Video interview: David Shor, political data scientist
The whiz-kid political analyst explains why Democrats need to talk about bread-and-butter issues
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!
We stan Geogism
Responding to the discussion start around 21:00 on the Hispanic Red Shift in 2020. It's very interesting that apparently the shift was primarily among Hispanics that already identified as Conservative but had previously voted for Democrats. But I have some holes to poke in David's theory that Socialism and Defund The Police caused the shift:
First, AOC's own district is half Hispanic, and she only underperformed Biden in her district by 1.4 percent, after she spent months shouting from the rooftops that defeating Trump was The Most Important Thing Ever. If mere association with the likes of AOC and socialism and defund the police and so on, despite Biden's repeated denials, caused such a big drop, why didn't we see a much larger drop when it came to AOC herself?
Second, David has said on Twitter that "Hispanic turnout in the [2020 Democratic primary] went down by a lot (which probably was a big warning sign that persuasion was already happening)" https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1343685995208839176 Obviously, this timeline does not at all fit with Defund The Police being a major cause. Why wasn't this mentioned during the interview?
Third, as to the correlations that they found in surveys with views on crime and socialism. Again around 22:30, David said that what happened in 2020 is that Hispanics who identified as Conservative became more likely to vote Republican. Do these correlations persist after you control for self-identified political ideology? If by 2020 more self-identified Conservative Hispanics were identifying with the GOP and consuming right wing media and taking their political cues from that, isn't this exactly what we would expect to see anyway?