Rachel Bitecofer

Rachel Bitecofer (born February 23, 1977) is an American political scientist. Bitecofer graduated magna cum laude with honors from the University of Oregon where she earned a bachelor's degree in political science and earned her Ph.D. in political science and international affairs from the University of Georgia. In 2015 she became a lecturer at Christopher Newport University and assistant director of the Wason Center for Public Policy where she conducted polling. In 2019 she applied to convert her position to tenure track, which would lighten her teaching responsibilities, but was denied by the university. As a result, she resigned her position and went to work for the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank in Washington, D.C. Bitecofer's analysis has appeared on multiple media platforms including MSNBC and The New York Times. She wrote the 2017 book The Unprecedented 2016 Presidential Election on the election of Donald Trump and runs a podcast titled The Election Whisperer hosted by Substack. Today she runs Strike Pac, a liberal super PAC. In 2017, Bitecofer released a book called The Unprecedented 2016 Presidential Election, where she argued that the election of Donald Trump was not the result of one or two causes, but rather the product of a long process that began in the 1950s. She noted several breaks from past political reporting in the media's coverage of Trump, such as the number of days where Trump received 60% or more of all candidate coverage and his few newspaper endorsements. She later criticized the media and public for characterizing Trump's 2016 performance in the blue wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin as a "mythic legend of invincibility"; instead, she attributed the 2016 result to complacency, depressed African-American turnout, Russian interference, and dislike of Hillary Clinton. Bitecofer was recognized for predicting the size of the "Blue Wave" in the 2018 United States midterm elections much earlier than other forecasters.