With the election little more than a week away, the political scientist and strategist Rachel Bitecofer, author of the tough-minded Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts, sees some grounds for optimism about Kamala Harris in a nail-biting race that is effectively tied and still too close to call.

As a confidential advisor to some campaigns in recent years, she’s not making the sorts of predictions that had earned her fame as “The Election Whisperer.” (She called nearly every Congressional race correctly in the 2018 mid-terms months before the vote.) But she notes in her Substack column The Cycle that the Republicans and their partisan polling firms are pushing what she and a few other analysts call the “Polls Narrowing Mirage.” At the same time, record-shattering early votes from Democratic areas in Georgia, North Carolina and the views of early voters cited in new polling suggest that the frightening anti-Trump, abortion-ban messaging she championed now coming from the Harris campaign and the DNC is having an impact.

“Negative partisanship,” as she calls it, does two things: “It’s driving the swing bucket and maybe, hopefully, some of these Republicans to not vote for Trump and to vote for Harris by default.” She adds, “At the same time, that messaging—Donald Trump is an extremist; Donald Trump wants a national abortion ban; Donald Trump has a thing called Project 2025 that’s really bad—those messages are also maximizing coalition turnout. Because who’s going to be the most freaked out about an abortion ban being national, Project 2025 and Donald Trump? It’s the Democratic base. It’s a superior strategy; that’s why Republicans use that strategy exclusively.” She adds, “That’s the beauty of negative partisanship strategy. It does double duty: it gets rid of the entire concept of separate pools of the electorate.”

Its main weapon is the “wedge issue”: your opponents’ biggest vulnerabilities targeted in a hyperbolic, scary way designed to fracture the candidates’ coalitions and force them to play defense. The Republicans’ main wedge messaging, as only half-caricatured in our interview with Bitecofer in March? “Democrats are pedophiles and are going to turn your male children into girls.”

Now that has become basically the Trump campaign’s closing message. Adding to messaging on inflation and especially immigration, it’s led to a $21 million ad buy on NFL games and in swing states, highlighting Harris’s 2020 support for gender-affirming care for detained migrants and prisoners, which notably is required by federal law and was also implemented by the Trump administration. All told, Republicans have spent over $65 million in ads in more than a dozen states focusing on government subsidized gender-affirming care in prisons, and trans boys and women participating in female sports, according to The New York Times, part of a strategy to win back suburban female voters repelled by the GOP’s abortion bans. (See more below on how Kamala Harris and Senate candidates have handled—or mishandled—this line of attack featured in blistering Trump ads, ending “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”)

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Bitecofer praises the Harris campaign and the DNC: “They’re running a negative partisanship-style strategy this cycle focused on making the election a referendum on Donald Trump.” Unfortunately, she contends, “That’s not happening down ballot,” with most races running what she calls the “old model” that is putting incumbent Democratic Senators at risk. That strategy is aimed mostly at persuading undecided independent voters and moderate Republicans of the stellar qualities and policies of the Democratic candidates while also seeking to mobilize Democrats.

That approach—followed by the three-term Pennsylvania centrist Sen. Bob Casey, who boasts in ads of “siding with Trump” on trade and tariff issues while his lead has slipped into a toss-up contest—has also been deployed in the uphill Ohio and Montana races of Senators Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester. “The breakdown on one of these campaigns is going to be like 20 percent on turnout and 70 to 80 percent on the swing bucket persuasion,” she estimates. That latter argument is, essentially, “You hate Democrats and Jon Tester’s a Democrat, but he’s not one of those Democrats,” she observes. “And that will never ever work and it has never worked.” She chalks up Tester’s 2018 victory to the broader Democratic mid-term effect.

“The theory of the case on the old strategy is that you do that by distancing yourself from the national brand of the Democrats and reminding people of basically all the pork barrel and stuff you get done. And in Tester’s case, he’s a dirt farmer, and in Brown’s case, it’s the automotive union stuff, right? So, they’ve got their own personal brands. In the old model, what you hope is that you can carry enough of that [persuadable] vote. And in my model, it says no, no, no. What you have to do is convince that [persuadable] 10 percent that’s there’s a reason personal to them why it would be bad for this Republican to win.”

In sum, “The old strategy says: focus on how great you are. My strategy says: make sure you shit on the other guy so bad nobody can vote for him.”

On top of that, a central theme of her book and strategic advice is how few voters are genuinely independent and how stupefyingly ignorant most voters are about politics. She notes, for many, “The electorate does not know Donald Trump overturned abortion, women are dying—and they’ll never know that unless you tell them that in your paid ads. Because the campaigns are the only entity with large budgets to put messaging, forced messaging, into the eyes of consumers who are self-selecting to have no news.” And that electorate, she observes, is only “half of America’s adult population, because the other half won’t even bother to vote.”.

But it’s becoming even clearer that this pragmatic approach to demonizing opponents too often isn’t being applied in down-ballot races, as she noted in an astute recent Cycle article looking at a data-rich report from Ad Impact, a top-tier advertising intelligence firm. She pointed to abortion extremism messaging winning the day in the 2023 high-profile Wisconsin Supreme Court race, off-year Virginia legislature contests and the 2022 victory of Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. But only a quarter of 2024 Democratic races are running abortion-related ads. Yet it is essentially Kryptonite for Republicans: “When we focus on abortion, we’re talking about freedom. It’s their wedge: freedom, abortion, Project 2025, all together.”

One of the underlying failures here is the shambolic structure of the Democratic Party. She says, “In our party, each campaign is part of a decentralized system so we are all over the place talking about 15 different things…It’s frustrating because I personally feel like I failed in my mission: My goal was to go into 2024 to have everyone humming on this theme and have it centralized,” going from state legislative races all the way up to federal elections.” But, as she points out, “People should understand that most people who need to read my book still have not read my book—even with Jaime Harrison, the DNC chair, pushing it hard.” Indeed, she says, “Did Jon Tester read my book? No, but his staff knows about it. I know I wanted to talk to them about how to transition to that [negative partisanship] strategy and that they chose not to do that.” ( In contrast, the long-shot candidacies of Colin Allred in Texas and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell facing off against Sen. Rick Scott—she’s hitting him hard on abortion and even blaming him for a hurricane insurance calamity—are increasingly adapting Bitecofer’s hard-line strategy, as modeled by the Kamala Harris campaign.)

The more conventional campaigns are shaped in part by the supposedly “savvy” inside-the-Beltway mentality of consultants and sophisticated political journalists that has over-emphasized the importance of issue appeals and defenses as critical to winning over voters—as opposed to the rawer emotions of rage and fear Democrats have only recently started to exploit.

Yet instead of following the Republican-style attack pathway to victory, Democratic candidates are moving to embrace a realpolitik approach in trimming their liberal positions, as outlined in an article by David Weigel in Semafor. He looked closely at their adjustment to the threat posed by a growing right-wing tilt in politics.

These Democratic candidates are not nearly as wily as they believe, however, because they’re falling into the defensive “I’m not one of those Democrats” trap Bitecofer has been shouting about from the rooftops for years. In a foolhardy effort to dispute the Republican framing, Weigel shows how some campaigns are scrambling to deny the ads and mollify enraged anti-trans Republican bigots on a losing issue for Democrats. He points to strategies adopted by everyone from Ted Cruz challenger Allred airing an ad denying he supports trans boys in girls’ sports to Sherrod Brown running a local spot during Sunday Night Football decrying the anti-trans ads as misleading and saying that transgender girls “have already been banned” from girls’ sports.

Even though most Democrats have ignored the barrage of anti-trans ads (according to the Advocate they haven’t worked in past elections anyway), Sherrod Brown is still trying to wriggle free from them.  Semafor reported in mid-October that earlier, at a stop in Steubenville, Ohio, Brown had told reporters, “I hope the media will help us by putting out there that they aren’t true, because fact checkers have said they aren’t true,” though he declined to discuss the substance of the transgender-focused ads in his race. Ask John Kerry how well enlisting the media’s fact-checkers helped him in his fight against the Swift Boat campaign during his 2004 presidential race.

In contrast to Brown, Kamala Harris’s deft side-stepping of the baiting questioning from Bret Baier of Fox News on her previous trans positions won high marks from Bitecofer. After playing an ominous Trump ad proclaiming, “Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners,” Baier moved in for the kill shot.

“So are you still in support of using taxpayer dollars to help prison inmates or detained illegal aliens to transition to another gender?” he asked.

Harris, cooly unflappable, answered in part: “I will follow the law and it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed. You’re probably familiar with now—it’s a public report—that under Donald Trump’s administration, these surgeries were available to, on a medical necessity basis, to people in the federal prison system. And I think frankly, that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit of like throwing stones when you’re living in a glass house.”

Baier retorted, “The Trump aides say that he never advocated for that prison policy,” and, adding a lie, “No gender transition surgeries happened during his presidency.”

Harris responded, “Well, you got to take responsibility for what happened in your administration.” When Baier insisted no such surgeries took place, she cited again the report on Trump policies: “It’s in black and white.”

When Baier kept pressing her on her current stance, she said, “I would follow the law, just as I think Donald Trump would say he did.”

She then questioned the attack ads’ broader context and turned the tables on Baier and the MAGA Republicans. “He spent $20 million on those ads trying to create a sense of fear in the voters because he actually has no plan in this election that is about focusing on the needs of the American people. Whereas $20 million on that ad, on an issue that, as it relates to the biggest issues that affect the American people, it’s really quite remote. And again, his policy was no different.”

Baier attempt to parry her, but then folded, “Let’s move on.”

Bitecofer says, “She did very good because she just basically refused to play ball and what they wanted was a clip from her that they could take and throw in these anti-trans ads.”  (In fact, though, Harris did briefly and effectively address the question and tied Trump to the same policies she had endorsed.) Bitecofer adds, “If it was me, I’d pivot and attack on everything. Oh, you want to talk about kids? Let’s talk about all the kids that you’re letting die in schools every day because of your gun control radicalism. I’m very trained to pivot as an attacker.”

The task of dodging smears and lies coming from the Trump campaign and the GOP faces Democrats at all levels, but her strategy seems to be the same in most cases: The best defense is a good offense. For example, while most polls show Sen. Tammy Baldwin ahead in Wisconsin even as the Cook Report calls it a toss-up, Baldwin’s race is tightening while attacks on the openly gay Baldwin’s support for health care for gay and trans youth is under fire.

Bitecofer admits she hasn’t been following the race closely and doesn’t even know the name of Baldwin’s opponent (Eric Hovde), but her prescription is the same. She says, “Let’s say I did know his name and it was Smith. Your closing message should be ‘John Smith is an extremist who’s going to pass a national abortion ban and kill your wife.’” She emphasizes that the attacked opponent has to represent a personal threat to you, the voter—not broader societal concerns. “It’s not kill brown people, not kill other people. It’s you, your wife, your family.”

Bret Baier and Fox News were openly hostile to Kamala Harris, but even supposedly more balanced and respected media outlets can throw up daunting roadblocks to the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party getting a fair shake in media coverage.

Take the “sanewashing” and “bothsideism” of The New York Times and other mainstream outlets that downplay or ignore the increasingly unhinged authoritarian, racist and vile comments from Donald Trump. All this underscores the urgency of Bitecofer’s plea that Democratic campaigns have to highlight the dangers of Trumpism directly to voters because the press won’t do so. “If democracy dies in two weeks,” Bitecofer says, “the cause of death will be the American media system.”

Respectable media coverage also prods Democrats into spending more time on the political issues that voters tell pollsters and reporters that concern them—rather than taking advantage of our polarized politics with messages that could actually propel Democrats to victories. As Bitecofer observes, “We should focus on Donald Trump as a unique threat. If democracy is to survive this cycle, it will be because a coalition of Democrats, independents, and even some Republicans choose to vote against Trump, especially for those right-leaning indies and those Republicans going against brand loyalty. We’re asking them to break brand loyalty from the Republican brand and vote for a Democratic candidate. And the worst thing you can do is propose all these unicorn policies that you’ll never get into law anyway.”

Speaking of Harris, Bitecofer observes, “This idea that she should be talking all about her policy and laying out details of her plans for this and that is absolutely the wrong take. It comes from a progressive bubble and it would actually be counterproductive when you’re trying to get people to do that, to break their brand loyalty and vote for this existential threat reason.”

“Every minute that you’re talking about policy, you’re normalizing that existential threat,” she declares. “And you’re likely to trigger partisan reactions from the target [you’re trying to reach], moderates. Reminding them through policy appeals why they hate Democrats is not the way to do that.”

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The conventional emphasis on policy messaging—augmented with carefully tested ads—has been turbo-charged with the outsized role of Future Forward, the dominant Super Pac that’s now spending more on ads than the Trump and Harris campaigns combined. The Times headlined a story about it last week: “Inside the Secretive $700 Million Ad-Testing Factory for Kamala Harris.” It claims to have tested thousands of messages, social media posts and ads, boasting of somehow conducting nearly four million voter surveys since Harris entered the race. It produces, the Times notes, about 20 potential commercials for each one it airs.

The group has ranked 300 ads that it ran online and on television on their effectiveness, using online surveys to determine which potential ads have the greatest impact. Bitecofer is skeptical of most elements of its approach. She contends, “They said something about for each ad, they’ll have 20 ads submitted and then they pick the best one, right? I mean all I read into that is a massive, massive waste of resources.” She notes that the ads that test best are what are called “contrast ads”. “Voters will tell you they like something if it’s got some doom and inspiration,” but that doesn’t necessarily translate to an ad that motivates voters. She speculates: “All this shit that Tester’s got tested great with voters, but he’s going to lose on all of it.”

She cites the often powerfully emotional and enraging ads by Lincoln Project gurus Rick Wilson and Stuart Stevens as counter-examples. “When the Lincoln Project wants to roll out an ad, they don’t test it. They don’t spend $700 million on testing.” Indeed, she points out that basing your ad campaign on individually scored ads can have unintended consequences. “What Rick Wilson, Stuart Stevens and I would tell you is that it defeats the entire purpose of political advertising. What advertising should be doing is setting a top-of-mind narrative argument, something like ‘Trump is dangerous to you.’”

Most of Future Forward’s findings and highest-testing broadcast ads are at odds with Bitecofer’s real-world strategic gameplan. But Bitecofer and the secretive leaders of Future Forward do share some common ground on the value of broader “general population” ads, rather than niche ads targeting specific under-served ethnic minorities.

It looks like many of the Future Forward ads that tested well simply don’t fit in with the “negative partisanship” strategy that has allowed the GOP to dominate the political agenda for decades or garnered major victories for Democrats after the Dobbs decision. Instead, as the Times reported, “The results show the top-testing Harris ad through the end of September was a 60-second spot of her delivering a speech about her most popular economic proposals.” In addition, the Times found, “The group has also shared broad thematic findings with allies, including that purely negative ads against Mr. Trump barely make a difference.”

There are real-world rebuttals to all that, including all the Democratic victories curbing the much-touted Red Wave in 2022 with harsh attack ads labeling GOP candidates as abortion and MAGA extremists. Perhaps one of the best recent challenges to these testing wizardry claims comes from the Trump campaign itself, Bitecofer points out, although the final impact has yet to be seen. In a snarky tweet featuring the Trump anti-trans ad captured from a TV screen, she said, “This is the ad Trump is airing on college football. I can guarantee you if we tested this ad, people would say it was ridiculous. It wouldn’t make it out of OUR testing lab. Republicans know the point isn’t to test well, it’s to wedge well.”

Future Forward has come under fire from grass-roots groups claiming it drains donor funds from get-out-the-vote drives such as those catalyzed by the Movement Voter Project, led by journalist and social entrepreneur Billy Wimsatt, which funds local organizations that reach progressive young people and minorities. Wimsatt circulated a memo warning that GOTV efforts were “dangerously underfunded”—a view seemingly echoed by the Harris campaign itself, which publicly urged donors to also back groups devoted to getting out the vote. He told the Times, “It seems like a ton of money is going to paid media and not enough to the ground game.”

(The leaders of the Future Forward organization, including president Chauncey McClean, are so under the radar that at least one donor, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz, who has given $50 million to the group since 2020, has never spoken to him. Presumably, Bill Gates, whose previously secret $50 million donation to the group was misleadingly headlined this week by some outlets as a direct donation to the Harris campaign, can figure out how to reach McClean by phone. The Washington Spectator, however, hasn’t been able to reach its leaders for comment about the critiques of their group.)

Ad campaigns can also energize voters, but Bitecofer sees a logistical problem with Future Forward that can undermine reaching voters and convincing them to vote. She says, “I’m on the side of less money on testing, more money on distribution.” She admits, “I do have a bias. And that bias is: Great, you guys have the best fucking analytics infrastructure in the history of campaigns—and it’s largely fucking useless.”

If Harris loses, expect plenty of blame to fall on Future Forward. Indeed, the Times article, noting some criticism that it has too much ad agenda-setting power, reports: “If we’re right, we’re all right,” said one person involved in the effort, granted anonymity to candidly discuss the group’s influence in Democratic politics. “If we’re wrong, we’re all wrong.”

In looking over the political landscape, as Bitecofer wrote recently in her Substack, “There is nothing I can do to give you absolution, this is (and always has been) a race that will come down to a few thousand votes in states like Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona and will be much tighter than in 2020.“ She clearly sees it can go either way. So she’s been reading deeply on Hitler’s rise to power and how quickly he turned the government into a dictatorship, as explained in a new piece, “What (Really) Happens if Trump Wins”—while also telling The Washington Spectator: “The Harris campaign has run as good of a campaign as I could have hoped for.”

Art Levine is a prize-winning investigative reporter and contributing editor of The Washington Monthly. He is the author of “Spaceship of Fools,” his investigation for The Washington Spectator last summer on unproven claims of alien visitations, the dissemination of false information to government agencies and the eagerness of mainstream media to embrace it. He has written for Newsweek, The American Prospect, Salon, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Mother Jones, Truthout, In These Times, AlterNet and numerous other publications. He is also the author of Mental Health, Inc: How Corruption, Lax Oversight, and Failed Reforms Endanger Our Most Vulnerable Citizens.