After Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat in the presidential election, there’s been no shortage of explanations as to why she lost to Donald Trump, an unpopular, twice impeached, convicted felon found liable for sexual assault, who incited a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Many voters cast a ballot against Harris or stayed home simply because of her race and gender, while others blamed President Biden for the post-pandemic spike in inflation. Still others were outraged by the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel’s slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.
While there’s some truth in all these explanations, another more frightening reason behind voters’ candidate choices is the fact that typical low-information citizens know very little about current events or candidates’ positions on issues important to them. Confirmation of this can be found in two blind polls, conducted before the election which found that across nearly all issues, policies backed by Harris and the Democratic party were on average more popular than those backed by Trump and the Republican party.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Rachel Bitecofer, a political scientist, election forecaster and author of the book, “Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game.” Here she discusses her analysis on why Trump won the election, owing to the Democrats’ failure to widely declare their support of policies appealing to the broad swath of working class voters. Bitecofer begins by analyzing why so many women who voted to support abortion rights in states with reproductive rights referendums this year also voted for Donald Trump.
RACHEL BITECOFER: Most Americans don’t consume any type of hard news — like the vast, vast majority — and our assumption is that everyone is like us: “Everyone knows who Mike Johnson is.” “Everyone knows what the filibuster is.” “Everyone understands that the president’s power is extremely muted by the House and the Senate and what happens there.”
Average Americans know absolutely none of that, Okay?
And so, like one of my pre-cycle, pre-election jobs was to try to convince these candidates to understand you won’t benefit naturally from this initiative. People will walk in and they will vote “yes” on the initiative and then vote for the abortion-banning Republicans on the same ballot. And they will do that unless you teach them that Republicans ban abortion. Because as insane as that sounds to our audience right now, many, many millions of Americans up to today have no idea that abortion has been banned, let alone would be able to articulate who caused that problem for them. Okay?
And it is tremendously frustrating to be on the tail end of an election that the stakes, they were different. We may not even have democracy going forward.
SCOTT HARRIS: Overall, apart from what you just said Rachel, what did Kamala Harris’ campaign do right? What did they get wrong? One conclusion, reached by many observers is that the Democrats this year, and of course, over recent decades, have turned their back on core issues prioritized by the working class in this country. And they let Big Money Wall Street Democratic party donors influence their economic policy agenda.
What’s your take on that observation?
RACHEL BITECOFER: Yeah, I mean, this is actually what my topic is for the article that came out today on The Cycle. It really is based on a graph, a graph that came out from Financial Times that showed over decades how voters stopped saying that Democrats understood or fought for the working class. Okay? And it used to be a huge advantage for Democrats.
And over the decades you see that collapse. And of course, it’s the same decades, folks where Reaganomics obliterated the working class. So that’s bad, right? And at the same time, you see the graph go up for people, our brand. Right? And that’s what you’re asking voters to identify here is, what do you associate with the brand of Democrats? You know, takes care or fights for marginalized groups?
And as I say in The Cycle, I mean, that’s a good thing, right? That’s a good thing to me. I’m a liberal Democrat. It’s a good thing to you. It’s a good thing to the audience. But unfortunately, in terms of the broader electorate, most people are not hardwired to think like us.
In fact, most people are hardwired to just not care about what we call outgroups. People who are not like them. Many are actually hostile in addition to that. Right? And the Republican regime, like their messaging and strategic communication regime is very focused on exploiting that outgroup hostility, right? We’re not suggesting in any way you give up championing these causes, okay? But our community and our ads, our strategy, our messaging needs to be focused on rebranding us as a fighting for the working class.
And the reason why that’s important, folks, is because you can’t win national elections or swing states, and you certainly can’t get more Senate votes than 50 if you aren’t attracting working class voters. And maybe you might be thinking white working class, which is a certainly a subset of the working class, but the working class across the board, despite or regardless of their ethnicity or race moved right, significantly right. Okay?
And the working class of today, it used to be a very white-heavy demographic in the 1940s or whatever. But today’s working class is racially and ethnically diverse, right? So we’re losing these voters, even though we’re focusing on a lot of this micro-targeted, what we call identity politics-based strategy that we’ve been doing really since Obama.
And as I point out, it worked in 2008, it was exciting and new technology to be able to go down and say, “Okay, you’re Asian American, we’re going to target you on this, and you’re a black American. We’re going target you here.” That was natural, a natural impulse because a Democratic coalition is not like the Republican coalition.
Theirs is homogeneous, white Christian. Right? Ours is all these different interest groups. And our goal was like, “Okay, well, we have to in our message and we want to be representing all these things. Well, the problem with that, folks, is that when you — as I’m trying to pound into people, the electorate is not us. The electors is nowhere even near us, the electorate knows nothing.
And if you wanted to know even one thing, even one thing, you got to pound that one thing with all your “comms”, all your messaging, right? Yes, and hammer it, hammer it. So that’s the shift that we’re going to have to make. It’s going to be painful for a lot of the system that we’ve built, which is very intensive on, you know, these niche type of appeals.
And I think what we need to create is a story. You know, anyone who spends time on social media interacting with Trump voters will tell you Trump voters are often citing Democratic policies that they believe Trump and Republicans will deliver to them. So clearly, we’re not making that case well, right?. And so that’s where the future is going to be focused on.
For more information, visit Rachel Bitecofer’s The Cycle substack page at thecycle.substack.com. Follow her on Twitter @RachelBitecofer.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Rachel Bitecofer (24:24) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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