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?
Still working my way through this, but I want to first respond to, at 38:42, David saying that increasing pro-immigration sentiment was caused by the increasing college-educated share of the population/electorate.
I'm pretty sure that this is completely wrong. Pew has a graph of immigration attitudes over time broken down by generation (https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/FT_19.01.29_ImmigrantsBurden_Generationaldifferences.png?resize=420,394), and the trendline for Generation Xers starts increasing around 2010 at the exact same time that it does for Millennials, and tracks the Millennial trendline almost exactly from that point on, even though Gen-Xers (defined in this context as people born from 1965-1980) were long past their college years by then. Boomers and Silents also show the same general post-2010 trend of increasing pro-immigrant sentiment, though they started from a lower base.
The pre-Trump trend (I agree that when Trump came onto the scene there was an additional pro-immigration backlash to his rhetoric and actions, but the trend was already visible before 2015) of increasing pro-immigration sentiment was, in my opinion, almost certainly primarily caused by the end of net illegal immigration with the Great Recession (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/12/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/). There's an inflection point around 2007-2010 in basically every immigration public opinion graph that I've looked at. Opinions changed because the situation changed.
Also, as for the general question of whether a college education makes people more pro-immigration, a longitudinal study in Switzerland tracked people from before they entered college until age 30, and found that people's opinions on immigration stayed basically the same between entering college and graduating, and that highly educated individuals actually became a bit more anti-immigration after they entered the labor market. Quoting the study's abstract: "This suggests that differences between educational groups are mostly due to selection effects, and not to the alleged liberalizing effect of education." https://academic.oup.com/esr/article-abstract/31/4/490/496810
- Do you think there is such a thing as a generational voting block (controlling for all other demographics)? If so, how has this influenced policy in the past and how will it influence policy in the future? For background, I was shocked to see Baby Boomer's made up nearly 40% of eligible voters during the 2000 election cycle: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/01/30/an-early-look-at-the-2020-electorate-2/.... I'm just trying to figure out if I'm reading too much into this data point.
- In regards to class, what is your understanding of the polling on tax cuts and the Iraq War? My understanding is support correlated positively with respect to amount of education and amount of income.
you know someone is interesting if you've heard him interviewed by R. Khan, Julia Galef, Politico, NYMag already and I still watched:) I was a big fan of "Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop." great book that I think is a key idea after seeing what has happened after RVC was implemented in other countries. Had to laugh at this one though: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/12/democrats-election-ranked-choice-voting-new-york/617461/ You can't please everyone!
I truly enjoy and learn a lot from the discussion. I agree with David on pushing for economic issues that are common concerns to many undecided voters. I am an immigrant and it took me decades to become center left democrat. My friend who is a highly educated immigrant (Phd) did not vote in the 2020 election b/c his family is upset about the leftest leaning agenda and defund policy slogan in the Democratic Party. They are from China and the idea of socialism, eve misperception, is a big turn off for them. Luckily, we are from Massachusetts so the votes from his family did not count. Massachusetts is a solid blue state. It took months before I can talk to them b/c they skipped the most important election in recent history.
Noah, excellent interview with Shor (and I've read quite a few Shor interviews by this time!) He makes a lot of important points in this one that deserve wide circulation. I wonder if you have thought about posting a transcript of the conversation--that might help bring the very enlightening discussion to more people. Btw, great job with the substack in general; I consistently find that your newsletters provide useful analysis and data about stuff I'm interested in. Keep up the good work!
I think he really hits on something when he starts talking more broadly (on context of the Hispanic shift) about the working class/educated divide. Remember: it used to be that the working class was not a good fit at all for Republicans. They were seen as “fat cats” who didn’t give a shit. When you thought about the Republicans you knew in real life, perhaps as a working class person you’d think of the big dog bosses at your company who were too good to talk to you or ever really acknowledge you.
Now.... my how things have changed, and I think Trump helped accelerate the cultural shift that was already happening with the working class. Look, here’s the deal: I know lots of working class people, and if you want them to look at you like you have two heads tell them how great of a President you think Hilary Clinton would have been. You’ll get laughed at probably 9 times out of 10. And since Hispanics are much more likely to be working class vs whites in this country, and the churches they attend also don’t have the traditional Dem backing that blacks get, Hispanics are getting it: they increasingly have more in common with working class GOP voters than the college educated Dems. This is going to be tough to be reverse I think, but you never in politics. Things can change quickly with the right candidates/message.
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.
Conservative here scouting the enemy. Shor's points on messaging seem utterly obvious common sense. Man, you guys are so far left, you really need your own zone.
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
Re: Starting around 46:00 the discussion about increasing support for gay rights from the early 90s onward. Besides the AP column that David mentioned, another thing that also happened in 1994 was the appearance of Pedro Zamora on the third season of MTV's The Real World. Quoting Wikipedia:
"As the show increased in popularity, Zamora's life as someone living with AIDS gained considerable notice, garnering widespread media attention. Zamora was one of the first openly gay men with AIDS to be portrayed in popular media, and after his death on November 11, 1994 (mere hours after the final episode of his season aired), he was lauded by then-President Bill Clinton. [...] Zamora's conflicts with Rainey were not only considered emotional high points for that season, but are credited with making The Real World a hit show, and with proving that the infant "reality" television format was one that could bring considerable ratings to a network."
It seems like stuff like that might have mattered, especially since unlike a fictional TV series this was presented as something real. The GSS data, at least, does seem to show a big increase in acceptance of homosexuality among the "MTV generation" (born 1970-1979) right around that time: https://twitter.com/xenocryptsite/status/1106566354939846656/photo/1
Zooming out a bit, something that might be worth looking into is the 1992 Cable Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_Television_Consumer_Protection_and_Competition_Act_of_1992), and whether that had a significant impact on the content of paid TV. I note that 1992 is the same year that Bruce Springsteen described Cable and Satellite TV as "57 channels and nothing on." Maybe that law did something to change that, by encouraging competition somehow, and perhaps in the process expanded the "effective bandwidth" of the television medium?
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?
Still working my way through this, but I want to first respond to, at 38:42, David saying that increasing pro-immigration sentiment was caused by the increasing college-educated share of the population/electorate.
I'm pretty sure that this is completely wrong. Pew has a graph of immigration attitudes over time broken down by generation (https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/FT_19.01.29_ImmigrantsBurden_Generationaldifferences.png?resize=420,394), and the trendline for Generation Xers starts increasing around 2010 at the exact same time that it does for Millennials, and tracks the Millennial trendline almost exactly from that point on, even though Gen-Xers (defined in this context as people born from 1965-1980) were long past their college years by then. Boomers and Silents also show the same general post-2010 trend of increasing pro-immigrant sentiment, though they started from a lower base.
The pre-Trump trend (I agree that when Trump came onto the scene there was an additional pro-immigration backlash to his rhetoric and actions, but the trend was already visible before 2015) of increasing pro-immigration sentiment was, in my opinion, almost certainly primarily caused by the end of net illegal immigration with the Great Recession (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/12/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/). There's an inflection point around 2007-2010 in basically every immigration public opinion graph that I've looked at. Opinions changed because the situation changed.
Also, as for the general question of whether a college education makes people more pro-immigration, a longitudinal study in Switzerland tracked people from before they entered college until age 30, and found that people's opinions on immigration stayed basically the same between entering college and graduating, and that highly educated individuals actually became a bit more anti-immigration after they entered the labor market. Quoting the study's abstract: "This suggests that differences between educational groups are mostly due to selection effects, and not to the alleged liberalizing effect of education." https://academic.oup.com/esr/article-abstract/31/4/490/496810
Similar longitudinal studies in the US have found similar results: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/01/09/are-left-wing-american-professors-indoctrinating-their-students
Three things for David Shor (assuming he is still looking at these comments):
- Do you have any opinion/critique of Steven Bram's ideal voting system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9Q0azZOyww (19:45 mark) ?
- Do you think there is such a thing as a generational voting block (controlling for all other demographics)? If so, how has this influenced policy in the past and how will it influence policy in the future? For background, I was shocked to see Baby Boomer's made up nearly 40% of eligible voters during the 2000 election cycle: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/01/30/an-early-look-at-the-2020-electorate-2/.... I'm just trying to figure out if I'm reading too much into this data point.
- In regards to class, what is your understanding of the polling on tax cuts and the Iraq War? My understanding is support correlated positively with respect to amount of education and amount of income.
you know someone is interesting if you've heard him interviewed by R. Khan, Julia Galef, Politico, NYMag already and I still watched:) I was a big fan of "Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop." great book that I think is a key idea after seeing what has happened after RVC was implemented in other countries. Had to laugh at this one though: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/12/democrats-election-ranked-choice-voting-new-york/617461/ You can't please everyone!
I truly enjoy and learn a lot from the discussion. I agree with David on pushing for economic issues that are common concerns to many undecided voters. I am an immigrant and it took me decades to become center left democrat. My friend who is a highly educated immigrant (Phd) did not vote in the 2020 election b/c his family is upset about the leftest leaning agenda and defund policy slogan in the Democratic Party. They are from China and the idea of socialism, eve misperception, is a big turn off for them. Luckily, we are from Massachusetts so the votes from his family did not count. Massachusetts is a solid blue state. It took months before I can talk to them b/c they skipped the most important election in recent history.
Noah, excellent interview with Shor (and I've read quite a few Shor interviews by this time!) He makes a lot of important points in this one that deserve wide circulation. I wonder if you have thought about posting a transcript of the conversation--that might help bring the very enlightening discussion to more people. Btw, great job with the substack in general; I consistently find that your newsletters provide useful analysis and data about stuff I'm interested in. Keep up the good work!
Any chance you could upload the audio of this to your Hexapodia podcast channel so I could listen on Apple Podcasts?
I think he really hits on something when he starts talking more broadly (on context of the Hispanic shift) about the working class/educated divide. Remember: it used to be that the working class was not a good fit at all for Republicans. They were seen as “fat cats” who didn’t give a shit. When you thought about the Republicans you knew in real life, perhaps as a working class person you’d think of the big dog bosses at your company who were too good to talk to you or ever really acknowledge you.
Now.... my how things have changed, and I think Trump helped accelerate the cultural shift that was already happening with the working class. Look, here’s the deal: I know lots of working class people, and if you want them to look at you like you have two heads tell them how great of a President you think Hilary Clinton would have been. You’ll get laughed at probably 9 times out of 10. And since Hispanics are much more likely to be working class vs whites in this country, and the churches they attend also don’t have the traditional Dem backing that blacks get, Hispanics are getting it: they increasingly have more in common with working class GOP voters than the college educated Dems. This is going to be tough to be reverse I think, but you never in politics. Things can change quickly with the right candidates/message.
Great discussion!! Anxiously awaiting part II.
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.
Conservative here scouting the enemy. Shor's points on messaging seem utterly obvious common sense. Man, you guys are so far left, you really need your own zone.
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
Re: Starting around 46:00 the discussion about increasing support for gay rights from the early 90s onward. Besides the AP column that David mentioned, another thing that also happened in 1994 was the appearance of Pedro Zamora on the third season of MTV's The Real World. Quoting Wikipedia:
"As the show increased in popularity, Zamora's life as someone living with AIDS gained considerable notice, garnering widespread media attention. Zamora was one of the first openly gay men with AIDS to be portrayed in popular media, and after his death on November 11, 1994 (mere hours after the final episode of his season aired), he was lauded by then-President Bill Clinton. [...] Zamora's conflicts with Rainey were not only considered emotional high points for that season, but are credited with making The Real World a hit show, and with proving that the infant "reality" television format was one that could bring considerable ratings to a network."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_World_(TV_series)#History
It seems like stuff like that might have mattered, especially since unlike a fictional TV series this was presented as something real. The GSS data, at least, does seem to show a big increase in acceptance of homosexuality among the "MTV generation" (born 1970-1979) right around that time: https://twitter.com/xenocryptsite/status/1106566354939846656/photo/1
Zooming out a bit, something that might be worth looking into is the 1992 Cable Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_Television_Consumer_Protection_and_Competition_Act_of_1992), and whether that had a significant impact on the content of paid TV. I note that 1992 is the same year that Bruce Springsteen described Cable and Satellite TV as "57 channels and nothing on." Maybe that law did something to change that, by encouraging competition somehow, and perhaps in the process expanded the "effective bandwidth" of the television medium?