February 24, 2025 • 46 mins
Rachel Bitecofer drops some serious knowledge in this episode, dissecting the absurdity of political campaigns and the inherent disconnect between party strategies and voter engagement. She dives deep into the Chuck Todd theory of elections, throwing shade at how the media misrepresents swing voters, and highlights the dire need for Democrats to embrace a more aggressive, centralized approach to messaging. Bitecofer, with her PhD chops, doesn't hold back as she critiques the current Democratic infrastructure, calling for a total overhaul to compete with the well-oiled Republican propaganda machine. She argues that it’s high time for the left to stop playing nice and start hitting back, or risk losing ground to an electorate that’s more tuned into sensationalism than substance. With her sharp wit and unapologetic stance, Bitecofer makes it crystal clear that the stakes are way too high for Democrats to keep tiptoeing around the truth.
The episode takes a rather sardonic turn as Bitecofer elaborates on the Democratic Party's struggles to connect with the average voter. She sarcastically points out the party's tendency to show up to knife fights with salad instead of a knife, reflecting a deep-seated issue of strategy and messaging. This conversation sharply contrasts bold Republican tactics that often prioritize discrediting opponents over presenting coherent policy platforms. Bitecofer’s perspective underscores the importance of understanding voter psychology, particularly how cultural and identity politics have alienated many working-class Americans. The trio discusses the disconnection of Democratic leaders from their base, emphasizing that to win, Democrats must reframe their narrative and engage with voters on issues that resonate with their everyday lives, rather than abstract ideals that seem distant and irrelevant.
The discussion kicks off with a light banter between Colonel Mo Davis and Rachel Bitecofer, who brings her expertise in political science to the table. The trio dives into the absurdity of today's political landscape, especially how often the media misrepresents electoral dynamics. Bitecofer's unique insight stems from her extensive research on political polarization and its impact on voting behavior, particularly among swing voters. She humorously critiques the Chuck Todd theory of elections, suggesting that it oversimplifies the decision-making processes of voters. Instead, she argues that many voters are woefully uninformed and easily swayed by negative campaigning, which has become the hallmark of modern political strategy. As they peel back the layers of political communication, Rachel emphasizes the need for Democrats to adopt a more aggressive, sometimes ruthless approach to campaigning—a stark contrast to their often genteel tactics.
The episode takes a rather sardonic turn as Bitecofer elaborates on the Democratic Party's struggles to connect with the average voter. She sarcastically points out the party's tendency to show up to knife fights with salad instead of a knife, reflecting a deep-seated issue of strategy and messaging. This conversation sharply contrasts bold Republican tactics that often prioritize discrediting opponents over presenting coherent policy platforms. Bitecofer’s perspective underscores the importance of understanding voter psychology, particularly how cultural and identity politics have alienated many working-class Americans. The trio discusses the disconnection of Democratic leaders from their base, emphasizing that to win, Democrats must reframe their narrative and engage with voters on issues that resonate with their everyday lives, rather than abstract ideals that seem distant and irrelevant.
Takeaways:
- Rachel Bitecofer emphasizes the importance of understanding that most voters are not well-informed, highlighting the absurdity of political discourse that expects them to engage thoughtfully with complex issues.
- She...
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
You know who made it.
Welcome to mucu, anotherepisode with my good friend Colonel
Mo Davis.
Say hello, Mo.
Hey, David, how are you?
You know what, it's sunny uphere in the mountain and it's warming
up.
I said snow's coming, so enjoythe sunshine while you can.
(00:24):
Today our special guest isRachel Bitcover and she's on on the
Line from.
Where today, Rachel, I'mcoming from the heart of the Hippie
Capital, Eugene, Oregon.
Oh, cool.
Awesome.
I thought you were at DC.
Yeah, I came home in 2021.
Cool.
As a, as a.
It looked like Trump wasn'tgoing to leave the stage and that
(00:46):
this was going to be a fightfor the.
For to the finish.
Yeah, well, I think that fightto the finish is begun this year,
so it's a delight to have youon the show.
And, and Dr.
Bitter Coffer, we're thrilledto have you joining us.
Obviously you made a name foryourself on MSNBC dissecting into
various issues.
Tell, tell us a little bitabout yourself and, and before we
(01:07):
get too far, where can peoplefind you and follow you and, and
contact.
We give a daily sermon all daylong on X at Rachel Bitter Coffer.
There's nobody else with that name.
So it's B I T E C O F E R podcast.
It's called this is Americaand it's a fusion between political
science, history, currentevents, and it's really based on
(01:28):
my four year research projectinto the rise of the Nazis and the
Third Reich.
So people can find that on thecycle at Substack or whatever your
pod place is of choice.
Tell us a little bit aboutwhat you got your PhD in and why,
why did you head down this path?
Yeah, it's such a greatquestion now that I'm kind of down
the road, not at the beginninganymore, but I, I knew I wanted to,
(01:54):
to get a.
My last couple of years ofundergrad at U of O.
And so in 2009 went East coastoff to the University of Georgia,
which was, it turns out, avery good place to do my PhD.
Not only because it made mehireable after I got my PhD, but
also because it really taughtme how to talk to a student body
that was ideologically conservative.
(02:15):
Okay.
And anyway, I did that stuff.
I got my first professor gigat Christopher Newport University
and took over the Watsoncenter there.
That's really where my odysseyinto the public eye came.
I was doing polling, horserace polling, using my political
science background in Virginia.
Kind of made a name for myselfby predicting North a big win in
(02:36):
2017.
And then I decided I'm goingto take that methodology and predict
the midterms and the rest is history.
Because I, you know, if peoplelook me up, the first thing they're
going to see is, oh, she wasthe one that saw the big blue wave
coming.
Months and months of ants of 2018.
And that was, you know, basedon my expertise into political behavior
and political polarization.
So teaching data scientistslike Nate Silver and Nate Cohen and
(03:01):
Ezra Klein how to actuallyunderstand data given polarization
of up their games.
So that's me.
And that's how I ended up here.
Yeah, Rachel, I'm interested.
I was doing, reading up onsome of the stuff that you've written
and you talked about the ChuckTodd theory.
Can you, can you explain thata bit?
The Chuck Todd theory ofelections is what started that strategic
(03:26):
journey for me.
Okay.
I, I'm watching how electionsget covered in the press and like,
here's the thing.
It's like all of them.
I mean, everything that youconsume is wrong when it comes to
like, coverage of electionsand campaigns because the people
there don't seem to understand really.
Foundational findings aboutpolitical behavior from political
(03:47):
science literature, particularly.
Two things.
The one is the most important,especially for the audience of MUCU
who are not typical people.
They are well informed.
They're the information 1%.
You have a political interestthat drives you to listen to shows
like this, to watch otherstuff that's related that most people,
and I mean most like 95, don't have.
(04:10):
Okay.
And so average Americans don'tknow anything about politics.
They don't know.
They know who the president is.
They might know who the vicepresident is, but that drops like.
And they can't tell you whotheir senators are.
And I just want you, if youcan hear my voice now, just take
one second, close your eyes,and imagine a world in which you
pay so little attention tocurrent events in politics that you
(04:32):
don't know who your senators.
Okay.
And then once you get intothat, that manifestation, then I
want you to think about whatyou would know about Donald Trump
if your brain was souninterested in politics.
All you really knew was whothe President was and could have
senators, let alone yourmember of the House.
Right?
And that's, that's whereDonald Trump is, is, is getting most
(04:53):
of his.
Right?
That civic illiteracy problemthat's foundational to our democr.
Frankly, pretty unique too.
I mean, although there's, youknow, challenges with, with citizens
everywhere, our citizensreally is like particularly tuned
out and Dumb, right.
And I'm civically dumb that itcould be very smart.
You can be Elon Musk smart andstill be dumb.
As you can see it play outevery day on the Internet when it
(05:15):
comes to understanding how thegovernment works and civics is so
complex that our interest hasled us to, to develop the skills
to understand it.
But other people don't havethat interest.
And so swing voters, ChuckTodd's theory is o got two candidates,
you put, you put the mostattractive policy to the swing vote,
(05:36):
right?
I'm going to do this, this,this and this for you.
And the other guy is supposedto do, I'm going to do this, this,
this for you.
And then this swing voter is,you know, he's a connoisseur.
He can't be, he's not one ofthese partisan hacks, right.
He's a free thinker,independent guy.
He's going to go and read thecandidate profiles and he's going
to choose based on the bestprogram that best matches his own
(05:57):
self interest.
No, that's not how swingvoters are.
And it' engage.
Most swing voters weresocialized into voting by a parent
because that's really whatmakes a voter.
When I do us, I always, itdoesn't 10 or 500.
I know the answer is going tobe 100%.
When I asked the room how manyof you guys had parents that voted
(06:18):
on every hand, okay.
And so socialization is whatteaches someone to vote but that
doesn't necessarily give theman interest.
Okay.
Interested people tend to beideological and that's what drives
the interest.
And that's why both partiesbases are kind of insane.
Okay.
But in the swing bucket votersare not paying no attention at all.
So my theory that replaces theChuck Todd theory of politics which
(06:39):
I haven't referred to it inthat in many years but you're right
is exactly that is to getpeople to understand swing voters
have two products to buy.
And about 15 years ago theRepublicans figured out they could
sell their product better byignoring them themselves and just
shitting on Democrats.
Right.
Their entire electoralstrategy is not persuasion in the
(07:02):
way we do it.
Hey, here's these programs wewant to do for you, vote for us.
It's hey, John Kerry is a,he's a liar, he's a, you know, the
swift boat veterans for true thing.
He's lied about his war service.
It's about disqualifying theother option in the right.
And so that's what my workpost 2020 has really been about.
And that's what hit him whereit hurts.
(07:22):
How to Save Democracy byBeating Republicans at Their Own
Game lays out for readers.
Want to check?
Well, what's the receptionthen with Democrats?
I can tell you, at least myexperience here has been that, you
know, the Republicans, it'sall about winning.
You know, they'll come to aknife fight with a, an AR15 and Democrats
show up with a quinoa salad.
(07:42):
It just seems like trying toget Democrats to get some backbone
is a.
An arduous task.
Yeah.
You're not wrong.
I mean, you know, and when Istarted off, I knew how arduous it
was, but I still had hope Icould do it, you know, I mean, I
had to try because the pricewas going to be a Donald Trump dictatorship.
So I left it all on the floorin 2024.
But through that year offlying around the country talking
(08:04):
to Democr talking, you know,people who are in the party are the
most, you know, engagedactivist type too.
It is, it is against thenature to be mean.
Right?
I mean, if you're aprogressive person, you're probably
not very good at being mean.
I'm a freak of, of nature.
Okay.
Because I'm a progressive person.
That will you up.
Right.
(08:24):
That's rare.
Right.
So to answer your question, Ihave to say my argument, and I think
Ken Martin, the new chair ofthe dnc, would probably agree with
this, though we had the roadmap in the book.
We KN like we needed to makethese changes or we would lose.
But convincing people to dosomething new and scary, especially
incumbents like John Tester,Sherrod Brown, is very difficult.
(08:49):
And what my work is, is nottinkering up in the branches of strategy
and messaging.
It takes the whole tree, rootand branch soil, boom, yanks.
Okay.
And, you know, I couldn't getpeople to do it in 2024, I'm sad
to say, even with Ken Martinand Jamie Harrison giving people
copies of the book and p.
(09:09):
It very hard.
I can't say that there was asingle race run in that 2024 calendar
that I, you know, that I was running.
I was going to ask you aboutKen Martin.
He's the new head of the DNCand at least in the early days, seems
to be making more of a prounion, pro worker push for the Democratic
Party, which seems, you know,where we've, we've really lost ground
(09:30):
and over the years.
So what's your take on theearly days for the Ken Martin reign?
Yeah, I'm very pleased withwhat I see.
Obviously, after the election,if you Followed me and if subscribe
to the substack on, on thecycle and substack, you can go find
these analysis.
I, I, you know, it's, it,there's not a, there's a lot of opinions
(09:50):
about why Democrats lost.
Right?
As required innate silver.
But the fact is there's data.
So like you shouldn't have tohave an opinion.
You can look and see, okay,what did the campaign pay money to
distribute.
To the eyes of what I'veexplained to you just now, and you
can learn more in the book, isan electorate that doesn't care about
your product, in fact hatesthe product and doesn't have any
(10:11):
interest in learning about it.
Right?
Like that, you know, giventhat constraint, like what can you
possibly, you know, unveil to,you know, get people to pay attention?
And I looked at the data in Ad Impact.
You know, luckily we're livingin a really data centric environment
so we don't have to questionwhat did Kamala run on?
(10:31):
People might look at a stumpspeech or the DNC convention and
say, oh well, that she ran onfreedom and threats of democracy
and abortion.
No, she didn't, dude.
Okay?
What matters is what you payto put in front of these tuned out
people who are most of thepeople, okay, Most of the people
we need to get to vote arecompletely tuned out.
And so the only message theysee is the one that you put money
(10:55):
behind.
And the data don't lie.
What happened was she came in,took over the campaign, was good
at first, brought in the Obama bros.
They switched us to Joy.
Okay?
And I you, not you look at thead data.
What we find out unequivocallyis that we spent about 2 billion
largely on positive adsdefining Kamala Harris.
(11:17):
And the reason that we didthat, just so you guys can understand
my personal angst, is becausedespite four years ago when I started
strike pack, me going to meetsome of these big donors, right?
And my pitch to them was like,no, no, they're doing it all wrong.
The consultants that you'rehiring don't understand what they're
doing.
They're trained on the wrongsystem and what we should be doing.
(11:38):
Because in 2020 it was like60, 40 positive, negative.
I'm like, we should be doing90%, 10 neg percent, and instead,
fast forward four years, guys,and a book later and this like evangelical
mission through 2024.
And these guys, what did they do?
They ran almost 90 positiveads, positive ads doing the Chuck
(12:02):
Todd theory of democracy, dude.
And so when we look at whathappened when we lost.
We can see.
What did they do?
They ran the campaign the bookis designed to run.
And they wedged two issues.
Trans, scary trans people,scary looking trans people and a
federal and a prisoner sex change.
(12:22):
And they, they wedged scarymigrants immigration, Right.
And they just pounded the hellout of us on that.
There wasn't Trump's agendaand Trump's policy is 10 point economic
opportunity zone plan do that.
Right?
All he did was say KamalaHarris paid for sex changes for prison.
You know what I mean?
(12:43):
And they ran millions of thatall across football watching a.
To know that.
But that was so, you know,finally on the last point of that,
a data chart comes out andit's from like the 1970s on, right?
So it covers the Reaganrevolution where the Republican Party,
through the Heritagefoundation and their Project 1980,
which is, you know, nowProject 2025.
(13:04):
They came in with the Reaganadministration and destroyed working
class America.
Okay?
That's what Reaganomics did.
It destroyed working class America.
But at the same time, you cansee this time series where people
were asked, what do Democratsstand for?
And at that same time periodfor 30 years where they're doing
their voodoo economicexperiment that's killing the middle
(13:25):
class.
You see, our, our high brand identity.
Identity is standing forworking people starts to collapse,
okay?
And it's flat.
By the time we get to 2024,it's flat.
So the party that passedObamacare and gave 20 million working
Americans Medicaid expensedoesn't have a brand.
Has a worse brand than standsthat stands for the working class.
(13:46):
Republicans do.
Right?
And so also on that samegraph, you'll see a different timeline.
And that's.
That timeline is stands formarginalized groups.
And as that working classgraph is collapsing, that line stands
for marginalized groups isrising, rising, rising through those
decades.
(14:06):
And you might be thinking,well, that's good.
I mean, our brand is we standfor marginalized people.
And I think that is a greatbrand for humans.
Okay?
But not when you got to getracist and sexist white people to
vote for you.
Well, it works yet when thosemarginalized groups don't vote for
us either.
No.
(14:28):
Yeah, I'm excited to see Kenis focused on that problem.
It's absolutely the problem.
I mean, all the problems thatwe have can be boiled down in that
one graph, boys.
And it is, you know, it'swonderful to stand for marginalized
groups.
But here, let me explainsomething to you.
You might think all themarginalized groups are like, oh,
we're in it together.
No, they hate Each other too.
Okay, so like a black voterreading that might think, oh, all
(14:52):
they care about is trans people.
Right?
Because humans, most humans,are not wired the way we are for
empathy, nuance.
We all have high IQs.
People aren't like that.
And.
And, you know, if we gotta.
We gotta win elections withthe electorate.
We have not an electorate thatwe would like to have.
And we have an electorate thatis civically illiterate and prone
(15:14):
to human psychological traitsthat all humans are prone to.
Tribalism in group bias andthings like that, right?
So we need a system, anelectioneering system from across
every agency, across the dnc,the D Trip, the dscc, the dga, every
state party, every show, right?
We need everybody poundingthis theme because you look at a
(15:38):
survey and voters are 50, 50on which party protects Social Security.
I mean, that.
What a.
What a messaging fail that is.
Absolutely.
And the.
The party that asked it in thefirst place and pushed it through
and has grown it over theyears, the one being penalized for
all of that hard work.
Yes, we are.
We're actually paying apenalty for it.
And listen, I want to be clear.
Like, every time someone saysto me, well, Democrats left the working
(16:00):
class behind, you know, theyget it from me.
I'm like, oh, really?
And I lay out, like, all thiseconomic shit that they've delivered,
right?
But, but, but where we classand really replace working class
with just middle America, wehave left them behind culturally,
okay?
We're way ahead.
What has happened in theDemocratic Party as it's trying to
give marginalized voices abigger platform is that we have.
(16:23):
I.
We have defined ourselves in away that most of America, okay?
And yes, we can make fun ofjading couches all day long, right?
But at the end of the day, thepublic perception about us is that
we're uptight, nagger do weirdlike that.
You know, that's trouble.
And it's true.
Price of having.
Yeah, but it's true, right?
(16:44):
Yeah, that's the problem.
I mean, that's the problem, right?
And like, someone's gonna have to.
To be willing to bust someheads to fix it, you know, because
at the end of the day, I toldpeople this all through the cycle.
Listen.
Yes.
I'm telling you, if you'remaking an ad for suburban, you know,
white use white people only inthe ad, okay?
And you know, I get thatthat's not warm and fuzzy, great
(17:06):
liberal progr.
Standing, but it wins, right?
When.
When you go into the rnc,there's one mission win, okay?
You go into The DNC or any ofthese organizations.
There's what we call mission creep.
So we want to win, but we haveto do it the right way.
And we need to use unionprinters and we can't do anything
negative.
(17:26):
And oh my God, there's twotrans people who can have babies
out in America.
So we can't say the wordpregnant women anymore.
We have to say pregnant people.
And like, guys, we're gonna.
People are gonna die if wedon't get our.
Together know nothing hurtsmarginalized people more than letting
fascist have power over them.
So I'm not saying we abandonour causes.
(17:47):
Right.
We can have all of thosecauses, but what we define ourselves
on has to be this economic populism.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, my mom was a memberof the CWA and back when they, you
know, had switchboards and.
Always been a fan of unions.
I grew up in Iowa.
Pretty big union place.
But the unions have abandonedus too, so.
So I don't understand thislove of union printing.
(18:09):
We got to have the union bugger.
You're in deep sh.
Well, they don't give a crapanyway, so we got to abandon those
old ideas.
I think.
You know, listening to youright now, one of the things that
comes to mind is theRepublican Party, despite what we
educated elitist snobs thinkis much more connected to what's
going on in the world, in theAmerican world.
(18:30):
And unfortunately, even thecandidates we run are even more disconnected
from maybe the.
The donor class as well as thekind consultant class.
How.
How do we get candidates thatcan connect better with people and
understand that Boeing and.
And focus groups is not the way.
(18:51):
Of the future as they gavebillion dollars to Future Forward
and Blue Rose Research.
Those are the super PACs thatworked with the Harris campaign.
None of it on positive ads.
I wanted a billion dollars.
Unbelievable.
Hey, did you know that weunseeded Mo and I worked really hard
to get Madison Co and we had astrategy of get Democrats to unregister
(19:12):
as Democrats and registers independency.
Take the ballot run affiliate,as we call them here, take the Republican
ballot and vote against the.
Well, Cawthorn lost by 1400 votes.
We and Professor Cooper outhere at Western Carolina University
did a study.
We switched 3,500 people andwe got shit to this day by the Democratic
(19:33):
Party in Buncombe county moneyfor unseating Cawthorn in that election.
And we spent.
You know what we spent on that?
We spent less than 100 grandto get rid of Madison Cawthorn.
Then we went after Boebert wespent about 150 grand and came within
346.
And would have had her asstoo, if she hadn't jumped districts
because she was going down.
Yeah, yeah, but, but how is itthat, you know, we spend 250 and
(19:57):
we got.
Nearly got rid of twoatrocious members of Congress, but
we can't get any attention ofthe, these big donors?
What, what's the issue therewith the, with the donor class in
this country?
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I'mout of.
To give so I could permissionto speak clearly.
You know, I mean, here's the problem.
Is I haven't had permission granted.
I can't get a meeting withthose donors because the Obama bros.
(20:19):
And the bro, you know, PodSave America bros.
And Nate Silver and EzraKlein, they all hate me because I
beat them one.
Okay.
And refuse to give me thosemeetings because they understand
the gravy train ends thesecond I get into where it happened
because I'm the only personcapable of explaining why they're
doing it all wrong and howmuch money we're wasting letting
them get rich doing so.
(20:41):
You know, there's an incentiveto, to keep me away.
And you know, the truth is, isthat, you know, if you're a billionaire
listening to this podcast,your money is not well spent, okay?
Like it's, it's, and it's notwell spent because it's, it's basically
a money pit.
We're throwing billions ofdollars on a model of electioneering
that's fundamentally flawedbecause it violates the most important
(21:03):
takeaway you could possiblyhave if you study the American electorate,
which is that Americans areneither informed nor engaged.
Okay?
They, they are neither ofthose things.
And so your strategy from thevery base has to be designed with
that reality in mind and, andto optimize winning under that model.
Right.
And so, you know, I, I hopemaybe, I mean I haven't given up
(21:25):
total hope like year going forward.
I'll finally get that meeting.
But until and unless I do,we're going to continue to flounder
because there's infrastructurethat we need to build and that's
what the donors should be.
Over to you, Mo.
All right, well, Rachel, howdo we, you know, you talked about
there's this inability for theDemocrats to effectively engage with
those low information votersand it seems like it's even more
(21:49):
challenging now.
You know, Jesse Watersrecently, this is a quote from him,
says we are waging a 21stcentury information warfare campaign
against the left.
The left.
What you're Seeing on theright is asymmetric.
Someone says something onsocial media.
Elon Musk retweets it, JoeRogan podcasts it, Fox broadcast
it, and by the end of the day,we've reached millions of people.
(22:10):
And you're hearing it backfrom them.
Yep.
You can hear them literallyreport to pollsters or on the swing
voter, you know, stump interviews.
You literally hear those talking.
So how do we punch through?
Because now you've got the,you know, the right controls most
of social media.
They've whipped the mainstreammedia into compliance.
So, so just the, themechanisms for reaching those low
(22:31):
information voters has gotteninherently more difficult.
How do we, how do we reach outand touch those people?
So when I, when I was alludingto like this meeting I need with
the donors.
Right.
That's part of what we'regoing to be talking about.
Because you can populate somenew progressive talk shows or we
can build out Midas Touch.
That's great.
Midas Touch is already amachine that's built and ready to
get gas.
Right.
(22:51):
You can do those things andthat's good.
It's better than nothing.
But at the end of the day,it's not going to come up against
what you just described.
A system where somebody tweetsit, Elon, repost it.
Trump, repost it.
Fox News reports it.
The mainstream media does it.
Right.
All in a day often.
Right?
It could be in a day.
Right.
So like, that is a purposefulinfrastructure in my strategic plan
(23:14):
that to build aninfrastructure that is basically
a war machine, rapid media hubfor Democrats.
Because the reason they can dothat, that is centralization.
Right.
What do we have?
We have the opposite of centralization.
In fact, for the last 20years, I don't, I don't know how
anyone could have watched theOccupy Wall street protest the way
that, you know, it started offreally strong and then fizzled away.
(23:36):
And a lot of it was because ofhow tedious and annoying the left
is with.
So remember when they wouldhave the meetings and they would,
you know, say a line of aspeech and the whole crowd would
repeat it.
Right.
Decentralization is the deathof winning.
And we have decentralized thehell out of ourselves.
We have no centralizationsystem between the dnc, the dccc,
(23:57):
the DSCC and the dga, whichare our three big campaign arms.
Plus DNC does partyinfrastructure in the States.
Right.
We don't have anycentralization system.
We don't have a hierarchy.
We don't have somebody up atthe top of that.
And I, you have to have achief who says, you know what, if
we're making ads for swingvoters in the burbs of Ohio, we're
(24:18):
using white people in theadult ads, okay?
We're using white people inthe ads.
And we're going to tell whitepeople this.
What's going to happen to you?
Because white people don'tgive a about other people.
If they did, they'd be us.
Right?
They're not us.
So we need to be doing it that way.
And that's why, you know, theinfrastructure part of it is so serious.
It's, it's, you know, we canaround with tactics all the time,
(24:40):
but strategy is different than tactics.
Strategy is the plan to win.
The tactics are the tools youdeploy to achieve this.
Where we're lacking his grandstrategy and we lack a brain trust
to create it or execute it.
And that's what I'm reallyfocused, hoping we'll develop.
Yeah, I agree with you about,you know, we need to be.
Have some more Democratic assholes.
But I can tell you, you know,here in, you know, where we live.
(25:01):
After Cawthorn took office,you know, he was big on the toxic
masculinity stuff.
And I responded to one of hisscreeds and referred to him as a
limp dick loser.
And I got reprimanded by the.
Oh, I'm sure you did.
For being mean to dare you make.
Fun of people with impot.
Well, then, then a week later,we had Mark Robinson, you know, our
(25:22):
gubernatorial candidate.
The.
The black Nazi.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And Robinson came out.
Yeah, Robinson came out withhis, you know, the, the LGBT community
is filth comments.
And the Democrats said, well,we reprimanded Mo for his comments.
Surely you'll reprimand Mark Robinson.
And the Republicans said,shove it up your ass.
(25:43):
No shit, dude.
Yeah, I mean, you know whatI'm saying, dude?
And like, some of it comesdown to this, right?
So like you said it, yourcomments blew up and people are lecturing
you.
And it's about an individualcapability for someone in your position,
especially to just say, Idon't give a if people think what
I've said is factually on.
Because, you know, to behyperbolic, you can't be technically
(26:05):
correct, right?
So for me, the message isRepublicans are going to steal your
Social Security.
Now, technically speaking,that's not how Social Security works,
right?
We pay now.
Now, they paid before.
It's not our money, butdoesn't matter, right?
Like, so you just have to bewilling when I say we need more.
What we.
What I really mean is we needcandidates, party leaders, influencers,
(26:26):
people in charge of to bewilling to look dumb, to make outlandish
claims like Donald Trump.
You know, with this Easter'scoming with no eggs, right?
My messaging Easter is goingto be that Donald Trump.
We got Trump potatoes.
We're okay because he killedall the eggs.
Like, obviously that's not true.
And I have a PhD.
I know it's not true, guys,but I, I'm willing to look stupid
(26:48):
to be effective.
And you should be.
Yeah, well, certainly theother side just.
I just got through writing anop ed today that I just sent in and
it's on.
Elon came out with this crapabout Fema and the $59 million that
New York was spending puttingmigrants up in luxury hotels while
people here in western NorthCarolina are suffering.
And those.
And again, that's.
(27:08):
It's a lie.
There are two separate pots ofmoney, money that, that came out
of and you can't use one forthe other.
But they don't give a.
Whether they're telling thetruth or not.
And the MAGA faithful couldcare less.
They lap it up.
Yeah.
And, and to be honest withyou, I mean, look, we're, we're three
weeks in now.
People believe I've spentstood I would.
Or the last two months betweenuntil he got rolling with people
being very skeptical abouttoday, you know, narrative Team Doom.
(27:32):
Right?
But like, you know, the houris long late, right?
Like there are in red statesright now.
I guarantee you there areattorney generals, Republican Attorney
General keen to prosecuteparents who medically help their
children transition or did agender affirming care.
Right?
Like the hour has grown late.
(27:52):
So like, if we, we can't evenlike, be hyperbolic and they're over
there doing stuff like that.
Like the asymmetry is nolonger a gun and a knife fight.
We're talking about, about anuclear weapon and us still showing
up with a flower.
Right.
And it's hard because the, thebase is what drives maga.
Like, it may look like areally big universe on Twitter and
(28:14):
X and, and Elon certainly hasconfused it to be the real world.
But it.
No one's on Twitter of thepopulation of the world.
Very few people are on Twitter.
Almost all the content comesout of like 300 accounts, including
mine.
And it's not representative inany way of the demographic ethics
of America, but is, you know,a, a critical propaganda tool.
(28:36):
And we need to start thinkingwe can't beat a propaganda system
with your, your undergradfrom, you know, Rutgers on Communications.
Right.
And.
And the last people, in myopinion, who are able to meet this
moment for the DemocraticParty and its brand and, and the
reality that the voters thatwe didn't get it stolen.
Elon Musk didn't use Skyl to.
With the voting tallies.
(28:56):
Guys, the voters chose, excuseme, Donald Trump over us, okay?
Like, that's how horrible theythink we are that they chose Trump.
And it's us like our brand.
So we have to fix it.
And, and we need digitalwarriors to be willing to fix it.
It's very difficult becausetheir digital warriors have no, no,
(29:17):
you know, no ability todiscern truth.
They take whatever they'retold and go right out with it.
They don't go and verify it,you know, and they amplify the hell
out of it.
And they're willing to sayreally hyperbolic things like, you
know, they managed to convincethe whole electorate that Joe Biden
was personally in control of inflation.
Yeah, but we're up of steep.
We're up against a steep climb.
(29:38):
Rachel, I still don't see thereality having come to the far left
in this country about what'sgoing on.
I mean, you know, one example,you can probably not going to be
shocked.
I was shocked when, when momand I ran that video against Cawthra,
you know, where he's facehumping his cousin or whatever.
Literally, the pushback fromthe left was.
(29:59):
This was anti lgbtq.
Yes.
Give me a break.
It is ammunition we're goingto use against a guy that shouldn't
be in Congress.
Why can't they see it that way?
I don't understand thementality of the left that everything
has to be perfect.
Is it because they.
They're all rich and they grewup with perfect in their life, or
is it they're just sodisconnected from reality that they
(30:22):
don't understand how to win campaigns?
Yeah, that's basically it.
I mean, it's the inverse ofideologues just tend to do this.
Right.
Ideologues develop anideological world and then project
that world out into thebroader population.
That is definitely what thefar left does.
Now, I want to be not sloppyin my language because these terms,
progress, the far left,whatever, are very interchangeable
and different things anddifferent to me.
(30:44):
When I say the far left, I'mtalking about the people who don't
vote for Democrats and as muchabout Democrats as they do about
Republicans.
In fact, sometimes you got towonder if they're on Putin's payroll.
They do it so well.
Right.
They don't vote For Democrats,okay, A lot of these people who showed
up at these Gaza protests,they're not, they're not Democrats.
People who are, are gluingtheir hands to the airport access
(31:08):
road and people out ofthousands of dollars of trips and
inconvenience, those are not Democrats.
That is the far left.
And, and to answer yourquestion, the far left is, is still
like marinating the finalweeks of their fake world where both
parties are the same andthere's just a unit party and Democrats
are all corporate and blah,blah, blah, blah, blah, like, and
(31:28):
you know, they're about tofind out because the very first people
that are coming from for arethe Gaza people.
It was all on his website, right.
I would go and I'd show themthe screenshot of his plan to purge
all the universities of, ofFree Palestine people, all the faculty,
all the students.
And you know, the responsewas, oh, you're a fear monger.
We're not.
You can't make me.
You can't fear me into votingfor Joe Biden.
(31:49):
Genocide Joe.
Right?
Genocide Joe.
Yeah.
I'm gonna pop somebody in thenose if they ever say that to me
again.
I mean, that's the thing islike, I'm like, you know, oftentimes
I want to be like I am.
Ain't doing this for me.
Okay.
I'll be all right.
I'm a white suburbanite livingin a.
One of the best blue states inthe country because I relocated strategically
home for this purpose.
Right.
I don't have a lot of money,but I'm very smart and if hits the
(32:13):
fan, I will deal with it and Iwill get the hell out.
Right?
It's you, you climate changejustice warriors and Gaza, you know,
Hamas lovers, who they'recoming for first.
Okay.
And I just have to wonderlike, will they?
I.
I'm of the opinion that thesewill be sitting on deportation flights
(32:33):
to get mo and they'll still betalk bitching about genocide Joe.
Well, they'll, they'llprobably be bitching about how Walter
mondale up the 1980 election.
That's how disconnected fromreality they are.
So.
All right, so let's pivot here.
Let's pivot in a different direction.
Okay.
Do you see any Democrats onthe horizon that are maybe headed
(32:55):
in the right direction thatcould take, take on some of these,
I mean, or, or is this partydoomed to fail?
Yeah, we just, we, we have the people.
We don't have the strategy,the infrastructure and the centralization,
which is what I'm focused on.
Right.
But we have the People.
Gretchen Whitmer, Pitbull.
Okay.
Pete Buttigieg, Pitbull.
(33:16):
And.
And he does it with this,like, all shucks, Midwestern kindness,
but he's very aggressive.
Josh Shapiro, Fetterman.
We've got tools that we're notdeploying, but they all the ones
that are good at messaging,you know, the Jasmine Crockett's,
the Jared Dan Goldmans,they're all doing their own thing.
Imagine all of that energycentralized under one all day, every.
(33:38):
Right.
Or.
Or even just once a week.
We choose a message not once a week.
It has to be all day, every day.
If we want to compete with these.
With these folks.
Right?
No, no, I.
So we have the players.
We just aren't playing the game.
Yeah, I mean, I get that.
But even if.
If we all just chose on oneday to go one message and see how
it worked, you know, I've beentrying to get influencers on Twitter.
(34:03):
Problem is all those folks areso commercial.
They're like, well, you can'ttouch my.
My followers unless you'regoing to pay me.
Yeah, see, I can't believe that.
I don't do that.
I do a lot of.
For pro bono.
I make a living.
My favorite people, but no oneowns my ass.
And like, when I look at mysocial tool, which has about 200,000
curated followers, like I useit to amplify.
(34:25):
Amplify people.
I don't charge them for the privilege.
I.
My goal is like, how can weget this information in front of
as many people as possible?
Right?
That's always my goal.
So I don't have a profitmotive built into it.
But at the end of the day,boys in the middle of hit them where
it hurts.
And I really recommendeverybody read that book.
Book.
If you want to understand whatKen Martin's strategy is and where
the Democrats need to go, readthe book.
(34:46):
Like the.
The infrastructure that theRepublican Party.
We are.
We are.
We are under a fruit tree thatthey planted back in 1980 and have
been watering and growing ever since.
Took the form of many instances.
The Heritage foundation, the.
The American LegislativeExchange Council.
The acronym is alec.
Alec, which does model legislation.
(35:07):
Legislation and state legislatures.
Which is why you'll see sevenor eight red states ban transgender
people all at once.
Right?
Because they have that centralization.
The Federalist Society.
I mean, there's so many.
I could go on and on, but oneof them is Turning Point usa.
And I.
And I focus on that in the book.
I got to invitate CharlieKirk's producer who clearly didn't
(35:27):
know anything about me to comedebate him on crt.
And you know, not that I'm afan of CRT or anything, but I went
down there and just, you know,professored his ass for, for an hour.
But I wanted to see this, the infrastructure.
That's really what I went for.
Like you can't see that unlessyou're in there, right?
So they invited me in, let mecome in.
And they have a four, fivelevel building, like compact in Tempe,
(35:52):
Arizona, one of the mostexpensive zip codes.
And it is not just one building.
Each building is five floors.
There's four buildings.
One of them had a sign on theoutside that said Turning Points
Logistics center.
Okay.
For the whole building.
Now I didn't get to go intothat one.
I only got to go into the onewith the state of the art, fully,
you know, equipped TV student.
And in the green room up therewaiting to start the show, dozens
(36:15):
of people coming in fromflights all across the country.
Why are they able to do that?
Well, they have an $80 millionannual from a billion couple billionaires
that finance.
What do we have in comparison?
We don't have that.
Okay?
We have 500 youth orientedgrassroots groups.
Some of them are establishedand been going for a while.
Many of them are not becausepeople want to have.
They make their own groups, right?
(36:37):
And they're all doingdifferent strategy, they're all doing
different things.
None of it is paid.
It's all on elbow grease andspit, okay.
Where they have it all on money.
And so ultimately, like, do Iwant to have to pay people for content?
I am happy to do it if I'mable to build this infrastructure
and bring in, you know, theseinfluencers and give them a check
(36:58):
and have them be powerful theway that, that's why they're so powerful,
because they aren't running onelbow grease and spit.
Their YouTube shows getinvestment, their radio shows get
investment.
Like the people, the donorclass of the Republican Party has
paid big money to grow thatpropaganda infrastructure.
And they haven't relied onpeople doing it out of the kindness
(37:20):
of their heart.
We don't need, right?
And they bring down, theybring, they bring down Lauren over
to give everybody a hand jobat their conferences too.
So.
Oh, those conferences, do theyhave pyrotechnics?
It's you know, like state ofthe art.
He goes around collegecampuses all year with this big fat
budget, holds these, you know,major events, gives out all kinds
(37:41):
of free.
Like we got a college chapterwith two kids sitting at a table,
okay?
So no Wonder we're getting.
I mean, like I said, the houris late.
We need to get going.
We got to give them credit.
I mean, they've played thelong game, and they've done an effective
job of convincing a majorityof the people that, you know, the
people are tired of getting bythe government, but they're going
(38:01):
to be shocked when they lookback and realize that's not Nancy
Pelosi's dick up their assthat, oh, it's the Republicans.
And.
But, you know, the generalpublic has bought into the.
The.
And we have just done ahorrible job of connecting and communicating.
And again, I think with Biden,he wasn't perfect.
I think history will probablyhave a pretty favorable outlook on.
(38:22):
On what he accomplished, butwe did a horrible job of communicating
that to the American public.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, they started upwith the dementia right after he
was sworn in.
Okay.
And, like, every time he madea gaff or a stumble or would, you
know, walk, talk awkwardly,they would cut that out and exploit
it.
Okay.
And they did that for a year.
So by the time we got to 2024,all of us that do this for a living
(38:45):
know Donald Trump is aninsane, demented person that rants
about weird for like an hour,and it bounces everywhere.
Right.
And it could include gettingelectrocuted by a shark of electric
boat in the water.
And, you know, like, he's.
He's not well mentally.
But when you look at public,public polling In July of 2020, it
(39:05):
was 64 of Americans that had aquestion about Joe Biden's mental
acumen, and it was 30.
Something like 34 for dunk.
Like that.
None of this is organic.
They're doing it strategically.
Like, we have to have a braintrust, and we have to be doing the
same thing.
That's step one.
Otherwise, you know, I.
I don't think that anything.
(39:27):
We're.
We'd have to make these big,big changes, and we need to make
them right now, and we need tomake them with a ton of money.
So Ken Martin got a bunch ofcrap at giving his speech when he
won the election because hementioned that, you know, there's
good billionaires out thereand we need their money.
Well, folks, I'm here to tellyou we have unilaterally screwed
ourselves out of a House majority.
We would have the House rightnow to stop Donald Trump with if
(39:51):
we hadn't unilaterally decidedto do fair gerrymandering.
Maps.
Maps only in the blue states,because that's the place where we
control.
So we did it all in the blue states.
And what did we do?
We fair mapped our asses outof a House majority that they're
allowed to gerrymander to put in.
And it's the same thing withthe money, okay?
Like we had an opportunity tokill Citizens United.
(40:12):
All we had to do to kill bothCitizens United and the partisan
gerrymandering crap was votefor Hillary Clinton in 2016.
She would have been inposition to create the first liberal
majority on the supreme courtsince the 1960s.
Okay?
But that ship is sailed now.
And we're talking about abillion we don't have.
We have George Soros and Reed hoffman.
(40:34):
They have 30 billionairesfinancing this infrastructure.
And you know, obviously somuch money they bought Supreme Court
justices with it.
Right?
So like, we can't be tellingthe people with money we don't want
your money.
I'm here to tell you there isnot enough grassroots money in all
the world to fix our problem.
The problem.
Meanwhile, Democrats thinkthat business people are the problem
(40:57):
or small business people arethe problem.
I mean that, that whole, thewhole brand identity and, and you
know what, I gotta be honestwith you, dude.
I went to a lot of Democraticmeetings over the last.
Okay.
And you know, they're cringe.
It's cringe to sit there andlike, listen to how it was stolen
from the Native American.
Have 10 people at a table,none of whom are transgender, introduce
themselves with gender pronouns.
(41:19):
Right.
Like these.
I, I know that's how it is in,in D.C.
and these Ivy League colleges.
I think a lot of it is, thesepeople have.
No, it's.
They have a very, very, youknow, unique and, and DC Belt line,
Beltway, New York, east coast,like experience of perception.
And that's why they thinkeveryone already knows Donald Trump
tried to steal the election.
(41:39):
And everybody already knowsDonald Trump banned abortion.
No, they didn't.
You don't.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, these are the same.
These are the same people thatare bitching and moaning because
a sella doesn't go fast enough.
That's what I'm saying.
And so like, you know, we, we want.
We can't.
We're not going to get backworking class of this country using
consultants with genderpronouns on their business card is
what I'm going to say.
I interrupted you.
(41:59):
Mo, go ahead.
No, I lost my train of thought.
Hey, it's good.
I'm having like, thank God wecan edit.
Thank God we're all seniorshere, right?
Like, yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Well, that's one thing I wasgoing to mention early.
Happy birthday You've got onecoming up in a.
In a couple of days.
It was coming up.
Oh, it's coming up.
(42:19):
It is.
And I wish I could.
I wish I could tell you thingsget better as time goes on, but hate
to lie to you, that's the.
That'S the most horrible partabout being old, right?
Is that you figure outeverything the old people told you
is true and, and you didn'tlisten to any of it.
And now, now your curse is ofcourse your.
The old person tellingeverybody about how like all this
(42:41):
truism about being old and noone will listen.
It's like the circle of life.
Yeah.
Getting old is not for.
But it beats the alternative.
It sure does, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Hey, we.
It's been kind of, you know, alot of doom and gloom we've been
talking about.
Obviously you've got some rayof hope or optimism or you wouldn't
be doing what you're doing.
So what, what is it that.
(43:02):
That keeps you going?
Yeah.
You never let the bastardsgrind you down.
Luckily for me, like I have aninsatiable appetite to win.
And when what keeps me goingis like, it's not just that we're
losing, it's that we're losingto these feros.
Okay.
We're losing to people thatwant to repeal the n the 20th century.
We're losing to people whothink Donald Trump had an election
(43:23):
stolen.
Right.
And that they.
They think the COVID vaccinekilled more people than co.
They're stupid as hell.
And it really irritates me notit be one thing to lose the democr
or democracy to a group oftalented smart people that are doing
talented and smart people things.
Now there is within thatorbit, definitely that.
That capability.
But at the top of the chainyou got Elon and, and Trump.
(43:46):
Right?
I mean, I can't lose to these morons.
Okay?
Okay.
And you know, that's whatkeeps me going.
What keeps me going isunderstanding, as I've always understood,
that I'm not the person thatI'm doing this for.
I'm doing this because.
Because rural people inMississippi, which is one of the
shittiest states in thecountry, I mean for ever since the
(44:07):
end of segregation, the redstates have used GOP control.
The red states to basicallyslow murder the black, their black
populations through shittypublic policy.
Like, you know, those are thepeople who are going to pay the price
because we didn't want to makefun of J.D.
vance for, you know, having agay porn.
Right.
So like at the end of the dayI feel pretty good where I am morally.
I know I'm on the right sideof history.
(44:28):
I know what I'm offering interms of the RX is a tough pill to
swallow, but I also know if wedon't swallow it, people are going
to suffer and they may even die.
Well, thank you for whatyou're doing.
We need more warriors outthere carrying the message and hopefully
we can beat these bastards atsome point.
That's right.
No, it's going to come.
There is going to come a day, guys.
I mean, I can't offer you anything.
(44:48):
Blood, toil, tears and sweatright now, but I.
They're at the end.
End.
It will be victory.
Victory at all costs.
Right?
All right, so we, we have atradition of talking about our favorite
bourbon.
Are you an alcohol drinker or a.
Look, no, no.
Deadhead.
(45:09):
Didn't spend some time with,with some Sammy Smith oatmeal stouts
on tour, but I, I'm, I'm a pot smoker.
I'm not a beer drinker oralcohol drinker anymore, but only
because I'm allergic to it.
It.
That said, on specialoccasions, like the last time I kicked
a bourbon, it was top shelfand it was with my dissertation advisor,
Paul Gurion, at a littlerestaurant in Athens, Georgia.
(45:31):
It was a good bourbon.
Good.
It wasn't Pappy's good, but itwas good.
Well, we, we've got some goodbourbons out here in North Carolina.
Be surprised, I've heard, youknow, and certainly if I was out,
you know, in, in the wilds ofNorth Carolina, I'd want to do a
little bourbon tour.
All right, well.
Well, you are a soulmate of Moand I's in that.
(45:51):
We both ran campaigns thatwere pretty tough and we're not afraid
to drop the F bomb and we bothgot kicked out of the room most of
the time.
So you're welcome on this showanytime and we really appreciate
you taking some time.
And our guest today has been Dr.
Not just Rachel, but Dr.
Rachel Biticoffer.
Oh, dude, it was my pleasure.
(46:13):
And then he muck you as a softspot in my heart.
So this has been Muckyou cohosted by Colonel Mo Davis in Asheville,
North Carolina, and DavidWheeler in Spruce Pine, North Carolina.
Thanks to our friend and guesttoday, Dr.
Rachel Bittacofer.
You can follow Rachel on X atRachel Bitticofer.
B I T E C O F E R Muck you isproduced by American Muckrakers.
(46:35):
Copyright 2025.
You can learn more atAmericanMuckrakers.comcom and follow
us on X and Blue sky underAmerican Mug.
You know who made it.
Welcome to mucu, anotherepisode with my good friend Colonel
Mo Davis.
Say hello, Mo.
Hey, David, how are you?
You know what, it's sunny uphere in the mountain and it's warming
up.
I said snow's coming, so enjoythe sunshine while you can.
(00:24):
Today our special guest isRachel Bitcover and she's on on the
Line from.
Where today, Rachel, I'mcoming from the heart of the Hippie
Capital, Eugene, Oregon.
Oh, cool.
Awesome.
I thought you were at DC.
Yeah, I came home in 2021.
Cool.
As a, as a.
It looked like Trump wasn'tgoing to leave the stage and that
(00:46):
this was going to be a fightfor the.
For to the finish.
Yeah, well, I think that fightto the finish is begun this year,
so it's a delight to have youon the show.
And, and Dr.
Bitter Coffer, we're thrilledto have you joining us.
Obviously you made a name foryourself on MSNBC dissecting into
various issues.
Tell, tell us a little bitabout yourself and, and before we
(01:07):
get too far, where can peoplefind you and follow you and, and
contact.
We give a daily sermon all daylong on X at Rachel Bitter Coffer.
There's nobody else with that name.
So it's B I T E C O F E R podcast.
It's called this is Americaand it's a fusion between political
science, history, currentevents, and it's really based on
(01:28):
my four year research projectinto the rise of the Nazis and the
Third Reich.
So people can find that on thecycle at Substack or whatever your
pod place is of choice.
Tell us a little bit aboutwhat you got your PhD in and why,
why did you head down this path?
Yeah, it's such a greatquestion now that I'm kind of down
the road, not at the beginninganymore, but I, I knew I wanted to,
(01:54):
to get a.
My last couple of years ofundergrad at U of O.
And so in 2009 went East coastoff to the University of Georgia,
which was, it turns out, avery good place to do my PhD.
Not only because it made mehireable after I got my PhD, but
also because it really taughtme how to talk to a student body
that was ideologically conservative.
(02:15):
Okay.
And anyway, I did that stuff.
I got my first professor gigat Christopher Newport University
and took over the Watsoncenter there.
That's really where my odysseyinto the public eye came.
I was doing polling, horserace polling, using my political
science background in Virginia.
Kind of made a name for myselfby predicting North a big win in
(02:36):
2017.
And then I decided I'm goingto take that methodology and predict
the midterms and the rest is history.
Because I, you know, if peoplelook me up, the first thing they're
going to see is, oh, she wasthe one that saw the big blue wave
coming.
Months and months of ants of 2018.
And that was, you know, basedon my expertise into political behavior
and political polarization.
So teaching data scientistslike Nate Silver and Nate Cohen and
(03:01):
Ezra Klein how to actuallyunderstand data given polarization
of up their games.
So that's me.
And that's how I ended up here.
Yeah, Rachel, I'm interested.
I was doing, reading up onsome of the stuff that you've written
and you talked about the ChuckTodd theory.
Can you, can you explain thata bit?
The Chuck Todd theory ofelections is what started that strategic
(03:26):
journey for me.
Okay.
I, I'm watching how electionsget covered in the press and like,
here's the thing.
It's like all of them.
I mean, everything that youconsume is wrong when it comes to
like, coverage of electionsand campaigns because the people
there don't seem to understand really.
Foundational findings aboutpolitical behavior from political
(03:47):
science literature, particularly.
Two things.
The one is the most important,especially for the audience of MUCU
who are not typical people.
They are well informed.
They're the information 1%.
You have a political interestthat drives you to listen to shows
like this, to watch otherstuff that's related that most people,
and I mean most like 95, don't have.
(04:10):
Okay.
And so average Americans don'tknow anything about politics.
They don't know.
They know who the president is.
They might know who the vicepresident is, but that drops like.
And they can't tell you whotheir senators are.
And I just want you, if youcan hear my voice now, just take
one second, close your eyes,and imagine a world in which you
pay so little attention tocurrent events in politics that you
(04:32):
don't know who your senators.
Okay.
And then once you get intothat, that manifestation, then I
want you to think about whatyou would know about Donald Trump
if your brain was souninterested in politics.
All you really knew was whothe President was and could have
senators, let alone yourmember of the House.
Right?
And that's, that's whereDonald Trump is, is, is getting most
(04:53):
of his.
Right?
That civic illiteracy problemthat's foundational to our democr.
Frankly, pretty unique too.
I mean, although there's, youknow, challenges with, with citizens
everywhere, our citizensreally is like particularly tuned
out and Dumb, right.
And I'm civically dumb that itcould be very smart.
You can be Elon Musk smart andstill be dumb.
As you can see it play outevery day on the Internet when it
(05:15):
comes to understanding how thegovernment works and civics is so
complex that our interest hasled us to, to develop the skills
to understand it.
But other people don't havethat interest.
And so swing voters, ChuckTodd's theory is o got two candidates,
you put, you put the mostattractive policy to the swing vote,
(05:36):
right?
I'm going to do this, this,this and this for you.
And the other guy is supposedto do, I'm going to do this, this,
this for you.
And then this swing voter is,you know, he's a connoisseur.
He can't be, he's not one ofthese partisan hacks, right.
He's a free thinker,independent guy.
He's going to go and read thecandidate profiles and he's going
to choose based on the bestprogram that best matches his own
(05:57):
self interest.
No, that's not how swingvoters are.
And it' engage.
Most swing voters weresocialized into voting by a parent
because that's really whatmakes a voter.
When I do us, I always, itdoesn't 10 or 500.
I know the answer is going tobe 100%.
When I asked the room how manyof you guys had parents that voted
(06:18):
on every hand, okay.
And so socialization is whatteaches someone to vote but that
doesn't necessarily give theman interest.
Okay.
Interested people tend to beideological and that's what drives
the interest.
And that's why both partiesbases are kind of insane.
Okay.
But in the swing bucket votersare not paying no attention at all.
So my theory that replaces theChuck Todd theory of politics which
(06:39):
I haven't referred to it inthat in many years but you're right
is exactly that is to getpeople to understand swing voters
have two products to buy.
And about 15 years ago theRepublicans figured out they could
sell their product better byignoring them themselves and just
shitting on Democrats.
Right.
Their entire electoralstrategy is not persuasion in the
(07:02):
way we do it.
Hey, here's these programs wewant to do for you, vote for us.
It's hey, John Kerry is a,he's a liar, he's a, you know, the
swift boat veterans for true thing.
He's lied about his war service.
It's about disqualifying theother option in the right.
And so that's what my workpost 2020 has really been about.
And that's what hit him whereit hurts.
(07:22):
How to Save Democracy byBeating Republicans at Their Own
Game lays out for readers.
Want to check?
Well, what's the receptionthen with Democrats?
I can tell you, at least myexperience here has been that, you
know, the Republicans, it'sall about winning.
You know, they'll come to aknife fight with a, an AR15 and Democrats
show up with a quinoa salad.
(07:42):
It just seems like trying toget Democrats to get some backbone
is a.
An arduous task.
Yeah.
You're not wrong.
I mean, you know, and when Istarted off, I knew how arduous it
was, but I still had hope Icould do it, you know, I mean, I
had to try because the pricewas going to be a Donald Trump dictatorship.
So I left it all on the floorin 2024.
But through that year offlying around the country talking
(08:04):
to Democr talking, you know,people who are in the party are the
most, you know, engagedactivist type too.
It is, it is against thenature to be mean.
Right?
I mean, if you're aprogressive person, you're probably
not very good at being mean.
I'm a freak of, of nature.
Okay.
Because I'm a progressive person.
That will you up.
Right.
(08:24):
That's rare.
Right.
So to answer your question, Ihave to say my argument, and I think
Ken Martin, the new chair ofthe dnc, would probably agree with
this, though we had the roadmap in the book.
We KN like we needed to makethese changes or we would lose.
But convincing people to dosomething new and scary, especially
incumbents like John Tester,Sherrod Brown, is very difficult.
(08:49):
And what my work is, is nottinkering up in the branches of strategy
and messaging.
It takes the whole tree, rootand branch soil, boom, yanks.
Okay.
And, you know, I couldn't getpeople to do it in 2024, I'm sad
to say, even with Ken Martinand Jamie Harrison giving people
copies of the book and p.
(09:09):
It very hard.
I can't say that there was asingle race run in that 2024 calendar
that I, you know, that I was running.
I was going to ask you aboutKen Martin.
He's the new head of the DNCand at least in the early days, seems
to be making more of a prounion, pro worker push for the Democratic
Party, which seems, you know,where we've, we've really lost ground
(09:30):
and over the years.
So what's your take on theearly days for the Ken Martin reign?
Yeah, I'm very pleased withwhat I see.
Obviously, after the election,if you Followed me and if subscribe
to the substack on, on thecycle and substack, you can go find
these analysis.
I, I, you know, it's, it,there's not a, there's a lot of opinions
(09:50):
about why Democrats lost.
Right?
As required innate silver.
But the fact is there's data.
So like you shouldn't have tohave an opinion.
You can look and see, okay,what did the campaign pay money to
distribute.
To the eyes of what I'veexplained to you just now, and you
can learn more in the book, isan electorate that doesn't care about
your product, in fact hatesthe product and doesn't have any
(10:11):
interest in learning about it.
Right?
Like that, you know, giventhat constraint, like what can you
possibly, you know, unveil to,you know, get people to pay attention?
And I looked at the data in Ad Impact.
You know, luckily we're livingin a really data centric environment
so we don't have to questionwhat did Kamala run on?
(10:31):
People might look at a stumpspeech or the DNC convention and
say, oh well, that she ran onfreedom and threats of democracy
and abortion.
No, she didn't, dude.
Okay?
What matters is what you payto put in front of these tuned out
people who are most of thepeople, okay, Most of the people
we need to get to vote arecompletely tuned out.
And so the only message theysee is the one that you put money
(10:55):
behind.
And the data don't lie.
What happened was she came in,took over the campaign, was good
at first, brought in the Obama bros.
They switched us to Joy.
Okay?
And I you, not you look at thead data.
What we find out unequivocallyis that we spent about 2 billion
largely on positive adsdefining Kamala Harris.
(11:17):
And the reason that we didthat, just so you guys can understand
my personal angst, is becausedespite four years ago when I started
strike pack, me going to meetsome of these big donors, right?
And my pitch to them was like,no, no, they're doing it all wrong.
The consultants that you'rehiring don't understand what they're
doing.
They're trained on the wrongsystem and what we should be doing.
(11:38):
Because in 2020 it was like60, 40 positive, negative.
I'm like, we should be doing90%, 10 neg percent, and instead,
fast forward four years, guys,and a book later and this like evangelical
mission through 2024.
And these guys, what did they do?
They ran almost 90 positiveads, positive ads doing the Chuck
(12:02):
Todd theory of democracy, dude.
And so when we look at whathappened when we lost.
We can see.
What did they do?
They ran the campaign the bookis designed to run.
And they wedged two issues.
Trans, scary trans people,scary looking trans people and a
federal and a prisoner sex change.
(12:22):
And they, they wedged scarymigrants immigration, Right.
And they just pounded the hellout of us on that.
There wasn't Trump's agendaand Trump's policy is 10 point economic
opportunity zone plan do that.
Right?
All he did was say KamalaHarris paid for sex changes for prison.
You know what I mean?
(12:43):
And they ran millions of thatall across football watching a.
To know that.
But that was so, you know,finally on the last point of that,
a data chart comes out andit's from like the 1970s on, right?
So it covers the Reaganrevolution where the Republican Party,
through the Heritagefoundation and their Project 1980,
which is, you know, nowProject 2025.
(13:04):
They came in with the Reaganadministration and destroyed working
class America.
Okay?
That's what Reaganomics did.
It destroyed working class America.
But at the same time, you cansee this time series where people
were asked, what do Democratsstand for?
And at that same time periodfor 30 years where they're doing
their voodoo economicexperiment that's killing the middle
(13:25):
class.
You see, our, our high brand identity.
Identity is standing forworking people starts to collapse,
okay?
And it's flat.
By the time we get to 2024,it's flat.
So the party that passedObamacare and gave 20 million working
Americans Medicaid expensedoesn't have a brand.
Has a worse brand than standsthat stands for the working class.
(13:46):
Republicans do.
Right?
And so also on that samegraph, you'll see a different timeline.
And that's.
That timeline is stands formarginalized groups.
And as that working classgraph is collapsing, that line stands
for marginalized groups isrising, rising, rising through those
decades.
(14:06):
And you might be thinking,well, that's good.
I mean, our brand is we standfor marginalized people.
And I think that is a greatbrand for humans.
Okay?
But not when you got to getracist and sexist white people to
vote for you.
Well, it works yet when thosemarginalized groups don't vote for
us either.
No.
(14:28):
Yeah, I'm excited to see Kenis focused on that problem.
It's absolutely the problem.
I mean, all the problems thatwe have can be boiled down in that
one graph, boys.
And it is, you know, it'swonderful to stand for marginalized
groups.
But here, let me explainsomething to you.
You might think all themarginalized groups are like, oh,
we're in it together.
No, they hate Each other too.
Okay, so like a black voterreading that might think, oh, all
(14:52):
they care about is trans people.
Right?
Because humans, most humans,are not wired the way we are for
empathy, nuance.
We all have high IQs.
People aren't like that.
And.
And, you know, if we gotta.
We gotta win elections withthe electorate.
We have not an electorate thatwe would like to have.
And we have an electorate thatis civically illiterate and prone
(15:14):
to human psychological traitsthat all humans are prone to.
Tribalism in group bias andthings like that, right?
So we need a system, anelectioneering system from across
every agency, across the dnc,the D Trip, the dscc, the dga, every
state party, every show, right?
We need everybody poundingthis theme because you look at a
(15:38):
survey and voters are 50, 50on which party protects Social Security.
I mean, that.
What a.
What a messaging fail that is.
Absolutely.
And the.
The party that asked it in thefirst place and pushed it through
and has grown it over theyears, the one being penalized for
all of that hard work.
Yes, we are.
We're actually paying apenalty for it.
And listen, I want to be clear.
Like, every time someone saysto me, well, Democrats left the working
(16:00):
class behind, you know, theyget it from me.
I'm like, oh, really?
And I lay out, like, all thiseconomic shit that they've delivered,
right?
But, but, but where we classand really replace working class
with just middle America, wehave left them behind culturally,
okay?
We're way ahead.
What has happened in theDemocratic Party as it's trying to
give marginalized voices abigger platform is that we have.
(16:23):
I.
We have defined ourselves in away that most of America, okay?
And yes, we can make fun ofjading couches all day long, right?
But at the end of the day, thepublic perception about us is that
we're uptight, nagger do weirdlike that.
You know, that's trouble.
And it's true.
Price of having.
Yeah, but it's true, right?
(16:44):
Yeah, that's the problem.
I mean, that's the problem, right?
And like, someone's gonna have to.
To be willing to bust someheads to fix it, you know, because
at the end of the day, I toldpeople this all through the cycle.
Listen.
Yes.
I'm telling you, if you'remaking an ad for suburban, you know,
white use white people only inthe ad, okay?
And you know, I get thatthat's not warm and fuzzy, great
(17:06):
liberal progr.
Standing, but it wins, right?
When.
When you go into the rnc,there's one mission win, okay?
You go into The DNC or any ofthese organizations.
There's what we call mission creep.
So we want to win, but we haveto do it the right way.
And we need to use unionprinters and we can't do anything
negative.
(17:26):
And oh my God, there's twotrans people who can have babies
out in America.
So we can't say the wordpregnant women anymore.
We have to say pregnant people.
And like, guys, we're gonna.
People are gonna die if wedon't get our.
Together know nothing hurtsmarginalized people more than letting
fascist have power over them.
So I'm not saying we abandonour causes.
(17:47):
Right.
We can have all of thosecauses, but what we define ourselves
on has to be this economic populism.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, my mom was a memberof the CWA and back when they, you
know, had switchboards and.
Always been a fan of unions.
I grew up in Iowa.
Pretty big union place.
But the unions have abandonedus too, so.
So I don't understand thislove of union printing.
(18:09):
We got to have the union bugger.
You're in deep sh.
Well, they don't give a crapanyway, so we got to abandon those
old ideas.
I think.
You know, listening to youright now, one of the things that
comes to mind is theRepublican Party, despite what we
educated elitist snobs thinkis much more connected to what's
going on in the world, in theAmerican world.
(18:30):
And unfortunately, even thecandidates we run are even more disconnected
from maybe the.
The donor class as well as thekind consultant class.
How.
How do we get candidates thatcan connect better with people and
understand that Boeing and.
And focus groups is not the way.
(18:51):
Of the future as they gavebillion dollars to Future Forward
and Blue Rose Research.
Those are the super PACs thatworked with the Harris campaign.
None of it on positive ads.
I wanted a billion dollars.
Unbelievable.
Hey, did you know that weunseeded Mo and I worked really hard
to get Madison Co and we had astrategy of get Democrats to unregister
(19:12):
as Democrats and registers independency.
Take the ballot run affiliate,as we call them here, take the Republican
ballot and vote against the.
Well, Cawthorn lost by 1400 votes.
We and Professor Cooper outhere at Western Carolina University
did a study.
We switched 3,500 people andwe got shit to this day by the Democratic
(19:33):
Party in Buncombe county moneyfor unseating Cawthorn in that election.
And we spent.
You know what we spent on that?
We spent less than 100 grandto get rid of Madison Cawthorn.
Then we went after Boebert wespent about 150 grand and came within
346.
And would have had her asstoo, if she hadn't jumped districts
because she was going down.
Yeah, yeah, but, but how is itthat, you know, we spend 250 and
(19:57):
we got.
Nearly got rid of twoatrocious members of Congress, but
we can't get any attention ofthe, these big donors?
What, what's the issue therewith the, with the donor class in
this country?
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I'mout of.
To give so I could permissionto speak clearly.
You know, I mean, here's the problem.
Is I haven't had permission granted.
I can't get a meeting withthose donors because the Obama bros.
(20:19):
And the bro, you know, PodSave America bros.
And Nate Silver and EzraKlein, they all hate me because I
beat them one.
Okay.
And refuse to give me thosemeetings because they understand
the gravy train ends thesecond I get into where it happened
because I'm the only personcapable of explaining why they're
doing it all wrong and howmuch money we're wasting letting
them get rich doing so.
(20:41):
You know, there's an incentiveto, to keep me away.
And you know, the truth is, isthat, you know, if you're a billionaire
listening to this podcast,your money is not well spent, okay?
Like it's, it's, and it's notwell spent because it's, it's basically
a money pit.
We're throwing billions ofdollars on a model of electioneering
that's fundamentally flawedbecause it violates the most important
(21:03):
takeaway you could possiblyhave if you study the American electorate,
which is that Americans areneither informed nor engaged.
Okay?
They, they are neither ofthose things.
And so your strategy from thevery base has to be designed with
that reality in mind and, andto optimize winning under that model.
Right.
And so, you know, I, I hopemaybe, I mean I haven't given up
(21:25):
total hope like year going forward.
I'll finally get that meeting.
But until and unless I do,we're going to continue to flounder
because there's infrastructurethat we need to build and that's
what the donors should be.
Over to you, Mo.
All right, well, Rachel, howdo we, you know, you talked about
there's this inability for theDemocrats to effectively engage with
those low information votersand it seems like it's even more
(21:49):
challenging now.
You know, Jesse Watersrecently, this is a quote from him,
says we are waging a 21stcentury information warfare campaign
against the left.
The left.
What you're Seeing on theright is asymmetric.
Someone says something onsocial media.
Elon Musk retweets it, JoeRogan podcasts it, Fox broadcast
it, and by the end of the day,we've reached millions of people.
(22:10):
And you're hearing it backfrom them.
Yep.
You can hear them literallyreport to pollsters or on the swing
voter, you know, stump interviews.
You literally hear those talking.
So how do we punch through?
Because now you've got the,you know, the right controls most
of social media.
They've whipped the mainstreammedia into compliance.
So, so just the, themechanisms for reaching those low
(22:31):
information voters has gotteninherently more difficult.
How do we, how do we reach outand touch those people?
So when I, when I was alludingto like this meeting I need with
the donors.
Right.
That's part of what we'regoing to be talking about.
Because you can populate somenew progressive talk shows or we
can build out Midas Touch.
That's great.
Midas Touch is already amachine that's built and ready to
get gas.
Right.
(22:51):
You can do those things andthat's good.
It's better than nothing.
But at the end of the day,it's not going to come up against
what you just described.
A system where somebody tweetsit, Elon, repost it.
Trump, repost it.
Fox News reports it.
The mainstream media does it.
Right.
All in a day often.
Right?
It could be in a day.
Right.
So like, that is a purposefulinfrastructure in my strategic plan
(23:14):
that to build aninfrastructure that is basically
a war machine, rapid media hubfor Democrats.
Because the reason they can dothat, that is centralization.
Right.
What do we have?
We have the opposite of centralization.
In fact, for the last 20years, I don't, I don't know how
anyone could have watched theOccupy Wall street protest the way
that, you know, it started offreally strong and then fizzled away.
(23:36):
And a lot of it was because ofhow tedious and annoying the left
is with.
So remember when they wouldhave the meetings and they would,
you know, say a line of aspeech and the whole crowd would
repeat it.
Right.
Decentralization is the deathof winning.
And we have decentralized thehell out of ourselves.
We have no centralizationsystem between the dnc, the dccc,
(23:57):
the DSCC and the dga, whichare our three big campaign arms.
Plus DNC does partyinfrastructure in the States.
Right.
We don't have anycentralization system.
We don't have a hierarchy.
We don't have somebody up atthe top of that.
And I, you have to have achief who says, you know what, if
we're making ads for swingvoters in the burbs of Ohio, we're
(24:18):
using white people in theadult ads, okay?
We're using white people inthe ads.
And we're going to tell whitepeople this.
What's going to happen to you?
Because white people don'tgive a about other people.
If they did, they'd be us.
Right?
They're not us.
So we need to be doing it that way.
And that's why, you know, theinfrastructure part of it is so serious.
It's, it's, you know, we canaround with tactics all the time,
(24:40):
but strategy is different than tactics.
Strategy is the plan to win.
The tactics are the tools youdeploy to achieve this.
Where we're lacking his grandstrategy and we lack a brain trust
to create it or execute it.
And that's what I'm reallyfocused, hoping we'll develop.
Yeah, I agree with you about,you know, we need to be.
Have some more Democratic assholes.
But I can tell you, you know,here in, you know, where we live.
(25:01):
After Cawthorn took office,you know, he was big on the toxic
masculinity stuff.
And I responded to one of hisscreeds and referred to him as a
limp dick loser.
And I got reprimanded by the.
Oh, I'm sure you did.
For being mean to dare you make.
Fun of people with impot.
Well, then, then a week later,we had Mark Robinson, you know, our
(25:22):
gubernatorial candidate.
The.
The black Nazi.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And Robinson came out.
Yeah, Robinson came out withhis, you know, the, the LGBT community
is filth comments.
And the Democrats said, well,we reprimanded Mo for his comments.
Surely you'll reprimand Mark Robinson.
And the Republicans said,shove it up your ass.
(25:43):
No shit, dude.
Yeah, I mean, you know whatI'm saying, dude?
And like, some of it comesdown to this, right?
So like you said it, yourcomments blew up and people are lecturing
you.
And it's about an individualcapability for someone in your position,
especially to just say, Idon't give a if people think what
I've said is factually on.
Because, you know, to behyperbolic, you can't be technically
(26:05):
correct, right?
So for me, the message isRepublicans are going to steal your
Social Security.
Now, technically speaking,that's not how Social Security works,
right?
We pay now.
Now, they paid before.
It's not our money, butdoesn't matter, right?
Like, so you just have to bewilling when I say we need more.
What we.
What I really mean is we needcandidates, party leaders, influencers,
(26:26):
people in charge of to bewilling to look dumb, to make outlandish
claims like Donald Trump.
You know, with this Easter'scoming with no eggs, right?
My messaging Easter is goingto be that Donald Trump.
We got Trump potatoes.
We're okay because he killedall the eggs.
Like, obviously that's not true.
And I have a PhD.
I know it's not true, guys,but I, I'm willing to look stupid
(26:48):
to be effective.
And you should be.
Yeah, well, certainly theother side just.
I just got through writing anop ed today that I just sent in and
it's on.
Elon came out with this crapabout Fema and the $59 million that
New York was spending puttingmigrants up in luxury hotels while
people here in western NorthCarolina are suffering.
And those.
And again, that's.
(27:08):
It's a lie.
There are two separate pots ofmoney, money that, that came out
of and you can't use one forthe other.
But they don't give a.
Whether they're telling thetruth or not.
And the MAGA faithful couldcare less.
They lap it up.
Yeah.
And, and to be honest withyou, I mean, look, we're, we're three
weeks in now.
People believe I've spentstood I would.
Or the last two months betweenuntil he got rolling with people
being very skeptical abouttoday, you know, narrative Team Doom.
(27:32):
Right?
But like, you know, the houris long late, right?
Like there are in red statesright now.
I guarantee you there areattorney generals, Republican Attorney
General keen to prosecuteparents who medically help their
children transition or did agender affirming care.
Right?
Like the hour has grown late.
(27:52):
So like, if we, we can't evenlike, be hyperbolic and they're over
there doing stuff like that.
Like the asymmetry is nolonger a gun and a knife fight.
We're talking about, about anuclear weapon and us still showing
up with a flower.
Right.
And it's hard because the, thebase is what drives maga.
Like, it may look like areally big universe on Twitter and
(28:14):
X and, and Elon certainly hasconfused it to be the real world.
But it.
No one's on Twitter of thepopulation of the world.
Very few people are on Twitter.
Almost all the content comesout of like 300 accounts, including
mine.
And it's not representative inany way of the demographic ethics
of America, but is, you know,a, a critical propaganda tool.
(28:36):
And we need to start thinkingwe can't beat a propaganda system
with your, your undergradfrom, you know, Rutgers on Communications.
Right.
And.
And the last people, in myopinion, who are able to meet this
moment for the DemocraticParty and its brand and, and the
reality that the voters thatwe didn't get it stolen.
Elon Musk didn't use Skyl to.
With the voting tallies.
(28:56):
Guys, the voters chose, excuseme, Donald Trump over us, okay?
Like, that's how horrible theythink we are that they chose Trump.
And it's us like our brand.
So we have to fix it.
And, and we need digitalwarriors to be willing to fix it.
It's very difficult becausetheir digital warriors have no, no,
(29:17):
you know, no ability todiscern truth.
They take whatever they'retold and go right out with it.
They don't go and verify it,you know, and they amplify the hell
out of it.
And they're willing to sayreally hyperbolic things like, you
know, they managed to convincethe whole electorate that Joe Biden
was personally in control of inflation.
Yeah, but we're up of steep.
We're up against a steep climb.
(29:38):
Rachel, I still don't see thereality having come to the far left
in this country about what'sgoing on.
I mean, you know, one example,you can probably not going to be
shocked.
I was shocked when, when momand I ran that video against Cawthra,
you know, where he's facehumping his cousin or whatever.
Literally, the pushback fromthe left was.
(29:59):
This was anti lgbtq.
Yes.
Give me a break.
It is ammunition we're goingto use against a guy that shouldn't
be in Congress.
Why can't they see it that way?
I don't understand thementality of the left that everything
has to be perfect.
Is it because they.
They're all rich and they grewup with perfect in their life, or
is it they're just sodisconnected from reality that they
(30:22):
don't understand how to win campaigns?
Yeah, that's basically it.
I mean, it's the inverse ofideologues just tend to do this.
Right.
Ideologues develop anideological world and then project
that world out into thebroader population.
That is definitely what thefar left does.
Now, I want to be not sloppyin my language because these terms,
progress, the far left,whatever, are very interchangeable
and different things anddifferent to me.
(30:44):
When I say the far left, I'mtalking about the people who don't
vote for Democrats and as muchabout Democrats as they do about
Republicans.
In fact, sometimes you got towonder if they're on Putin's payroll.
They do it so well.
Right.
They don't vote For Democrats,okay, A lot of these people who showed
up at these Gaza protests,they're not, they're not Democrats.
People who are, are gluingtheir hands to the airport access
(31:08):
road and people out ofthousands of dollars of trips and
inconvenience, those are not Democrats.
That is the far left.
And, and to answer yourquestion, the far left is, is still
like marinating the finalweeks of their fake world where both
parties are the same andthere's just a unit party and Democrats
are all corporate and blah,blah, blah, blah, blah, like, and
(31:28):
you know, they're about tofind out because the very first people
that are coming from for arethe Gaza people.
It was all on his website, right.
I would go and I'd show themthe screenshot of his plan to purge
all the universities of, ofFree Palestine people, all the faculty,
all the students.
And you know, the responsewas, oh, you're a fear monger.
We're not.
You can't make me.
You can't fear me into votingfor Joe Biden.
(31:49):
Genocide Joe.
Right?
Genocide Joe.
Yeah.
I'm gonna pop somebody in thenose if they ever say that to me
again.
I mean, that's the thing islike, I'm like, you know, oftentimes
I want to be like I am.
Ain't doing this for me.
Okay.
I'll be all right.
I'm a white suburbanite livingin a.
One of the best blue states inthe country because I relocated strategically
home for this purpose.
Right.
I don't have a lot of money,but I'm very smart and if hits the
(32:13):
fan, I will deal with it and Iwill get the hell out.
Right?
It's you, you climate changejustice warriors and Gaza, you know,
Hamas lovers, who they'recoming for first.
Okay.
And I just have to wonderlike, will they?
I.
I'm of the opinion that thesewill be sitting on deportation flights
(32:33):
to get mo and they'll still betalk bitching about genocide Joe.
Well, they'll, they'llprobably be bitching about how Walter
mondale up the 1980 election.
That's how disconnected fromreality they are.
So.
All right, so let's pivot here.
Let's pivot in a different direction.
Okay.
Do you see any Democrats onthe horizon that are maybe headed
(32:55):
in the right direction thatcould take, take on some of these,
I mean, or, or is this partydoomed to fail?
Yeah, we just, we, we have the people.
We don't have the strategy,the infrastructure and the centralization,
which is what I'm focused on.
Right.
But we have the People.
Gretchen Whitmer, Pitbull.
Okay.
Pete Buttigieg, Pitbull.
(33:16):
And.
And he does it with this,like, all shucks, Midwestern kindness,
but he's very aggressive.
Josh Shapiro, Fetterman.
We've got tools that we're notdeploying, but they all the ones
that are good at messaging,you know, the Jasmine Crockett's,
the Jared Dan Goldmans,they're all doing their own thing.
Imagine all of that energycentralized under one all day, every.
(33:38):
Right.
Or.
Or even just once a week.
We choose a message not once a week.
It has to be all day, every day.
If we want to compete with these.
With these folks.
Right?
No, no, I.
So we have the players.
We just aren't playing the game.
Yeah, I mean, I get that.
But even if.
If we all just chose on oneday to go one message and see how
it worked, you know, I've beentrying to get influencers on Twitter.
(34:03):
Problem is all those folks areso commercial.
They're like, well, you can'ttouch my.
My followers unless you'regoing to pay me.
Yeah, see, I can't believe that.
I don't do that.
I do a lot of.
For pro bono.
I make a living.
My favorite people, but no oneowns my ass.
And like, when I look at mysocial tool, which has about 200,000
curated followers, like I useit to amplify.
(34:25):
Amplify people.
I don't charge them for the privilege.
I.
My goal is like, how can weget this information in front of
as many people as possible?
Right?
That's always my goal.
So I don't have a profitmotive built into it.
But at the end of the day,boys in the middle of hit them where
it hurts.
And I really recommendeverybody read that book.
Book.
If you want to understand whatKen Martin's strategy is and where
the Democrats need to go, readthe book.
(34:46):
Like the.
The infrastructure that theRepublican Party.
We are.
We are.
We are under a fruit tree thatthey planted back in 1980 and have
been watering and growing ever since.
Took the form of many instances.
The Heritage foundation, the.
The American LegislativeExchange Council.
The acronym is alec.
Alec, which does model legislation.
(35:07):
Legislation and state legislatures.
Which is why you'll see sevenor eight red states ban transgender
people all at once.
Right?
Because they have that centralization.
The Federalist Society.
I mean, there's so many.
I could go on and on, but oneof them is Turning Point usa.
And I.
And I focus on that in the book.
I got to invitate CharlieKirk's producer who clearly didn't
(35:27):
know anything about me to comedebate him on crt.
And you know, not that I'm afan of CRT or anything, but I went
down there and just, you know,professored his ass for, for an hour.
But I wanted to see this, the infrastructure.
That's really what I went for.
Like you can't see that unlessyou're in there, right?
So they invited me in, let mecome in.
And they have a four, fivelevel building, like compact in Tempe,
(35:52):
Arizona, one of the mostexpensive zip codes.
And it is not just one building.
Each building is five floors.
There's four buildings.
One of them had a sign on theoutside that said Turning Points
Logistics center.
Okay.
For the whole building.
Now I didn't get to go intothat one.
I only got to go into the onewith the state of the art, fully,
you know, equipped TV student.
And in the green room up therewaiting to start the show, dozens
(36:15):
of people coming in fromflights all across the country.
Why are they able to do that?
Well, they have an $80 millionannual from a billion couple billionaires
that finance.
What do we have in comparison?
We don't have that.
Okay?
We have 500 youth orientedgrassroots groups.
Some of them are establishedand been going for a while.
Many of them are not becausepeople want to have.
They make their own groups, right?
(36:37):
And they're all doingdifferent strategy, they're all doing
different things.
None of it is paid.
It's all on elbow grease andspit, okay.
Where they have it all on money.
And so ultimately, like, do Iwant to have to pay people for content?
I am happy to do it if I'mable to build this infrastructure
and bring in, you know, theseinfluencers and give them a check
(36:58):
and have them be powerful theway that, that's why they're so powerful,
because they aren't running onelbow grease and spit.
Their YouTube shows getinvestment, their radio shows get
investment.
Like the people, the donorclass of the Republican Party has
paid big money to grow thatpropaganda infrastructure.
And they haven't relied onpeople doing it out of the kindness
(37:20):
of their heart.
We don't need, right?
And they bring down, theybring, they bring down Lauren over
to give everybody a hand jobat their conferences too.
So.
Oh, those conferences, do theyhave pyrotechnics?
It's you know, like state ofthe art.
He goes around collegecampuses all year with this big fat
budget, holds these, you know,major events, gives out all kinds
(37:41):
of free.
Like we got a college chapterwith two kids sitting at a table,
okay?
So no Wonder we're getting.
I mean, like I said, the houris late.
We need to get going.
We got to give them credit.
I mean, they've played thelong game, and they've done an effective
job of convincing a majorityof the people that, you know, the
people are tired of getting bythe government, but they're going
(38:01):
to be shocked when they lookback and realize that's not Nancy
Pelosi's dick up their assthat, oh, it's the Republicans.
And.
But, you know, the generalpublic has bought into the.
The.
And we have just done ahorrible job of connecting and communicating.
And again, I think with Biden,he wasn't perfect.
I think history will probablyhave a pretty favorable outlook on.
(38:22):
On what he accomplished, butwe did a horrible job of communicating
that to the American public.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, they started upwith the dementia right after he
was sworn in.
Okay.
And, like, every time he madea gaff or a stumble or would, you
know, walk, talk awkwardly,they would cut that out and exploit
it.
Okay.
And they did that for a year.
So by the time we got to 2024,all of us that do this for a living
(38:45):
know Donald Trump is aninsane, demented person that rants
about weird for like an hour,and it bounces everywhere.
Right.
And it could include gettingelectrocuted by a shark of electric
boat in the water.
And, you know, like, he's.
He's not well mentally.
But when you look at public,public polling In July of 2020, it
(39:05):
was 64 of Americans that had aquestion about Joe Biden's mental
acumen, and it was 30.
Something like 34 for dunk.
Like that.
None of this is organic.
They're doing it strategically.
Like, we have to have a braintrust, and we have to be doing the
same thing.
That's step one.
Otherwise, you know, I.
I don't think that anything.
(39:27):
We're.
We'd have to make these big,big changes, and we need to make
them right now, and we need tomake them with a ton of money.
So Ken Martin got a bunch ofcrap at giving his speech when he
won the election because hementioned that, you know, there's
good billionaires out thereand we need their money.
Well, folks, I'm here to tellyou we have unilaterally screwed
ourselves out of a House majority.
We would have the House rightnow to stop Donald Trump with if
(39:51):
we hadn't unilaterally decidedto do fair gerrymandering.
Maps.
Maps only in the blue states,because that's the place where we
control.
So we did it all in the blue states.
And what did we do?
We fair mapped our asses outof a House majority that they're
allowed to gerrymander to put in.
And it's the same thing withthe money, okay?
Like we had an opportunity tokill Citizens United.
(40:12):
All we had to do to kill bothCitizens United and the partisan
gerrymandering crap was votefor Hillary Clinton in 2016.
She would have been inposition to create the first liberal
majority on the supreme courtsince the 1960s.
Okay?
But that ship is sailed now.
And we're talking about abillion we don't have.
We have George Soros and Reed hoffman.
(40:34):
They have 30 billionairesfinancing this infrastructure.
And you know, obviously somuch money they bought Supreme Court
justices with it.
Right?
So like, we can't be tellingthe people with money we don't want
your money.
I'm here to tell you there isnot enough grassroots money in all
the world to fix our problem.
The problem.
Meanwhile, Democrats thinkthat business people are the problem
(40:57):
or small business people arethe problem.
I mean that, that whole, thewhole brand identity and, and you
know what, I gotta be honestwith you, dude.
I went to a lot of Democraticmeetings over the last.
Okay.
And you know, they're cringe.
It's cringe to sit there andlike, listen to how it was stolen
from the Native American.
Have 10 people at a table,none of whom are transgender, introduce
themselves with gender pronouns.
(41:19):
Right.
Like these.
I, I know that's how it is in,in D.C.
and these Ivy League colleges.
I think a lot of it is, thesepeople have.
No, it's.
They have a very, very, youknow, unique and, and DC Belt line,
Beltway, New York, east coast,like experience of perception.
And that's why they thinkeveryone already knows Donald Trump
tried to steal the election.
(41:39):
And everybody already knowsDonald Trump banned abortion.
No, they didn't.
You don't.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, these are the same.
These are the same people thatare bitching and moaning because
a sella doesn't go fast enough.
That's what I'm saying.
And so like, you know, we, we want.
We can't.
We're not going to get backworking class of this country using
consultants with genderpronouns on their business card is
what I'm going to say.
I interrupted you.
(41:59):
Mo, go ahead.
No, I lost my train of thought.
Hey, it's good.
I'm having like, thank God wecan edit.
Thank God we're all seniorshere, right?
Like, yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Well, that's one thing I wasgoing to mention early.
Happy birthday You've got onecoming up in a.
In a couple of days.
It was coming up.
Oh, it's coming up.
(42:19):
It is.
And I wish I could.
I wish I could tell you thingsget better as time goes on, but hate
to lie to you, that's the.
That'S the most horrible partabout being old, right?
Is that you figure outeverything the old people told you
is true and, and you didn'tlisten to any of it.
And now, now your curse is ofcourse your.
The old person tellingeverybody about how like all this
(42:41):
truism about being old and noone will listen.
It's like the circle of life.
Yeah.
Getting old is not for.
But it beats the alternative.
It sure does, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Hey, we.
It's been kind of, you know, alot of doom and gloom we've been
talking about.
Obviously you've got some rayof hope or optimism or you wouldn't
be doing what you're doing.
So what, what is it that.
(43:02):
That keeps you going?
Yeah.
You never let the bastardsgrind you down.
Luckily for me, like I have aninsatiable appetite to win.
And when what keeps me goingis like, it's not just that we're
losing, it's that we're losingto these feros.
Okay.
We're losing to people thatwant to repeal the n the 20th century.
We're losing to people whothink Donald Trump had an election
(43:23):
stolen.
Right.
And that they.
They think the COVID vaccinekilled more people than co.
They're stupid as hell.
And it really irritates me notit be one thing to lose the democr
or democracy to a group oftalented smart people that are doing
talented and smart people things.
Now there is within thatorbit, definitely that.
That capability.
But at the top of the chainyou got Elon and, and Trump.
(43:46):
Right?
I mean, I can't lose to these morons.
Okay?
Okay.
And you know, that's whatkeeps me going.
What keeps me going isunderstanding, as I've always understood,
that I'm not the person thatI'm doing this for.
I'm doing this because.
Because rural people inMississippi, which is one of the
shittiest states in thecountry, I mean for ever since the
(44:07):
end of segregation, the redstates have used GOP control.
The red states to basicallyslow murder the black, their black
populations through shittypublic policy.
Like, you know, those are thepeople who are going to pay the price
because we didn't want to makefun of J.D.
vance for, you know, having agay porn.
Right.
So like at the end of the dayI feel pretty good where I am morally.
I know I'm on the right sideof history.
(44:28):
I know what I'm offering interms of the RX is a tough pill to
swallow, but I also know if wedon't swallow it, people are going
to suffer and they may even die.
Well, thank you for whatyou're doing.
We need more warriors outthere carrying the message and hopefully
we can beat these bastards atsome point.
That's right.
No, it's going to come.
There is going to come a day, guys.
I mean, I can't offer you anything.
(44:48):
Blood, toil, tears and sweatright now, but I.
They're at the end.
End.
It will be victory.
Victory at all costs.
Right?
All right, so we, we have atradition of talking about our favorite
bourbon.
Are you an alcohol drinker or a.
Look, no, no.
Deadhead.
(45:09):
Didn't spend some time with,with some Sammy Smith oatmeal stouts
on tour, but I, I'm, I'm a pot smoker.
I'm not a beer drinker oralcohol drinker anymore, but only
because I'm allergic to it.
It.
That said, on specialoccasions, like the last time I kicked
a bourbon, it was top shelfand it was with my dissertation advisor,
Paul Gurion, at a littlerestaurant in Athens, Georgia.
(45:31):
It was a good bourbon.
Good.
It wasn't Pappy's good, but itwas good.
Well, we, we've got some goodbourbons out here in North Carolina.
Be surprised, I've heard, youknow, and certainly if I was out,
you know, in, in the wilds ofNorth Carolina, I'd want to do a
little bourbon tour.
All right, well.
Well, you are a soulmate of Moand I's in that.
(45:51):
We both ran campaigns thatwere pretty tough and we're not afraid
to drop the F bomb and we bothgot kicked out of the room most of
the time.
So you're welcome on this showanytime and we really appreciate
you taking some time.
And our guest today has been Dr.
Not just Rachel, but Dr.
Rachel Biticoffer.
Oh, dude, it was my pleasure.
(46:13):
And then he muck you as a softspot in my heart.
So this has been Muckyou cohosted by Colonel Mo Davis in Asheville,
North Carolina, and DavidWheeler in Spruce Pine, North Carolina.
Thanks to our friend and guesttoday, Dr.
Rachel Bittacofer.
You can follow Rachel on X atRachel Bitticofer.
B I T E C O F E R Muck you isproduced by American Muckrakers.
(46:35):
Copyright 2025.
You can learn more atAmericanMuckrakers.comcom and follow
us on X and Blue sky underAmerican Mug.
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