lies of his intention’s for slavery, war became inevitable. All it took was the lunatics in the South Carolina legislature to announce preemptive succession, provoking a stand off at Fort Sumpter the North never had a chance at defusing.

No, believing their way of life was not only not evil, but morally superior, Southerners lost all capacity for reason and instead demanded war. They were hungry for it.

I mention this because it is not much different than what we face right now.

More than 40 million Americans believe in an alternative reality in which Donald Trump never did anything wrong, Dr. Fauci should be in jail, and the entire FBI, CIA, and DOJ are in a vast, left wing conspiracy even while all three of those agencies are dominated by Republicans.

This despite ongoing federal prosecutions of several Democratic politicians and the President’s own son!

Its a mass psychosis and beating Trump in November is not likely to end it, not so long as the leadership of the Republican Party continues to lie to their own base. The probability MAGA will turn to political violence after a Trump loss is high.

Is Greg Abbott crazy enough to push a modern successionist movement? Anyone who tells you no doesn’t follow Greg Abbott.

Win or lose, America is going to go through some things.

Just remember, no matter what happens if Trump loses, it will pale in comparison to what will happen to us if he wins.

Vote like your life depends on it because it does.

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Millions of American women know exactly where they were, and what they were doing, when news broke that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority planned to overturn Roe v. Wade in May of 2022.

I remember vividly because it marked the end of our constitutional right to autonomous control over our own bodies, and with it, our own futures.

Perhaps it takes being a woman to appreciate the incandescent rage that comes from having the government claim dominion over your body. That rage does not simply go away. Women will never “get over” being made half citizens by the Republican Party’s extremist abortion regime.

Reproductive freedom for women was our pathway from the kitchen to the boardroom, at long last resolving what feminist author Betty Friedan called “the problem that has no name.”

Only it did have a name: the law.

Laws against contraceptives and abortion up until 1973 left women at the mercy of their own bodies. Women’s economic liberty, something that barely existed until the Supreme Court’s Griswold, Roe, and Casey decisions, finally liberated American women from their kitchens.

Women’s liberation begins and ends with reproductive control.

But Republican leaders, who spent decades building the Supreme Court conservative majority needed to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2023, don’t care about women’s economic freedom. Regardless of what they claim, Trump and his Republican friends plan a national Life at Conception law that will leave American women with nowhere to hide.

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Control women’s reproductive freedom and you control women. The loss of our bodily autonomy—our very freedom—is not something women will just “get over.” It’s not something we will forget because of post-pandemic inflation.

No, Roe Rage slow-burns inside each of us. It’s a torch of anger that can only be snuffed by kicking abortion-banning Republicans out of office and replacing them with Democrats who believe American women have more to offer society than serving as baby incubators.

Channeling Roe Rage into the Democratic Party’s messaging strategy allowed us to blunt the Republican Party’s “Red Wave” in 2022 and it can save American democracy from Donald Trump in 2024.

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Roe Rage strategy has now worked dozens of times, in multiple states, and across multiple election cycles post-Dobbs. Most recently, it helped Democrat Marilyn Lands turn a state house district that broke for Donald Trump by 8 points in 2022 in deep red Alabama into an astounding 25 point victory.

Democrats are finally learning the Art of Electoral War when it comes to the long game of modern electioneering. Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans can run from their barbaric abortion bans, but we won’t let them hide from them.

Roevember is coming. Again.

Have you read the book DNC Chair Jaime Harrison is a must read for everyone working to save our democracy? Order today! Hit 'Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy By Beating Republicans at their Own Game

Its Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Not only did Hitler and his Nazis murder 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, its HOW they murdered them you should know more about.

After first being dispossessed of their businesses and homes, then being "ghettoized," the Jews began to be "deported East." Deported East meant being packed like sardines into a cattle car sometimes for a week or more with NO WATER, let alone food. People died standing up and the trains were full of excrement.

Once they arrived they walked into a carefully laid trap. They didn't know it, but they faced the first of what would come to define the life of the people who ended up with the Auschwitz tattoos: selection. At Auschwitz, between 10-30% of each train load was "selected for work." The rest, men, women, children, and babies were "selected" to be gassed.

At its height in 42/43, the German's killing machinery was performing at its peak, murdering and burnings thousands of humans a day. To make their murder machine work, they needed to keep their victims docile. So, using Jewish prisoners to unload and process those "selected for death" into the gas chambers, these "Sonderkommando" were forced to calm those condemned to death with lies about getting showered and deloused and about what would happen next. If they did not, they would be immediately murdered themselves.

The Nazis actually staged the train platform with fake "to the showers" signs and even went so far as to tell people with just seconds left to live to fold their clothes and make sure they can refind them. Anything to get their 1,000 or so victims to walk willingly into the shower room with its fake faucets. If you were "lucky" in the Holocaust, the Nazis selected you to be worked till death. Selected for work was what stood for "luck" in Auschwitz.

The most important thing you need to remember this year is that what happened to the Jews happened by the intentional "othering" of the Jews by a tyrannical despot. There was nothing special about the millions of Germans who became silent accomplices to the near total destruction of European Jewry. There was nothing special about the Germans then, or us now. We must stop Donald Trump and his MAGA movement here, now. The whole world is watching.

In Episode 2 of Shadowboxing the Apocalypse Ep. 2: How the Nazis Seized Power I bring historian and author of The Death Democracy Benjamin Hett back onto the pod to discuss how Hitler went from being sworn in as a weak chancellor on January 30, 1933 to suspending the German Constitution and outlawing the opposition in less than 60 days.

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Some of you may know I am also using twitter (which is by far my biggest audience) to try to draw attention to the parallels between our current crisis and the fall of democracy in Germany. This work, which I call Project 1933 is tied to the Republican Party’s Transition to Autocracy plans laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Manual for Leadership, more commonly known as Project 2025. I’ve been tweeting the Nazi’s quick rise to fascist autocracy in real time as events unfold in Germany in 1933. Please check it out if you are not already and if you are already, PLEASE RT THOSE TWEETS!!

(Editors Note: If you are not familiar with Project 2025 yet, please AT LEAST read this which will cover the most important points).

Have you read my book, which is reshaping how Democrats do elections?! Well, what are you waiting for?!

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1 https://arkansasadvocate.com/2022/10/05/study-more-republicans-than-democrats-likely-died-of-covid/

Researcher Max Taves closes his analysis in David Cay Johnston’s DC Report by asking a very important question:

“Republican politicians can talk all they want about how pro-life they are, but these data defy and belie their rhetoric. Facts are stubborn things.

So what does it say about a political party which incessantly promotes its respect for life and yet whose states’ policies overwhelmingly and repeatedly produce the highest rates of death from cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, Alzheimer’s, influenza, diabetes, traffic accidents, guns, workplace accidents, suicides and murders?

How pro-life can Republican states be when their own constituents literally get less life?”

Taves’ analysis comparing health and death outcomes between Red and Blue states reveal a shocking and inescapable conclusion: Republican policies kill people.

Pick any metric, from covid death rates, to heart disease and diabetes, cancer, car accidents, to gun suicides, Taves shows that Red State’s offer their residents a plethora of ways to die younger and poorer than folks in Blue States.

As I always say, the data don’t lie.

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Friends,

It gives me the utmost pleasure to share a preview of Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How To Save Democracy By Beating Republicans at their Own Game with my most faithful and committed folks. YOU.

The book releases Tuesday, February 6th and can be pre-ordered here.

Now, I’m going to ask you to dig deep for democracy and help with the most important part…

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As soon as Heather Cox Richardson’s new book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America came across my algorithm I reached out and invited America’s favorite academic back onto the show.

HRC’s newest book lays out how a small group of wealthy men financed and developed a right wing propaganda machine that 54+ years later, stands to topple America’s nearly 250 year old democracy.

But perhaps even more importantly, Cox-Richardson lays out how marginalized Americans of the past have risen up to meet their own historical moments and saved the American experiment in the process.

Heather’s right: if you have ever wondered what you would do during the Freedom Rides, WWII, the fight to end segregation, or the effort to hold America together during the Civil War, Heather deftly reminds us all: you’re doing it right now.

Folks! We’re down to ONE WEEK before Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at their Own Game is released and I have BIG NEWS for you!

Penguin Random House has given me special permission to give YOU a special preview of the book! Watch for that in the coming days and pre-order your copy RIGHT NOW!!

Like all good lefties, I cut my teeth in progressive politics learning all about the horrors of America’s massive military industrial complex.

In one of my very first college classes ever at the local community college, a passionate instructor who spent his spare time organizing peace marches against the Iraq War made sure each of his students left his class well-versed in America’s overinvestment in defense spending and underinvestment in well, everything else.

20 years ago I had zero appreciation for the reasons why America had amassed such tremendous military might. Like everyone else, I found America’s disproportioned military budget to be one of our country’s greatest sins.

It was only 18 years later, after I undertook my exhaustive study of world history that I came to fully understand the antecedents that led American presidents of both parties to leave something called isolationism behind and lead America into creating by far the world’s most powerful military.

Instead, administration by administration, America fully embraced the concept of internationalism by building and continually reinforcing a military apparatus larger than the next ten countries combined. One large enough to “police” the entire world.

So, before before you dig into this incredible conversation with Politico national security reporter Alexander Ward about his new book The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump I want to be sure you have a solid working definition of both these concepts:

Isolationism: a policy of remaining apart from the affairs or interests of other groups, especially the political affairs of other countries.

Interventionism: Interventionism is characterized by the use or threat of force or coercion to alter a political or cultural situation nominally outside the intervenor's moral or political jurisdiction.

In short, in the early 20th century, isolationism became the dominant attitude among Americans who came to believe U.S. involvement in World War I was unnecessary, a product of messing in affairs isolationists believed had no impact on Americans and killed thousands of American men.

The use of the word ‘believed’ here is intentional because as appeasement (isolationism) failed to stop Hitler’s aggressive plans to occupy and rule Europe it became obvious how war and turmoil abroad impacts Americans. Then the surprise attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor put a finer point on it: America ignores the rest of the world at its own peril.

The rest, as they say, is history.

source: https://split-ticket.org/2023/09/27/do-special-elections-mean-anything/Folks,

I want to make something crystal clear right up front: the 2024 presidential election will be decided within roughly 7 swing states and will produce a very tight margin for the eventual winner.

The fact is from now, until Election Day, there is a 50/50 chance we lose, …

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Throughout 2024 I plan on highlighting core grassroots organizations working on the frontlines of the Democratic Party’s messaging revolution.

Now, maybe you think the word “revolution” is too strong, but trust me, moving a party away from approaching voters with wonky policy appeals and achievements to focusing on making sure regular Americans know what the modern GOP has planned for them is no small reform. It requires a revolution of thought based on the cold, hard, realities of the American electorate i lay out in the book.

In my forthcoming book Hit Em’ Where it Hurts: How to Save Democracy By beating Republicans at their Own Game I highlight the other massive problem that hampers Democrats in terms of message distribution.

You can have the greatest messaging in the world but it doesn’t do shit if no one sees it and folks, as I keep using google trend data to show how little Americans care about news and politics, no one sees it.

This is the fundamental flaw behind the White House’s efforts to lift Bidenomics: paid ads, speeches, and social content will never replace the ability of the right wing echo chamber to propel things, even false things like Joe Biden has dementia, to top-of-mind awareness which is what Democrats would have to accomplish to make voters responsive to Biden’s record.

Yes, message distribution is a tough nut to crack because it requires money, lots and lots of it. Which is why I want to talk to you today about something I call digital direct mail, but what you likely call memes and gifs.

Direct mail is a staple expenditure for competitive campaigns and often voters in swing contests receive plenty of it even if you never do.

In the book I highlight how much better Republicans tend to do with direct mail because they understand the target, the average voter, knows next to nothing about civics, cares even less, and will give the same direct mail your team agonized over for hours about 3 seconds of a glance before it is tossed directly into the recycling bin.

Republicans understand voters and have constructed their direct mail to deliver the main message in just that one glance using very little copy.

A rigorous direct mail campaign, one that targets voters with the multiple contacts research says voters need to actually show up and vote, easily runs l into the tens of thousands. It is expensive to produce and then distribution direct mail through the USPS.

But when you strip down direct mail to its purpose, delivering a message, it is easy to see that the internet creates a massive message distribution advantage if campaigns choose to see it as such.

That is why I’m delighted to introduce you to the Freedom Writer’s Collaborative and one of their dedicated grassroots volunteers, marketing strategist Yvonne Brandon. Yvonne joins me to talk about the ready-to-use messaging toolkits created with the also awesome folks at DemCastUSA where the meme that leads of this post was pulled from.

I hope you will consider using these toolkits, and even more importantly, getting your friends, family, and followers to do the same.

Whether your network is 150 people, or 150, everyone is an influencer. FWC makes it easy.

Anyone who has a MAGA relative knows “The Look.”

“The Look” presents itself as a wry, know-it-all smirk, which you just know is going to morph into some kind of smart ass MAGA talking point about something stupid coming from the far fringes of the Democratic Party’s base like Defund the Police.

“So Rachel, if we defund the police, who are you going to c…

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The first time I posted about the harsh reality of America’s collapsing democracy, it seemed like many folks were genuinely surprised to see that America is not actually the Greatest Democracy on Earth.

According to the democracy index compiled by the EIU and published annually by The Economist, America is actually a “flawed” democracy.

The United States was downgraded from “full” to “flawed” democracy after half of America handed the keys to the White House to a wannabe dictator-con man who immediately began to roll back civil liberties and ignore the rule of law.

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Sadly, America’s not even the best “flawed” democracy.

Technically we’re only the 6th best “flawed” democracy, one spot behind Israel (a state folks who have been mainlining antisemitic propaganda from Hamas for the past decade describe as an “apartheid state” of “colonizing” “oppressors” committing “genocide.”)

That’s why the very second I saw the topic Steve Levitsky’s and Daniel Ziblatt’s latest book, Tyranny of the Minority I knew I had to get them onto the show.

In Tyranny, Levitsky and Ziblatt, who are both professors at Harvard and are also the authors of another important book you should definitely read titled How Democracies Die, have put their fingers right onto the pulse of something you need to understand: America’s institutions are failing and must be reformed for our democracy to ever flourish again.

Our institutions were brilliant constructs of an 18th century world and a newly born country with one common fear among its creators: too much consolidation of federal power.

Thus, America’s Constitution was constructed to remove the creation of policy from the direct control of its chief executive, which is why most Americans are familiar with the terms “checks and balances” and “separation of powers” even if they’d be hard-pressed to specify what it means exactly, or how it actually works, in any meaningful way.

So concerned with the centralization of national power were the Founding Fathers that they codified checks and balances and separation of powers within each branch of government too.

As America is painfully learning right now, the House of Representatives was given sole “first mover” power in the appropriations process even though the “power of the purse” was granted to Congress at large. We can not fund the government without the House of Representatives which is why having it closed for 3 weeks while the Republican Party fights over custody of the kids is so damaging to our domestic and foreign policy interests.

Its why federal judicial appointments and treaty approval power belongs solely to the Senate.

Its why Chief Justice John Marshall wasn’t laughed out of the room when he asserted that the judicial branch had a “right of review” of actions taken by the legislative and executive branches in what went on to be called “judicial review.”

Yes, the Founding Fathers were positively OBSESSED about centralized power and did everything they could to gum up the works and force compromise in a system designed with one main goal in mind: to avoid creating a tyranny of the majority.

American institutions are designed to have a bias against action. It is very easy to propose legislative goals and very hard to actually enact them. This was true in America’s best of times and this, my friends, is not the best of times.

Fast forward 236 years and the very same institutional checks and balances that were supposed to protect us from a king have left America all but paralyzed on policy formation. Name a pressing policy problem and you’d be hard pressed to find Congress effectively legislating it despite robust public opinion begging for action on issues like immigration reform, climate change, and gun safety.

So what happened? Why have the institutions that served our young Republic so well, for so long, suddenly feel like they’re in danger of collapse?

Listen and find out.

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Third party general election spoilers have been a BIG topic this cycle given No Label’s foolish and destructive threat to field a well-funded independent “unity” ticket against Trump and Biden.

The angst over No Labels is completely warranted: third party defection in 2016 swung the Blue Wall states to Donald Trump with just a plurality of the vote, a b…

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What if I was to tell you the Republican Party’s villain-in-chief, the main protagonist in the Republican Party’s “Democrats are socialists” Big Lie, Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is an ideological moderate serving in a likewise still moderate Democratic Party?

Understandably, you wouldn’t believe me, so I would have to present some pretty compelling evidence to change your mind.

Enter that evidence: VoteView.

What is VoteView?

VoteView is a data analysis tool built by a group of now famous political scientists that measures the ideological behavior of members of Congress, from it’s very first session to the current 118th.

It does so in an innovative way. Rather than look at members’ campaign platforms, policy position memos, ads, and stump speeches for their stated ideology, VoteView populates its ideology scores using the non-unanimous roll call votes of members of Congress.

Each vote, on each contentious bill, by each member of the House, and each senator, enters a model as a series of meaningless 0s and 1s which indicate whether each member who voted on a vote voted yeah or nay.

This means the model calculates an ideological score without even knowing who the member is, what each vote was about, which party the member serves in, or whether they serve in a swing or safe seat.

The scores range from -1 to 1 with -1 being the most liberal score and 1 being the most conservative. I

It is important to understand how to interpret VoteView scores. -1 to +1 is a narrow scale, the difference so between a 0.5 score and a 0.8 score is substantial! In VoteView a score equal or less than 0.5 (positive or negative) is a “moderate” score. A score like positive or negative 0.8 means the member is a strong ideologue.

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Unlike member scores from GovTrack, VoteView is blind to the topic of the vote AND (and this is very important) plots ideology for each member as they relate to every other member of both parties.

This means that we can get a full, largely unbiased, measurement of each member’s ideology, but we can also measure ideological change across both time and chamber of Congress (House or Senate). In plain English, that means we can compare how polarized Congress has been across different points of America’s 236 years of constitutional history.

As you can see from the graph below (which does not yet include the current 118th session) the ideological distribution of each party in the House and Senate has changed considerably across time. The gaps between the red line (Republicans) and the blue line (Democrats) have narrowed and enlarged at different points of American political development. A large gap between the red and blue lines means high levels of polarization.

Now, look closely at the two yellow loops I marked out and you will see we are currently as polarized as we were in the 1850s heading into Civil War.

Good times!

You should also be able to see that Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left. The data don’t lie: Republicans have polarized more than Democrats in Congress.

Mapped Ideology of the Legislative Branch: 1st session to the 117th Session

Now, lets take a look at what VoteView data can tell us about the ideological make-up of the 118th Congress, our current Congress.

Ideology of the 118th House of Representatives Ideology of the 118th Senate What you are seeing above are two plot graphs that show the ideology scores for each of the 435 current members of the House and 100 members of the Senate. Again, the blue dots are Democrats, the red dots are Republicans.

The axis of relevance here is the X axis (the bottom axis) which displays a dot for each member of each respective chamber to show where they fall along that -1 to 1 ideology score range.

Two things that should stand out are the number of red dots versus blue dots that are on the respective ellipses (ends) as well as proximity of each cluster of dots to the middle of the plot because that middle reflects ideological scores close to 0 (perfect moderation) while the ellipses are scores that max out as very conservative/very liberal.

If you look closely, you should see a clear asymmetry between the parties in terms of ideological extremism.

Here’s a fun fact: there are 7 Republican senators who are more conservative than Elizabeth Warren is liberal (Schmitt, Tuberville, Paul, Lee, Vance, Cruz, Braun) and although Warren is by far the most liberal Democrat in the senate (liberal score of -0.752) she is nowhere near as liberal as Mike Lee and Rand Paul are conservative (0.891, respectively). She is an outlier, they are an entire caucus.

As for AOC?

AOC is just the 180th most liberal Democrat in the House of Representatives. Given that there are only currently 212 Democrats, that’s pretty damn moderate!

Now, you might be wondering, “Rachel, what does this even mean?” It means that America doesn’t have a “both sides” problem, it has a Republican Party problem.

And that, my friends, brings us to my conversation with David Corn about his recent book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, which is the feature of this Finally Back from Summer pod.

As many of you know, Corn is the DC Bureau Chief of Mother Jones magazine and an intrepid investigative reporter who’s so inside the Beltway he’s outside it. What you may not know is that David offers a newsletter called Our Land which you can subscribe to here.

So, how exactly did the Republican Party go crazy?

It’s a long story that begins…

BIG NEWS!!!My magnum opus Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at their Own Game(Crown 2024)is available for pre-order RIGHT NOW!

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Listen now (32 min) | New Analysis by Way to Win Shows the Power of Tapping into Roe Rage

Folks, with the 2024 Republican nomination contest just starting to gear up (yes, its just starting! In fact, it won’t ‘start’ for the bulk of the Republican primary electorate until October or November) it’s time to discuss one of the main limitations, and abuses of, presidential nomination polling.

In 2019 and early 2020, I spent A LOT of time trying to explain most 2020 Democratic primary voters had no idea who Pete Buttigieg or Beto O’Rourke even were.

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Even after Beto’s exciting Texas senate bid that raised more than $70 million dollars in 2018, 40% of Democratic Party (primary voters are the most engaged voters in the entire nation) had no idea who he was. DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY VOTERS.

This is why I continue to bang the drum that presidential nomination campaigns begin and end on name ID. Those who have reached saturation name ID the year heading into the primary year will usually be the same one or two candidates who end up being competitive to actually win the nomination. The rest of the field is filler (but don’t cry for them, running for president even as a long shot candidate comes with many excellent consolation prizes).

I mention all of this again because we’re already starting to see polling data that is asking questions of favorability data the data itself can not answer.

Case in point, this Harvard CAPS Harris poll which presents favorability margins for the Republican primary field along with some other notable political figures like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (yes, those are sarcasm asterisks).

I want you to pay close attention to the dark and light gray bands in this data because it will tell you a lot about the American electorate. Once you move past the former Vice President Mike Pence, you’ll start to see name ID take a sharp nose dive. 34% of respondents were like Nikki who? For all your angst about Kristin Sinema 55% of American voters have no idea who she is.

Tim Scott’s biggest problem won’t be convincing Republican Party primary voters he’s a better nominee than Donald Trump, its convincing Republican primary voters he exists, and as far as nomination politics goes, its a tale as old as time.

Given this voter ‘knowledge’ constraint, it’s important for pollsters to acknowledge the limitations of data like these in terms of being able to draw substantive insights.

You can compare net favorability for political figures with comparable name ID saturation with each other. For example, net favorability between Biden, Trump, Harris, Musk, Putin, Desantis, Clinton, and probably Pence are valid inferences to draw from these data. Outside of the high name ID subgroup, you aren’t measuring net favorability. And by limiting our analysis in this way, we can learn one very interesting takeaway: America loves celebrities. Always have (here’s looking at you Ronnie and Arnold), always will.

One final note: I get poo poo’d on this quite a bit from other strategists but the biggest strategic advantage House Republicans have right now is that like in 2010, Republicans can use control of the House to drag down Biden’s approvals and remain largely invisible while they do it. As of May 2023, 32% of voters have no idea who Kevin McCarthy is. If we want to win in 2024, we need to change that. It will not change itself.

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If you want to get someone out of a cult, Dr. Steven Hassan is your man.

Inspired to a career focused on cults by his own personal experience being tricked into joining one, Dr. Hassan has spent decades researching, writing, and talking about cults and is skilled at getting folks out of them.

In fact, he literally wrote the manual on understanding and breaking cult allegiance, Combating Cult Mind Control (4th edition), which I strongly urge you to check out, ESPECIALLY if like me, you’ve lost friends and relatives into the Cult of Trump.

Dr. Hassan has also created an excellent free resource called Freedom of Mind Resource Center which provides a wealth of information on how to help someone escape a cult. Especially compelling is Dr. Hassan’s recent Ted Talk How to Tell If You’re Brainwashed where you will learn some easy to implement techniques to bring your MAGA relatives back to reality.

Please keep in mind, our Republican friends and relatives are victims of a targeted, intentional, well-funded multi-decade propaganda operation. They are NOT going to fix themselves.

As the good Dr. points out, the only people that can save victims of the Republican’s propaganda system are the people they have long term personal relationships with.

In other words, if not you, who?

The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control

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Two years or so again I began an extensive research project into the totalitarian movements of the 1920s and 1930, with a heavy emphasis on Germany and Italy whose totalitarians regimes hailed from the political right.

When I started this research project I knew very little about the process by which the National Socialists actually rose to power, this despite holding both a college degree and a PhD in political science. My general knowledge was limited to the major battles of WWII and what was by far the Nazi’s worse crime: the systemic slaughter of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

With the tail end of the chaos of the Trump Administration and the Republican Party’s attempt to seize power after the 2020 election, what I wanted from my research was to feel better about the durability of democracy in America.

Instead, it made me feel worse. MUCH worse.

Turns out, how fascism rises is a tale as old as time, and its one that has profound implications for America’s current democratic woes.

That means it’s a tale that must be told.

This is the first in a series of episodes designed to bring what I’ve learned the past two years to you and hopefully from you, to your friends, relatives, and other associates. To assist with this effort, I’m teaming up with real experts on the Third Reich and on authoritarianism to talk about different aspects of how exactly, the Nazis seized power.

Today’s expert is Benjamin Hett, Professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, author of the must-read book The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic.

Whether it is the Weimer Republic in Germany, pre-Mussolini Italy, modern Hungary, or most Cold War Russia, the common thread behind every successful totalitarian movement is underreaction by the rest of society while there is still time to stop them.

Once the crisis is obvious to everyone, it is already far too late.

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The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

Leigh McGowen, of IamPoliticsGirl and The Politics Girl pod fame, intrinsically gets the purpose, the proper forms, and the distribution realties of modern messaging.

That’s why I was jazzed to bring my fellow messaging (and messy bun) aficionado onto The Cycle to talk about her rise as one of the Democratic Party’s brightest and best messaging stars.

Leigh has launched Politics Girl on YouTube so PLEASE SUBSCRIBE NOW. You’ll find links to all of her great messaging content in one convenient space!

So, what happens when you bring two fiery suburban mom messaging reformers together in one pod? You’ll have to listen to find out.

Spoiler Alert:

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If you find polling interesting or frustrating (or both!) this is the episode for you!

U-Mass Amherst pollster and Associate Professor Alex Theodoridis is on the pod to talk about challenges facing modern polling and how to properly conduct and present survey results given the impacts on mass behavior of hyperpartisanship, which you should think of as partisanship, but on steroids.

In addition to the above conversation I want to make damn sure you see Alex’s data drop from their latest poll, which quite clearly illustrates the effect propaganda is having on rank and file Republicans (and ONLY on them) in regards to mainstreaming the very dangerous Great Replacement Theory. Right wing media has been working hard to lay down the antecedents to the same type of dehumanizing “othering” perfected by Joseph Goebbels for the Nazis and folks, IT’S WORKING.

What you are looking at is data being properly reported out to account for the reality that political survey data must now be analyzed broken down by party, with each party’s independent “leaners” added to the pool of admitted partisans. You see “All respondents” which is the collective responses from everyone surveyed, followed by the responses by party group.

The poll question, “Do some elected officials want to increase immigration to bring in obedient voters to vote for them,” is derived from a narrative increasingly common on top-grossing Fox News shows such as Tucker Carlson’s show.

The first graph, subtitled “all respondents” shows the collective opinion of all people surveyed and finds 37% of all respondents agree, or strongly agree, with the statement.

It is important to note that Alex and team, quite shrewdly in my estimate, left their question free of a partisan “nudge.” There is nothing in the survey question that provides a partisan “clue” as to which party is for, or against, the viewpoint because partisan cues are so powerful I once used an experimental survey design to demonstrate I could move support for cap & trade by 40 points among Republican respondents simply by telling respondents Republicans proposed the policy!

Thus, this pool of respondents were given NO HINT of the “proper” partisan position. This is why the data reported is especially notable because as we look at the responses broken down by party, nearly half of Republicans and their leaners STRONLY AGREE with the statement. The best point of comparison is the “pure” independent pool (no leaners) where just 21% of respondents strongly agree.

Two main takeaways here, folks. One, Great Replacement Theory is now a mainstream, near majority, attitude among rank and file Republican voters That’s REALLY bad because as we’re already seeing that when you’ve been brainwashed into thinking your facing an existential race crisis, you do crazy shit like armed insurrections and ordering drive bys on Democrats.

But its also important because it quite clearly quantifies what I will call the GOP’s propaganda effect. It is real, it is measurable, and it is coming for democracy.

When you have to google the spelling of “cuckold",” you know you’re about to drop a hot pod!

The Liberty Way reads like some kind of modern Footloose, forcing students to adhere to a moral code so strict, you expect the punishments to include stoning.

That’s why the revelation that “America’s largest Christian university’s” University’s President Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becki Falwell have a “cuckold” itch they sneak off to South Beach to scratch it was a REALLY BIG DEAL.

And because Falwell Jr. had the good sense to be exposed as the world’s biggest religious hypocrite during the heavy news cycles of the Trump Administration he helped create by handing America’s evangelicals to Donald Trump on a silver platter, this particular scandal may have slipped past you.

That’s a damn shame because it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person, which is why I’m deeply grateful to Miami filmmaker Billy Corbin not only for making a doc about Falwell’s sex scandal, but making it so compelling you have to watch it all.

And as Billy says, “good night and good cuck.”

Did you know that in order to advance in ‘degrees’ in the Proud Boys you have to vow to stop jacking off so you can unleash your pent-up violence on your innocent victims?!

That’s why you NEED a copy of Andy Campbell’s new book: We Are Proud Boys: How A Rightwing Street Gang Ushered In A New Era Of American Extremism.

I haven’t had a chance yet to present the sum of my research into the collapse of democracies and the rise of totalitarians, but rest assured, I intend to spend the next year of my life impressing upon you just how far down the fascism rabbit hole America has already slipped. Especially in the formation of the violent, right-wing domestic terrorism groups American law seems hapless to preemptively address.

We’ll kick off our year-long effort with a look at Nazi militias like the Proud Boys, which Republicans have spent the past few years normalizing and legitimating. The “extremism” beat is usually a lonely beat, but that was before the American Republican Party decided to collapse into a fascist cult. Now it is one of the most important, and dangerous, beats in contemporary journalism. That’s why you should give Andy Campbell an immediate follow and pick up a copy of his book, RIGHT NOW!

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In this short, but spirited conversation, Tom Bonier of Target Smart and Simon Rosenberg of NDN and host of the With Democrats, Things Get Better series, joins me on the pod to laugh at the Republican Party’s red tinkle.

Target Smart, it is the Democrat’s premier voter targeting firm and creator of the incredible Target Early tool, which allows users to easily and quickly access critical information such as registration and voter turnout.

I’m starting out this post by showing folks what the polling data environment looked like over the course of the 2010 midterm cycle, where Republicans ended up netting 63 House seats. Compared to the data from 2022, you can see significant environmental differences between 2010 and this cycle.

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It's Polarization, Stupid.

Democracy is on the ballot, and we need to hit ‘em where it hurts

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Listen now (57 min) | Brynn Tannehill, Author of American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy, Forces Us To Deal With a New "Inconvenient Truth."

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Listen now (40 min) | How Seth Hill & his co-authors cracked the code on investigating turnout effects on election results

Listen now (54 min) | For the past 30 years, political scientist Gary Jacobson has documented America's slide into mass polarization. His 2020 update will terrify you.

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Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing

Listen now (50 min) | My convo with Dr. David Moscrop about his above-titled book and how human behavior/psychology is poorly suited for democracy (but well-designed political institutions & rules help a lot!)

Too Dumb for Democracy?: Why we make bad political decisions and how we can make better ones

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Listen now | Like many of you, the realization that Democrats would have majority control of the Senate after the improbable victories of Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s runoff elections on January 5th was electrifying! I imagine that for one of my personal heroes, Stacey Abrams, it also came with a deeply satisfying “see! we told you this electoral strategy would work!” as we saw how modernized electioneering can pay dividends even in some of the harshest electoral environments.

MSNBC's The Last Word's host, Lawrence O'Donnell Will Give Rare Interview on Senate- Submit Your Questions!

All, Here is a preview of the new Strike Pac ad we’re dropping today, to celebrate the inauguration of Joe Biden and the hard fought senate majority Democrats clawed from Georgia by implementing cutting edge voter turnout and messaging innovations pushed by people like myself and Stacey Abrams. But these campaign innovations are put into action by thous…

Listen now (42 min) | If there is one other person out there more bullish than I am regarding Donald Trump’s capabilities for Mussolini-like behaviors, it’s his niece Mary Trump. Mary made a splash when her tell-all book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man

Strike Back With STRIKE PAC

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Wednesday the 6th will be Trump-driven shitshow in D.C. when Republicans in Congress will turn a mere formality with the Electoral College certification process into a clown show. Thanks to an initial “toe-in-the-water” by senator and 2024 hopeful Josh Hawley, support for the circus in the senate, the chamber supposedly for grown-ups, quickly ballooned to a dozen (now 13) Republican senators. The effort already had robust enthusiasm in the House. Nearly 70% of that chamber’s Republican caucus, including their rudderless “leader,” Kevin McCarthy will vote against certification.

Trump’s effort to steal the election, which has unfolded almost entirely in plain sight and is being done using a classic GOP methodology of “gaslighting:” accusing the victim of the very crime being perpetrated against them by making his rallying cry “Stop the Steal.” The irony of their effort to commit election fraud at a massive scale via making erroneous claims of voter fraud seems entirely lost on President Trump and most of his Republican enablers.

With about half of the Republican Party devolving into what Steve Schmidt has dubbed a pro-authoritarianism faction (after all, if Republicans got what they wanted, democracy would end in U.S., Trump would be installed as a leader or an authoritarian state, and one party rule would commence) the events of the past two months are new chapters in a crisis that has been playing out within the Republican Party for the past decade.

I had come to think of the wart within the GOP as over since Donald Trump not only won the Republican primaries in 2015, but more importantly, became formally nominated by the Republican Party at their party’s nominating convention in the summer of 2016. Until that event, the party still had power to stop Trump’s candidacy, and given his “outsider” status and clear lack of the behavioral requisites to perform the job, legitimate rationales for doing so.

Such a move, while being accepted by the country’s middle, would have been seen as provocative by the progressive base of the Democratic Party and would have provoked a mass implosion within the Republican base. That would have surely written off the GOP’s chances of reclaiming the White House in 2016- a situation that too many elites found untenable after 8 years under Obama. Ultimately, this is what led the party to accept Trump as their standard bearer, even though many of them had devoted the months previous to arguing with their peers that nominating Trump would not only destroy the Republican Party, but likely the very country itself.

Once Trump won the general election though, and became transactionally useful to Republicans the fight for the soul of the Republican Party felt over. Trump had clear control over Republican voters and because elected Republicans in Congress share his constituencies, four years of obedience ensued, leading to the least disciplined presidency in the country’s history that has already locked in “worst president” before the COVID19 crisis rolled in to allow Trump to leave his competitors so far in the rearview they can’t be seen anymore.

MAGA became the modern version of the Republican Party (the 2020 Republican national convention was a great demonstration of what this means, but it can be summed up in one word: Trump) and current members of the party had just a few options to avail themselves to: conform proudly, acquiesce silently, or flee the party. Despite perceptions, the great majority of current Republicans, at least as of the onset of COVID19 were quite pleased with MAGA Republicanism, even the intentional cruelty, a fact that the other half of America, at some point, will have to allow themselves to confront.

Yet, here we are, once again looking at a Republican Party being forced into a choice by Donald Trump: support authoritarianism one-party rule under Donald Trump or continued democracy. So far, because of Mitch McConnell and several other Republicans like senator Pat Toomey and Tom Cotton who remember what being a small c conservative is supposed to mean (it doesn’t involve acty of radicalism like sedition!) and like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican Secretary of State in Georgia, the anti-authoritarians within the Republican Party are maintaining the upper hand. McConnell’s anti-authoritarian faction are set to stand with senate Democrats on behalf of democracy and the rule of law on Wednesday. It’s not hyperbolic to note that the fate of 243 years of democracy hangs on McConnell’s ability to deliver their votes.

Fortunately, because we’re still seeing additions to McConnell’s faction, and pro-democracy activism from Dick Cheney, this suggests the votes will be there on Wednesday. This is thanks, in no small part to to the shiny example that Raffensperger is setting for his fellow Republicans. By standing stalwartly against Trump’s illegal power grab, even in the face of extreme pressure, Secretary Raffensperger has single-handedly done more to subvert Trump’s anti-democratic coup than anyone else. Because keep in mind, Trump alludes to having made similar calls to the one Raffensperger shared with the public. Yet, we have learned of only the one.

The President has cooked up a bit of political theater for the streets of D.C. to correspond with the drama inside the Capitol building. He means to stage a show of support for the country’s “rightful” king. Trump has demonstrated time and again a total lack of regard for the public’s safety, as the illegal clearing of Lafayette Square Park showed. He’s hoping to lure to D.C. clashing factions: his “team” of racists, “Proud Boys” neo-nazis, and other “deplorables” against “antifa” protesters.

Whether MAGA world actually believes, or not, the totally fabricated story Trump and his team tells to convince people that Joe Biden didn’t really win the 2020 election by 7 million votes and robust margins in eight swing states (the most narrow were WI, GA, and AZ but all three of those have been recounted multiple times and thus verified extensively thanks to Trump’s efforts) is moot. They will never admit one way or the other. So long as they pretend to believe it, they can continue to wield it like a weapon and try to drag American democracy down with them.

So what can be done? Having both the truth and the law on your side is not inconsequential. What people can control is the truth. The true timeline, narrative, and facts of the election leaves zero room for Trump’s thesis to be true: and at some point, the truth and the law are coming for MAGA world and Trump’s tenure as president.

As Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling explained in his latest news conference, truth is immutable. Trump’s fantasy world and the real one are on an inevitable collision course. There is a firm date, time, and location for this crash: January 20th, 2021 at high noon. Once the clock runs down to that moment, Trump world’s evasions will no longer work and as Brett Baier challenged senator Hawley last night in an interview on Fox News, Trump voters that are being led-on about the prospects of a Trump second term are going to get a harsh dose of reality.

The question then becomes, what will happen then? Given last week’s podcast looking at lethal mass partisanship, the willingness of partisans to tolerate, even crave, physical punishment for the opposition party’s leaders and or even voters, it seems reasonable to worry about, and be wary of, the potential for political violence this month. Far worse than the fact that Donald Trump behaves irresponsibly with his rhetoric and seems incapable of appreciating the power of the presidency’s “bully pulpit” to incite violence, is the fact that he does get it. That he understands this power just fine. Indeed, watching Trump’s actions over the 5 years of his presidential experience, it’s not unfair to say that at times, Trump has intentionally tried to provoke violence- knowing full well what he was doing and frankly, enjoying the hell out of it.

But what Trump has artfully arranged in D.C. goes far beyond treatment of counter-protestors at rallies, or the treatment of arrestees by police. What Trump appears to have been up to over the past two weeks is an effort to convince the public that the election was literally stolen from him and that people should come to D.C. on Wednesday, January 6th to “Stop the Steal.” Certainly, the KellyAnne Conway’s of Trump World would shoot these allegations down, asserting that of course Trump means to only have peaceful protestors come to D.C. to protest the election and would discourage any violence in his name. But watch Trump talk about the protests and about people coming to D.C. and it’s clear- Trump vision for these protests is an angry mob, pitchforks waving, demanding their rightful ruler be reinstalled to his rightful throne.

The question is, what types of people will answer his call, and what level of devotion will be they be willing to bring to the cause? With the potential for violence and unrest high, does that make it more, or less likely, the type of crowd forms that is conducive to violence? Certainly, the bulk of Republicans who have been made to be upset about Trump’s loss and have been lied to in order to convince them that the election is being stolen would want to come to D.C. to engage in peaceful protest and would have no interest in violence or mayhem.

But it would be naive, after Charlottesville and the events of the past few years not to assume that neo-nazis, white supremacists, and other violent groups are currently descending on D.C., as are “antifa” protestors deploying to counteract them. Security in the city will be a mess and there is no way I’d suggest heading to D.C. on Wednesday if your interest is in peaceful assembly. So it begs a question- will people be willing to subject themselves to potential harm on behalf of Donald Trump?

To understand who and why might be willing to do so, I invite physician and sociologist Dr. Jonathan Metzl onto the show. He made a huge splash last year with his book and it’s provocative title, Dying Of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. As I told Jonathan, the second I saw this book I KNEW it would resonate with my own research and with the political science literature on polarization and hyperpartisnahip generally. I’ve been “dying” to talk to him about his research for a long time, especially given that the COVID crisis came along and at a mass scale, “horribly vindicated” his thesis.

We have a great chat about his work, talk about whether Trump’s base might be willing to “die for Trump” Wednesday, and bemoan and worry over our current collapsing democracy while musing over possible ways to save it.

Given that today is the Georgia runoff, Dr. Metzl and I are hosting a live Zoom event tonight at 6pm (ETA) in honor of the release of the pod & in conjunction with tonight’s nerve racking election. The Zoom Q & A is open only to paid subscribers, who will receive an invitation email to the event later this afternoon.

Happy Listening!!

Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites

It is rare that a political party gets handed gifts in the closing weeks of an election as nice as the ones Donald Trump has handed Democrats to close out the Georgia senate runoff elections. Not only are Georgia’s dual senate runoffs unprecedented in that two senate races will be decided on the same runoff ballot, together these races will determine party control of the senate for the next two years at a time where roughly half of the Republican House Caucus and a dozen GOP senators have split off into what Steve Schmidt aptly calls the party’s authoritarian faction.

Disturbingly, we’re opening 2021 with roughly half of the Republican Party openly advocating for, and actively working to impose, an end of democracy in America and the imposition of a one-party state with Donald Trump at its helm.

As astounding a sentence as that is for me to write and for you to read, it’s not a hyperbolic overstatement of the sort deployed casually over the past two decades by Republicans in right-wing media to bump ratings and win elections. With 16 days between us and Joe Biden’s inauguration, the only thing standing between us and a full-blown constitutional crisis is that key Republicans at both the national and state level of influence are, for now, holding the line.

Should those lines fall and the whole of the Republican Party become pro-authoritarian, the parchment protections Americans are relying on to transition the powers of the presidency to the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden, will then be tested in ways frankly not even Hollywood script writers have ever deigned to imagine. Fortunately, senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as well as a host of Republican state officials seems to understand how just consequential a moment this is for American democracy. and along with other Republican senators like Tom Cotton, John Thune, and Lisa Murkowski, have pledged to join with Democrats to approve the Electoral College on Wednesday. The Democratic Party’s majority in the House of Representatives ensures that chamber’s certification.

Nothing underscores better that McConnell’s control over his senate caucus is faltering than the fact that his junior senator from Missouri, just two years into his first term, felt emboldened enough to no-show his leader’s caucus call even though he was the guest of honor.

Like their fellow Republicans, both Loeffler and Perdue understand that allegations of electoral fraud in Georgia, and everywhere else for that matter, are completely contrived fabrications, some literally made up out of thin air on the stump, of the Trump campaign- propaganda created to sow permanent doubt about the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s presidency and to deflect attention away from the cold, hard fact that the mighty Donald Trump had lost to “Sleepy Joe,” a man who the campaign had painted as a secret, wheelchair-bound dementia patient on his last legs who wouldn’t survive the first year of his first term.

To get electorally crushed by such a frail, helpless and hapless person is humiliating to say the least. You can hear this in Trump’s voice, like in the secretly recorded audio of his attempt to bribe and extort Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into committing election fraud on his behalf in order to steal the Georgia election from Joe Biden (the irony of him committing massive fraud to “prove” fake fraud is, of course, completely lost on Trump world).

So, it is perhaps because of the attention needed to fuel Trump world’s full court press into an authoritarian coup that he was allowed to blunder, stridently so, into one of the stupidest campaign gaffes of all time.

On December 22nd seemingly out of the blue, Trump threatened to veto Congress’ hard-fought and months-long compromise bill on COVID bill because the bill only contained $600 individual stimulus checks- the exact amount his own negotiator, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had negotiated for on his behalf. The veto threat came out of left field, but more importantly, it completely screwed one person in particular, Mitch McConnell, who instantly went from hero to zero and was suddenly exposed as the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

McConnell was lodged between Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic Party majority in the House and President Trump, who had suddenly realized the value of playing populist’s hero as it relates to stirring up public sentiment on his behalf for his efforts to subvert democracy. The timing could not be worse for Republicans in terms of the senate runoff races. Trump’s called the $600 stimulus a disgrace, setting Democrats up not only with an upper hand to reopen negotiations, but also to frame the Georgia races in clear economic terms for voters: vote for Democrats and get paid. Keep Republicans in power and continue to get short changed.

President Trump had given Democrats the perfect issue to use to illustrate why party control matters. And because of the ideological rigidity of his senate caucus, who were just now (predictably) rediscovering their deep devotion to fiscal austerity after 4 years of wild spending under Trump, there was not a damn thing McConnell could do about it.

Generally, it’s hard to out-maneuver McConnell, and Democrats would do well to never let their dislike of the Senate Majority Leader blind them to his considerable talents, especially in terms of strategic planning. But Trump’s madness has no method. You can’t strategically plan around Donald Trump because he is wholly undisciplined and prone to undercutting your carefully laid plans at any moment (my particular favorite Trumpism is his tendency to unveil their evil plans out-loud during freewheeling press conferences because he’s so excited about them, he can’t stop himself from telling us what they have planned).

But a gift horse must still be saddled up and ridden. Having an increasingly terrifying Republican Party who is holding the nation’s promised $2,000 stimulus checks hostage is an impressive campaign arsenal to close out your campaign on. But only if you use it!

When polls open at 7am on Election Day one of two scenarios will unfold. We will see what we saw in the fall where the long lines of early voting set up smooth flows on Election Day, robust voting traffic with few issues and none of the congestion that marked the state’s June primary. Or we might see robust activity. Turnout that like what we’ve seen in early voting days and that clearly indicates record setting runoff participation and enthusiasm.

One thing is clear, the Republican Party is generally the party that dominates Election day voting, and this has been exacerbated by Donald Trump’s months-long campaign against the voting system’s integrity which has pushed Republican voters increasingly towards Election Day voting.

For their part, Jon Ossoff and the Reverend Raphael Warnock have worked to frame their races as a collective undertaking, acknowledging the broader implications than their one seat and the various policies they will advocate for and vote on during their senate tenure. Right out of the gate- it was not clear that Democrats understood these seats would best be marketed as a pair. Winning one is not enough as it leaves Democrats a seat shy of the majority in the senate. The initial messaging for both campaigns was a continuation of their fall campaigns- policy-focused and singular. Conversely, the GOP launched the Loeffler and Perdue campaigns as a pair working in tandem, branded as a unity ticket created to make a firewall against potential “Marxist” and “communist” ideas allegedly advanced by Democrats.

But within a couple of weeks, the messaging for Democrats was revised to better market the races collectively, and in a nationalized, “stakes framed” context that urges voters to see the seats through the lens of the senate majority and the Democratic Party’s effort to potentially give President-elect Joe Biden a governing trifecta (although it should be noted, a legislative filibuster would remain a major hurdle to any Biden agenda). The past two months on the stump, Ossoff in particular has described the runoff as a contest in which a young Jewish son of an immigrant and a Black, senior pastor at Dr. King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church” are running together as “brothers from another mother” to flip the senate to Democrats and voters, it seems, have responded.

Democrats have been assisted mightily in this effort by Trump in two critical ways. First, his effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, to execute a coup in plain site has been deeply unsettling and has likely made Americans wary of Republican-control of the Senate. Certainly, this is a message that would seem ripe to be exploited given the amount of reliance the country has right now on Mitch McConnell, who appears to be the safeguard between the country and an increasingly radical Republican Party.

In addition, Trump’s surprise veto threat of the months delayed COVID relief bill over the size of the individual stimulus checks which his own negotiator Treasury Secretary Mnuchin negotiated on his behalf handed Democrats one of the clearest contrast issues in the history politics. Two things were clear from the first moment that Trump’s video veto threat aired. First, there was no way in hell McConnell could pass a $2,000 stimulus bill because of his own caucus. Second, there was no way that President Trump was serious about helping McConnell do it. Instead of announcing his plans to stay in Washington, rolling up his sleeves, and imploring Congress to do the same, Trump boarded Air Force One and took off to the Winter White House in Florida for four days of golf.

For days, people were not even really sure if he meant his veto threat seriously, or if it was some kind of weird mood swing that might have passed through his system over Christmas holiday. Then, suddenly on Sunday the tweets started, and all illusions were stripped away. McConnell was going to have to navigate COVID relief without Trump’s $2,000 “ask” and then get through these senate runoffs with his own majority on the line having failed to deliver and with few options to deflect the blame.

Still, given the outcome of the 2020 general election in November, the Senate Majority Leader had reasons to be hopeful. The Trump Era, especially the last year and the COVID time period, have produced several significant issues for the senate’s majority that should have triggered democratic accountability in the 2020 cycle including an impeachment acquittal in a “trial” where additional evidence was banned but not needed anyway because the evidence of guilt was already overwhelming. and at the time close to 350,000 COVID deaths.

Yet, Election Day 2020 saw most of his endangered caucus survive their challenges. Only those senators facing the surge turnout electorates in realigning states (Colorado and Arizona) went on to lose. All the races in which “persuasion” was required Democrats had fallen short, most particularly senate long-timer Susan Collins in Maine, who had done much to undermine her reputation as a moderate “maverick” who bucked her party when it really mattered.

Although Collins had broken with Republicans to vote yes on allowing witnesses at Trump’s impeachment trial in the senate (you really should take a second to appreciate the absurdity of the witness vote), she had ignored a pile of incontrovertible evidence of Trump’s guilt and stood Mitt Romney up at the altar, making him the lone Republican vote to convict Trump on his impeachment charges.

Collins had also voted yes on the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, not only angering women who believed the allegations of sexual assault made against him by Christine Blasey Ford during his confirmation hearings, but also because of Judge Kavanaugh’s strident position on limiting access to abortion and receptivity to overturning Roe v. Wade, something Collins, an exceedingly rare pro-choice Republican, had previously claimed was a litmus test for her on judicial appointments.

Yet, come Election Day 2020 Susan Collins sailed to easy victory because Maine’s election returns produced something analysts, including yours truly, thought was unlikely to happen in the current political environment: ticket splitters. As I explained prior to the election, because Joe Biden was likely to carry Maine’s statewide popular vote, the only way that Susan Collins could retain her seat was for some Biden voters (these would largely be Independents) to “split” their tickets and vote for the Republican, Collins, on their ballot.

This meant that to defeat her, her Democratic challenger, Sara Gideon, needed only to disqualify Collins in the eyes of these potential voters to prevent them from being willing to party split their ballots. And the best way to do that? Equate Susan Collins with Donald Trump, a electioneering technique that is standard fare for decades now for Republican campaigns but remains a frustratingly rare tactic for Democrats for some reason. So, this strategy was not invoked. Instead, Democrats uniformly ran an “issue” or policy-based campaign against Collins, largely ignoring Trump and failing to paint Collins as inseparable from Trump.

Why do I mention this missed opportunity in Maine, and specifically point out that the opportunity was missed due to messaging failure? I do so because the results of tomorrow’s elections in Georgia will ultimately come down to turnout of each party’s coalition. It is music to my ears to hear analysts speaking of these elections that way- having these runoffs understand that ultimately we’ll be looking at a Democratic night or a Republican one by virtue of which party is best able to motivate their coalition to the polls (keeping in mind, party coalitions include partisans, but also independents that lean towards a party, or what are called independent “leaners” who, at rates approaching 90% will vote for their “lean-to” party as I showed in the 2020 general election with this large n size survey data.

Data from Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group “Nationscape” 2020 Data: July 1 ReleaseAlthough the Democratic candidates have positioned their candidacies together and framed them as determining control of the senate, they should exploit the powerful political assets Trump has handed to them and close their campaigns on the message of what Democratic Party senate control can bring to Georgians. Imminently, that is $2K individual stimulus checks and a safeguard against an increasingly pro-authoritarian Republican Party.

It is the perfect way to both personalize and personify what party control the 117th Congress means for Americans. If Mitch McConnell continues to “rule the roost” voters will continue to look at Washington for help that never comes. But, if Democrats and Independents show up in big numbers on Tuesday, January 5th and cast ballots for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, they can flip control of the senate to Democrats and final break the log jam on Congress addressing America’s policy needs.

And if Democrats were able to drive strong Election Day turnout, the early vote in Georgia tells us a clear story. That story is that for the first time in decades, Democrats have a chance, a real chance of controlling not just one, but two of that Deep South state’s senate seats.

What Stacey Abrams and her fellow organizers, the Democratic Party of Georgia, and the Ossoff and Warnock campaigns have done in terms of early vote performance heading into Election Day is the necessary, but not sufficient, building blocks of a Democratic victory for both races.

But and this is a BIG but, Election Day voting is the Republican Party’s schtick. The RNC’s voter turnout apparatus is state of the art and rarely fails to deliver turnout on the Right that does not hit their marks. The RNC, not the Trump campaign, powered Trump’s 2016 victory and his still impressive 2020 loss. I have no doubt the GOP’s negative partisanship powered fear campaign will produce very strong Republican turnout and will be very surprised if that turnout is anything but allegiant to the two Republican nominees regardless of how large the rally crowds have been at the Loeffler is One of THEM rallies. What I am unsure of is whether it will be enough to erase the clear advantage Democrats have built up in the early vote, vis a vis the Democrat’s own Election Day vote performance.

What we do know about the electorate’s demographic composition, which informs its partisan composition and thus gives us a relatively good sense of the vote choice breakdown, is that this early vote electorate, an impressive nearly 3 million strong, has a modeled party ID advantage for Democrats of about .3pt according to analysis conducted by Tom Bonier of Target Smart, the leading data analytics and voter targeting company for Democrats. This modeled Democratic Party performance is notable because at the same point in 2020’s general election, Republicans held a 5pt party advantage.

The advantage for Democrats is fueled by explosive turnout among Black voters and young voters. In fact, turnout is robust across the entire Democratic coalition, which is the same conditions that occurred in Georgia in the fall, where turnout for every element of the party’s coalition increased sharply, but comparatively ended up dwarfed by a massive surge in turnout among college-educated white voters in the suburbs of Atlanta.

This was not surprising because although Black and other non-white voters received a substantially increased investment in Georgia in 2020, investment in non-white voter turnout still lags considerably in your standard Democratic campaign compared to spending on things such as television ads. It should be noted that along with Georgia, greater emphasis on turnout for non-white voters was also placed in the presidential campaigns in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. Tasked with returning the states to the Blue Wall, the Democratic Party state chairs in those critical swing states consulted with Abrams and Fair Fight prior to the election and invested their own money into turnout via in-person voter outreach work. This was especially necessary because of the suspension of in-person voter outreach work by the Biden campaign and the DCCC/DSCC, which these chairs understood might compromise Democratic voters turnout, regardless of how medically prudent they might be.

I believe that work on turnout of low propensity Democratic voters in these key states for the Electoral College for the presidential race may partially explain the divergent results in 2020 where we saw the presidential outcome perform as predicted by forecasts, including my own, and once voter files are updated with the 2020 data, will be able to examine this further. In congressional races, there was little to no “replacement” in-person GOTV like we saw at the presidential level, where in addition to the state party’s also saw lots of activity at the grassroots level.

Investment in voter turnout overall, and non-white voter turnout specifically still lags considerably in your standard Democratic campaign. Thus, college-educated voters in the suburbs who are naturally the most likely to vote also receive a disproportionate amount of the voter contact from campaigns because it is these voters that are seen as the “persuadable” segment of the electorate.

Additionally promising for Democrats is that nearly 113,000 new voters have joined the ranks of voters for the Georgia senate runoffs- promising enough in and of itself, but once you consider who these voters are, Democrats should feel optimistic because additional Target Smart analysis finds that 22% of them are under the age of 25 (that age bracket only makes up 12% of the electorate) and 40% of them are Black (while Black voters make up 32% of registered voters).

There is a clear enthusiasm advantage, regionally, for metro Atlanta and areas of the state dominated by Democrats, who are very active on the ground in field after seeing suspension of “door knocking” potentially play a role in suppressing turnout in the fall cycle and partially leading to loss House seats in a cycle where I, and every other forecaster, expected them to gain seats. The question is, will this hold over to Election Day?

In their typical playbook, Republicans are bringing Trump into Georgia to stump on Monday in North Georgia- the ex-burbs of Atlanta and an area locals call the North Georgia Mountains, an key area for Republicans. These areas have underperformed their fall 2020 turnout thus far and have the GOP worried. Democrats also appear to be adjusting conceptually to “turnout’ elections. As hard as it is to believe, Democrats haven’t always been keen to bring in big name Democrats to juice turnout.

Even as late as the 2018 midterms, when Donald Trump stumped in virtually every senate race for the party’s candidates, Obama was only used sparingly, in places where he was clearly popular, avoiding races like Missouri, Indiana, and North Dakota where Democratic incumbents faced dealigning electorates. Long time readers of my work will know that I urged Virginia Democrats to bring in key national Democrats, particularly Stacey Abrams and President Obama and the First Lady to key districts in the 2019 Virginia state legislative elections to no avail, although they did not need those districts (which they ultimately did lose) to flip control of the state’s senate).

Instead, and even before the pandemic came along to complicate things (I’m with Joe Scarborough, those car rallies, with the incessant car horn honking is probably never going to grow on me), Democrats have leaned more towards things like robocalls of the type Michelle Obama recently recorded for Reverend Warnock or ads like the musical ad released by President Obama and John Legend erroneously fearing that bringing in Democrats increases Republican turnout (it doesn’t, Republican turnout is high regardless, and not stimulating Democratic turnout ends up hurting Democrats).

But recently, Democrats seem to be adjusting to the polarized era. President Obama hit the stump with Jon Ossoff, holding a socially distanced event with the candidate in December and to close the campaign out, both President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris returned to Georgia to stump for the senate candidates. By happenstance, Georgia voters have been vested with what amounts to “super votes” in these Tuesday runoffs. If Democrats are successful and pick up both of these seats, their decision to show up and vote for two Democratic senators may end up having more impact on American policy than nearly any other vote in our nation’s history.

Its important to keep in mind that Georgia’s flip to Biden in November, and its potential flip to Democrats in the Senate here, is completely dependent on the infrastructure and investments for voter registration and turnout that have been put in place by Stacey Abrams and her group Fair Fight, which she created in the wake of her close loss to Brian Kemp in the state’s 2018 gubernatorial election. Abrams’ work, in conjunction with a host of other voter advocacy groups such as The New Georgia Project, Black Votes Matter,Color of Change, Voto Latino have fundamentally altered politics in the state. Abrams’ close brush with victory in 2018, along with Biden’s 12,000 vote win in 2020 reminds us that whatever the outcome on Tuesday is, it is likely to be razor close, which will be a sharp departure from the norm for these runoffs- which have been typically one-sided shellacking’s in favor of the Republican Party.

Whether its recognition of that fact, realization, after Biden’s win that winning is actually possible in the state, or the endless turbulence being caused by President Trump as he throws everything and the kitchen sink at his effort to not be ousted from power come January 20th, the early vote data, explorable in detail at the Georgia Votes website, provides a solid foundation for Democrats to launch a closing drive from. But the fact remains, they cannot win these seats without an Election Day rally. Donald Trump has given them two key messages to rally around.

Both mobilizing and persuasive in nature, both the Ossoff and Warnock campaigns need to make it clear to voters that party control of government matters and Georgia voters have it within their control, their personal power, to settle that question for the whole country on Tuesday. Given the choice, most people would prefer $2,000 and the continuation of democracy.

It is up to Democrats to ensure that voters realize that is what they’re voting on in Georgia on Tuesday. The message matters and that is a message Democrats will win.

Greetings & Salutations,

If this email is reaching you, it is because you either recently subscribed to my new website, The Cycle-On Substack, or I have your email address from you signing up on a previous listserv indicating your interest in following my work. New subscribers to The Cycle, I cry your pardon, there was no way to separate out this email and in anycase, I want to give you very warm welcome and thank you again for subscribing! You may disregard the information that appears below.

For the rest of you, this email invites you to jolin us by subscribing for The Cycle-On Substack for either a free subscription, or for paid subscription, which adds some additional bells & whistles to the already jam-packed awesomeness of the free account.

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Of course, if you are familiar with my work, you’ll recall there is quite a bit of irreverent humor and profanity mixed into seriously wonky election and voting analysis. Registering for a subscription is your tacit acknowledgment that you’re cool with HBO level material as opposed to public airwaves content.

For those who’ve not been able to follow along on my work (I realize a great many people are not on Twitter, where up until now, all of my activity has been centered) the launch of this website corresponds with another significant venture I’ll be launching in the next couple of weeks- a Super Pac.

That’s right, Im going from teaching about Super Pacs to helping to run one as I seek to put my theories and ideas into practice starting with the Virginia 2021 gubernatorial and state legislative cycle.

That means The Cycle-On Substack is going to present an unprecedented fusion of election analysis and election commentary with actual electioneering. It’s sure to make for some interesting content, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how these two projects unfold and grow from each other.

It’s a journey I hope you’ll want to join me on. To say that 2020 was a challenging year would be an understatement. From a once-a-century pandemic seemingly managed to maximize, rather than minimize, death, to President Trump & the Republican Party’s “plain sight” coup attempts, America, and her people, are limping into the New Year.

Almost immediately, 2021 throws us into a toxic stew. It first features an epic clash for control of the Senate with nothing less than the entire capability of the Biden Administration to govern on the line. The very next day what should have been a formality, Congress certifying the Electoral College, has been turned into a clown show. It’d be funny if it didn’t symbolize the Republican Party’s willingness to cancel the results of the 2020 presidential election, to simply throw out the votes of 81+ million Americans because they went to your opponent and beat you.

Stripped of the comedy, it’s a concept so absurd you know that no American, five years ago, would believe that we’d be in this position. I had trouble convincing people who were already deeply distrustful of the the modern Republican Party that they would be willing to allow Donald Trump to take things this far in terms of these wild coup attempts. And yet, here we are. Perhaps the reddest of all red lines, completely blown by. Blown apart.

Regardless of the fact that President Trump’s efforts in contesting this election were always destined to fail due to the size of Biden’s victory, the fact that he was trying to overthrow our democratic election and largely being supported in that effort by the Republican Party should concern every American. The lies President Trump tells about 2020 are so outlandish his lawyers dare not utter them in any court of law for fear of losing their law licenses. Giuliani and the rest of the legal team ended up with a 1-60 lawsuit record because even Trump appointees stood up for the rule of law, in the great traditions of our legal system.

But Trump and Giuliani didn’t need to win a single lawsuit to cause the damage that they’ve caused to our democracy. In an election described by our nation’s top cyber security official as the most secure in our country’s history and which Attorney General Bill Barr twice reassured the public that there was no evidence of mass voter fraud, 77% of Republicans believe there was fraud in the election.

The counting process in the Midwest was set up to force Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to hold back the counting of hundreds of thousands of mailed-in ballots until midnight on election night (something the Trump campaign sued these states to ensure would happen). This was done to intentionally allow the the Trump campaign to build engineered suspense around their so-called “red mirage-” which refers to the fact that for awhile, when only 50% or 60% of ballots had been counted, Trump held a small, but distinct lead in the Midwest.

If you listen carefully to Trump now, you’ll hear him refer to this time period. He’ll say something along the lines of “we were winning! We had a big advantage and then all of the sudden Biden is winning?! He’ll be incredulous that counting the other HALF of the ballots impacted the race and asserts over and over that these ballots (again half of the total ballots cast which were received before Election Day and held at election offices by mandate of state law) led to Biden’s victory- but you can see why the courts have uniformly affirmed Biden’s win and often summarily rejected Trump’s appeals. Excluding half the legal ballots from a contest is the roughest of legal arguments to make. And when all the ballots are counted, even just the ones that arrived before Election Day, it is clear that just as my theory predicted way, way, way back in 2019, Trump got his ass kicked.

Between their vote counting shenanigans and their outright lies, Trump and his Republican enablers have done great damage to the already struggling institution of American elections. Yet, though America is deeply wounded with polarization and hyperpartisanship, her Constitution still stands strong and true against those that seek to betray it.

That said, we are about to endure a presidential transition unlike any the country has ever endured in its history. At noon on January 20th the powers of the American presidency will be divested from Donald Trump and installed in Joe Biden. That moment will, without a doubt, present a significant reduction of imminent danger for our nation and because of our unique role in the world, for the world. But, as our problems pre-date Donald Trump, they will remain beyond his tenure as president. The behavior of the Republican Party, post-election, makes this clear. Depressingly so.

It has been, and it remains, an all-hands-on-deck moment for our fragile democracy. I hope you will join me in its defense.

Rachel

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In the premiere episode of The Election Whisperer on The Cycle- On Substack the show’s first in audio-only format, Rachel recaps (as quickly as possible!) the months that have passed since the show went on hiatus.

The post election period has been marked by the whole of the Republican Party enabling Trump’s democracy-destroying multiple coup attempts. Senator Josh Hawley has gone so far as to commit to “objecting” to Biden’s win on January 6th when the Senate meets to approve the Electoral College- a process that is a mere formality for the Senate, but will likely underwrite Hawley’s 2024 presidential bid. With bodies piling up by the hour from COVID and Biden being stonewalled by key agencies for the transition, tensions are mounting as the clock continues to tick down to January 20th.

As such, Rachel brings an all-star team of political scientists onto the show-experts in political polarization perfectly suited for this moment. Their areas of expertise are negative partisanship and something called partisan schadenfreude. What is partisan schadenfreude? Put simply, it is the desire to harm or to see your political opponent harmed.

Political scientists Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe argue that in America, polarization and hyperpartisanship have created a lethal mass partisanship- a negative partisanship that is so deeply negative, it has the potential to lead people to tolerate or committ themselves physical violence for partisan ends. Steven Webster, who along with fellow political scientist Alan Abramowitz introduced the concept of negative partisanship into the polarization and voting behavior literatures, also joins the conversation with a discussion of his new book, American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics.

A good time is had by all!

The live episode aired at 9 pm ET on The Cycle on November 3rd.

Rachel Bitecofer is joined by Jessica Post and Flip Pidot for a live look at the wild election results pouring in as polls finally closed across most of the country.

For more, check out https://thecycle.news.

All content and opinions presented herein, whether by hosts and guests, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment or other advice.