Two interviews with David Shor, one at Politico, one at New York Magazine (thanks to Benj Hellie for flagging the latter). Shor doesn't seem to know much about the empirical literature on voter behavior, but there are still many interesting observations. Some highlights from the first interview:
Politics is fundamentally about splitting the country in half. And if college-educated white people are 4 percent of the electorate, like they were in the immediate post-World War II era, you can’t do that. But if they are 38 or 40 percent, suddenly you can. So, it’s unsurprising that as the education share has gone up, we’ve seen this happen.
If you think mechanically about the reinforcing currents that caused this, as college-educated white people enter the Democratic Party and become an increasingly large share of the Democratic Party while the reverse happens to Republicans, that naturally is going to influence who wins party primaries and what kind of people win internal party fights. In practice — given the fact that college-educated whites donate at disproportionate rates and volunteer at disproportionate rates — I think it’s going to be very hard for Democrats to resist the pull of catering to their preferences, which is naturally going to lead to losing votes among people who aren’t them: not just non-college educated whites, but, as we as we saw this cycle, also non-white voters....
There is a broader trend, though, that as college-educated white people become a larger share of the Democratic coalition and a larger share of the Democratic voice, they do pull the party on cultural issues. Non-college educated white people have more culturally in common with working-class Black and working-class Hispanic voters. So, it should be unsurprising that as the cultural power of college-educated white people increases in the Democratic Party, non-white voters will move against us.
The dominance of college graduates in the Democratic party no doubt means we'll be subjected to still more diversity "blather," blather that probably doesn't resonate with the 75% of Hispanic voters who do not self-identify as "people of color."
This decline in ticket-splitting means that when people are voting on their local House candidate, they’re increasingly doing that on the basis of the news they read about the national Democratic Party. And this creates a hard tradeoff: It’s no longer true, in a way that might have been true 20 or 30 years ago, that someone in a safe seat can say whatever they want to energize the base without creating consequences in swing districts. Now, that doesn’t mean that Abigail Spanberger, for instance, should control the exact contents of what gets said, but it really highlights the importance of being disciplined and embracing things that are popular and not embracing things that are unpopular....
The average voter in a general election is something like 50 years old — in a midterm or primary, it’s higher. They don’t have a college degree. They watch about six hours of TV a day — that’s the average; there are people who watch more. They generally don’t read partisan media. They still largely get their news from mainstream sources. They’re watching what’s on the ABC Nightly News. Maybe they see some stuff on Facebook, but it’s really mostly from mainstream sources.
This means that the issues that show up on the nightly news--is it "defund the police" or "protect the Affordable Care Act"?--have huge impacts in local elections, more so than in the past. The baby left should really retire "defund the police." Police are members of the working class, the left needs them, and not only because they have the guns. Police, for example, support gun control (for obvious reasons), and would also benefit hugely from reductions in economic inequality, which make their job harder. Unfortunately, the capture of the Democratic party by the "diversity blather" of the capitalist professional class, conjoined with the total misunderstanding of police killings means we're likely to see more of this.
Now some highlights from the second interview:
I think we have to acknowledge that if you pull up a list of Democrats who have outperformed their presidential race the most in the past 20 years, it is, generally speaking, a list of boring, moderate people..... Part of it is...that moderate politicians are less threatening to capital, and so they’re more likely to get Chamber of Commerce endorsements. But stepping back, if you look at all the polling and all of the evidence, I think there is a story that taking unpopular positions really hurts. You can see it as a time-series story too. If you look at AOC’s initial polling, or Bernie Sanders’s polling in 2016, or Warren’s standing in the Democratic primary, they were all much more popular before they started embracing a bunch of really unpopular issues.
The best example though might be Donald Trump. His approval rating rested in a very narrow band, for basically this entire election, particularly among non-college-educated whites. There was only one time that shifted, in the course of his entire presidency, and that was when they tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. His approval rating among non-college whites specifically plummeted. We were tracking Obama-Trump voters; this was the only time when they came home in large numbers. And the reason is that a lot of these voters agree with Democrats on Obamacare, and they were very angry about attempts to repeal it. (And then they stopped being angry because it failed and everyone in politics has a short memory.)
If this is right, there's a simple moral for social democrats: focus on the issues that affect people's material well-being. Period.
Recent Comments