If you can’t decide whether Bernie or Buttigieg is best to take on Trump, or are panicking over who the next President will be, don’t bother - America’s political future is already sealed. That’s what forecaster Dr Rachel Bitecofer says and, having predicted the 2018 midterm results to almost total accuracy, “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down” is now all but a day’s work for the 42-year-old political science professor. Indeed recent political winds - impeachment, the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary - count for naught: Bitecofer’s model, which she released in July 2018, is based on “demographics of an area, a contest, a district, a state, and anticipating a surge in turnout” at the ballot boxes, rather than the more commonly relied upon figures from polls and surveys employed by the likes of FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver. The former stats wunderkind’s team predicted the Democrats would lose the House during the 2018 midterms; Bitecofer’s assessment, that they would be ahead by 42, missed the mark by just one seat. Instead of praise from her peers, though, she has been met with silence. A lone loud, female voice in the male world of election modelling Bitecofer, who goes by the nom de guerre "the Doc’, has seen her accuracy and gender prove double barriers to entry in what has long been a (nerdy) boys’ club. A single mother then living in Oregon, she decided to study politics after hearing presenter Rachel Maddow mention her own doctorate on the subject on a radio show; community college and university followed, before taking up her current posts at Christopher Newport University, Virginia and the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank based in Washington D.C. In the absence of recognition from those in her field, she has taken matters into her own hands, posting her predictions on the tweets of election data hotshots like Silver and Nate Cohn in an attempt to make people notice - a tack Dave Wassmerman, a leading figure in the election numbers game and critic of her methods, called “unfair to the many thoughtful forecasters who don’t relentlessly self-promote.” But Bitecofer - whose university desk bears a nameplate reading ‘I came to slay, bitch’ - knows that nobody else is going to do it for her. This lack of camaraderie doesn’t bother her, or at least it doesn’t sound as if it does when we speak during the week of the New Hampshire primary, a conversation largely made up of wonk chat and barking from her Australian shepherd, Ginsie. Besides, promoting herself has started to finally pay dividends: she has been featured in Politico and on CNN, as well as The Rachel Maddow Show - a fitting full circle, given her forecasting beginnings. Much criticism has been levelled against political forecasts in recent years on matters from Brexit to the 2016 presidency - analysis is no more accurate now than it was in 1972, in spite of how much more data we now have. Bitecofer plans to redress this by hinging her model on ‘negative partisanship’, an idea popularised by political science professor Alan Abramowitz, which purports that beating the opposition matters more to voters than individual policies. To sharpen the accuracy of forecasting, then, she is taking the politics out of, well, politics - charting instead how human behaviour is most likely to govern what happens. “[Voters] are not researching candidates and looking at issues; all they care about is ‘I’m a Republican, this guy’s a Republican.’ That’s always been true,” she explains, but adds that the polarisation of politics over the last decade has given rise to new voting patterns - the university-educated opting for the Democrats, while the white working class swing towards Republicanism. In feeding data into her model, she has thus reduced the importance of the economy and turned the dial up on partisanship, the race"s “main predictor” which “really sets the frame of the debate.” As for this year"s showdown, Bitecofer says the name on the Democrat ticket is irrelevant - they have 2020 victory in the bag. She is aware such a prediction is “radical shit” - discounting the people and policies the party is currently wrangling with, and championing the idea that one-upmanship over the other team matters most. But her numbers have been on the money, until now. And come November, she may well make mincemeat of that boys’ club once again.