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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The U.S. is an enormously geographically sprawling and culturally diverse nation. Your ideas about deconstructing our system of geographic representation to one base purely on population density, as a way to lord over people out in the hinterlands with different beliefs, make you real enemies to be crushed.
When you talk about the education divide, it sounds very condescending, like you mean people vote left BECAUSE they are educated. You never mention the very genuine economic pain of wage suppression and hollowing out of manufacturing due to (a) importing low wage Hispanic immigrants, or (b) farming out all our jobs to Chinese forced-labor camps.