Video interview: David Shor, political data scientist
The whiz-kid political analyst explains why Democrats need to talk about bread-and-butter issues
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As political analysts go, David Shor is something of a wunderkind. He slices the data, he dices the data, he extracts insights that other analysts miss! Sometimes his fealty to the numbers instead of the narrative lands him in hot water, but he’s managed to craft a unifying theory of American politics that seems to be slowly winning converts (a phenomenon known in some circles as “Shorpilling”. Also, the long hair is really working for him, in my opinion.
In this hour-long interview, we discuss a bunch of fun political topics, including:
Why Bernie Sanders lost
Why some Hispanics shifted to the GOP in 2020, and whether Democrats should be worried
What kind of issues Democrats should emphasize
How liberal or conservative America really is
Whether the surge of pro-immigration sentiment is real
Whether and how elites drive changes in mass opinion
…and much more!
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A bit late to the party here, but this explanation for Bernie's loss isn't all that compelling and sounds more like a media spot for the poll-driven politics that Shor loves and benefits from... he's just rehashing the Angela Nagle/Michael Tracey bait piece published in the conservative American Affairs journal last year.
What was clear from the outset was that Bernie benefitted from a divided field, won the first three primaries in states with large White and Hispanic populations and floundered when he got to South Carolina, the first state with a large Black voter base that he'd lost by large margins in 2016. The rest of the Dems use this performance to rally behind Biden, a plague breaks out, and the rest became history. The key would've been to maintain a divided field, which in retrospect, hinged on a stronger performance in the South and with Black voters, and overcoming a skeptical South that firmly associated Biden with Obama and looked to stalwarts like Clyburn for last-minute direction. For all the optics and talk, the campaign failed to adequately invest, campaign, and prioritize the South and use Biden's weak Iowa performance against him. The "white working class" at this point had already defected to Trump in 2016 after Bernie's 2016 failure and didn't show up to vote in the Dem primaries, and instead we got a sea of moderate, richer conservative Republicans voting blue filling in this vacuum that broke in Biden's favor. I agree with the bread and butter approach but the electorate changed in some meaningful ways this cycle
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