Election forecast porn for people sheltering in place

Rachel Bitecofer is "insufferably" confident that, next November 3, Joe Biden will be elected president of these United States.

Who is Bitecofer? She's a brash, youngish, fat, white woman from a non-Ivy educational background who is gate-crashing the incumbent elections pundit class with her bold forecasts. The usual suspects look at her askance. She's not a proper political scientist from their perch. In the midterm election of 2018, she nailed Democratic House gains, predicting 40 pickups -- she was spot on. She didn't do so well on the Senate contests and will tell you what she got wrong. But she thinks she knows best.

When the Democratic primary effectively ended in March, she published her map of the 2020 Electoral College, with explanation:

Bitecofer's confidence in a Democratic victory is rooted in "forecasting work [that] predicts the two-party vote share for Democrats in each state on Election Day using fixed demographic data, and not polls." She also challenges the political science dictum that elections are all about the state of the economy.

A recession will certainly provide a potent test of the old “fundamentals” models that my research challenges. Make no mistake about it: If “the economy, stupid” still matters, it needs to matter here, and it should put the presidency completely out of grasp for Trump. ... In an America in which partisans are willing to inflict bodily harm on each other over politics, it seems unlikely that a mere recession, even an intense one, could move them off of their preferred presidential candidate in the ways it did prior to the polarized era, when the economic-fundamentals models, like the dinosaurs once did, ruled the Earth.

Nope -- she thinks the coming election will be all about the intense enthusiasms of the respective base voters of each party -- and "elections in the polarized era are won by out-voting the other party’s coalition." So can Democrats keep their coalition together under attack from the GOPer misinformation machine?

... underlying the cycle-specific trends are the realities of the long-term demographic, coalitional realignments of the two parties, where the Republican Party is becoming a rural-based party of whites, particularly working-class whites (but  more accurately, non-college-educated whites), and the Democratic Party is becoming an urban/suburban party, racially and ethnically diverse in a society that is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, and where college education is becoming a reliable predictor of Democratic candidate vote choice (so much so that I use it to predict Democratic candidate vote share in my modeling).

What this means, of course, is that every four years, fewer white, non-college-educated voters (especially those in rural areas) vote for Democrats. And this has profound impacts in the Midwest, because the traditional Democratic strongholds were often, in more rural, heavily unionized areas of these states. ... the prospects of Biden winning back white, working-class voters seem unlikely.

... the 2018 suburban transformation was largely powered by millennials and Gen Z voters, voters of color, and college-educated women, many of whom had been lazy about voting prior to the election of Donald Trump but now see their votes as America’s last line of defense. It was the surge to the polls by these voters, Democrats, but also independents, that my 2018 model anticipated and it’s these voters who power the 2020 version, too.

Of these “surge” voters, the most vulnerable to turnout failure are young voters and voters of color and the intersection of these two demographics: young voters of color. And for these voters, ideological representation matters. ... As the losing ideological faction from the primary, progressives are about to become the targets of a well-financed, sophisticated propaganda campaign hosted by Republicans attempt to fracture the “not-Trump coalition” and reduce the vote share needed for Trump to carry swing states to the pluralities he reached in the 2016 cycle.

Or, if we can manage to hang together, we needn't hang separately.

In the current party polarization, Bitecofer almost completely discounts "candidate quality" as a variable in determining outcomes. She considered Bernie Sanders a poor candidate because Democrats would have had such a hard time unifying behind him, but she also thought he had a clear shot at winning, because of base partisanship. She describes Joe Biden as a satisfactory specimen of a "generic Democrat," "digestible." (Okay, I rather like that.) Moreover, since her model is grounded in demographics, I imagine she doubts that a campaign constrained to online activity will make much difference.
... Do I believe in Rachel Bitecofer's forecast? Not completely, but I enjoy her writing and much of her thinking.

This may have something to do with the fact that I came up in politics before we had much access to either micro-targeting data about voters or carefully focus-grouped and massaged messages.

It's not that hard to understand that the voters you want to turn out are among certain populations and constituencies and that you need to go prospecting among those people.

It's not that hard to find out how to talk with voters; listening and practice go a long way.

Happily, contemporary election work has become slightly less wasteful of human labor thanks to more precise targeting. But the fundamentals remain. These are what underlie Bitecofer's picture of elections.

Read her yourself, enjoy, and ponder.

And prepare to work to make something like her map the reality in November.