10-12-2021, 05:42 PM
Whew! Another long'un, but a good 'un. In this Op Ed, Pollster Ezra Klein explains and critiques another pollster's
critique of Dem strategists. Klein gives a good presentation of both sides, and offers a fascinating look at polling science.
I'm abridging two sections of the presentation in two posts: this one recounts Schor's argument. The next Klein's complication of Schor's critique.
There is plenty here for everyone to nibble on--the true policy wonks and the casual reader who agrees or disagrees with individual points.
.......................................................................................................................................................................
Post #1:
David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don't Want to Hear.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/democrats-david-shor-education-polarization.html
President Biden’s agenda is in peril. Democrats hold a bare 50 seats in the Senate, which gives any member of their caucus the power to block anything he or she chooses, at least in the absence of Republican support. And Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are wielding that leverage ruthlessly.
But here’s the truly frightening thought for frustrated Democrats: This might be the high-water mark of power they’ll have for the next decade.
Democrats are on the precipice of an era without any hope of a governing majority. The coming year, while they still control the House, the Senate and the White House, is their last, best chance to alter course. To pass a package of democracy reforms that makes voting fairer and easier. To offer statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. To overhaul how the party talks and acts and thinks to win back the working-class voters — white and nonwhite — who have left them behind the electoral eight ball. If they fail, they will not get another chance. Not anytime soon.
That, at least, is what David Shor thinks.
...Freed from a job that didn’t let him speak his mind, Shor was resurrected as the Democratic data guru who refused to soften an analysis the left often didn’t want to hear....
At the heart of Shor’s frenzied work is the fear that Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe.
In 2022, if Senate Democrats buck history and beat Republicans by four percentage points in the midterms, which would be a startling performance, they have about a 50-50 chance of holding the majority. If they win only 51 percent of the vote, they’ll likely lose a seat — and the Senate.
But it’s 2024 when Shor’s projected Senate Götterdämmerung really strikes. To see how bad the map is for Democrats, think back to 2018, when anti-Trump fury drove record turnout and handed the House gavel back to Nancy Pelosi. Senate Democrats saw the same huge surge of voters. Nationally, they won about 18 million more votes than Senate Republicans — and they still lost two seats. If 2024 is simply a normal year, in which Democrats win 51 percent of the two-party vote, Shor’s model projects a seven-seat loss, compared with where they are now.
Sit with that. Senate Democrats could win 51 percent of the two-party vote in the next two elections and end up with only 43 seats in the Senate.
The “Physics” of Elections
Projection is an uncertain exercise, but that doesn’t make it useless. There is, as Shor puts it, a certain “physics” to elections. How a state votes in presidential elections is largely how it votes in midterm elections. Partisanship and demographics are uncomfortably revealing and don’t change much from year to year. None of this is inevitable or unalterable in the face of campaigns or catastrophe. But it’s somewhat predictable, and attempting a prediction can force a confrontation with reality that would otherwise go ignored until it’s too late.
This is the confrontation Shor is trying to force. The Senate’s design has long disadvantaged Democrats. That’s in part because the Senate overweights rural states and Democrats are a disproportionately urban coalition and in part because Republicans, in a bid for political advantage, added a flurry of states in 1889 and 1890 — North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho and Wyoming — many of which largely vote Republican to this day. But that’s been true for decades, and Democrats have held their own in the Senate. What’s changed the equation, Shor believes, are several interlocking forces.
First, educational polarization has risen sharply in recent years, particularly among white voters. Democrats are winning more college-educated white voters and fewer non-college white voters, as pollster shorthand puts it, and Donald Trump supercharged this trend. There was a time when Democrats told themselves that this was a byproduct of becoming a more diverse party, as non-college white voters tend to be more racially reactionary. Then, in 2020, Democrats lost ground among Black and Latino voters, with the sharpest drops coming among non-college voters.
I want to stop here and say I believe, as does Shor, that educational polarization is serving here as a crude measure of class polarization. We tend to think of class as driven by income, but in terms of how it’s formed and practiced in America right now, education tracks facets that paychecks miss.
Either way, the sorting that educational polarization is picking up, inexact as the term may be, puts Democrats at a particular disadvantage in the Senate, as college-educated voters cluster in and around cities while non-college voters are heavily rural. This is why Shor believes Trump was good for the Republican Party, ...“Donald Trump enabled Republicans to win with a minority of the vote.”
The second problem Democrats face is the sharp decline in ticket splitting — a byproduct of the nationalization of politics.
Atop this analysis, Shor has built an increasingly influential theory of what the Democrats must do to avoid congressional calamity. The chain of logic is this: Democrats are on the edge of an electoral abyss. To avoid it, they need to win states that lean Republican. To do that, they need to internalize that they are not like and do not understand the voters they need to win over. Swing voters in these states are not liberals, are not woke and do not see the world in the way that the people who staff and donate to Democratic campaigns do.
All this comes down to a simple prescription: Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff. “Traditional diversity and inclusion is super important, but polling is one of the only tools we have to step outside of ourselves and see what the median voter actually thinks,” Shor said. This theory is often short-handed as “popularism.” It doesn’t sound as if it would be particularly controversial.
It is.
critique of Dem strategists. Klein gives a good presentation of both sides, and offers a fascinating look at polling science.
I'm abridging two sections of the presentation in two posts: this one recounts Schor's argument. The next Klein's complication of Schor's critique.
There is plenty here for everyone to nibble on--the true policy wonks and the casual reader who agrees or disagrees with individual points.
.......................................................................................................................................................................
Post #1:
David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don't Want to Hear.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/democrats-david-shor-education-polarization.html
President Biden’s agenda is in peril. Democrats hold a bare 50 seats in the Senate, which gives any member of their caucus the power to block anything he or she chooses, at least in the absence of Republican support. And Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are wielding that leverage ruthlessly.
But here’s the truly frightening thought for frustrated Democrats: This might be the high-water mark of power they’ll have for the next decade.
Democrats are on the precipice of an era without any hope of a governing majority. The coming year, while they still control the House, the Senate and the White House, is their last, best chance to alter course. To pass a package of democracy reforms that makes voting fairer and easier. To offer statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. To overhaul how the party talks and acts and thinks to win back the working-class voters — white and nonwhite — who have left them behind the electoral eight ball. If they fail, they will not get another chance. Not anytime soon.
That, at least, is what David Shor thinks.
...Freed from a job that didn’t let him speak his mind, Shor was resurrected as the Democratic data guru who refused to soften an analysis the left often didn’t want to hear....
At the heart of Shor’s frenzied work is the fear that Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe.
In 2022, if Senate Democrats buck history and beat Republicans by four percentage points in the midterms, which would be a startling performance, they have about a 50-50 chance of holding the majority. If they win only 51 percent of the vote, they’ll likely lose a seat — and the Senate.
But it’s 2024 when Shor’s projected Senate Götterdämmerung really strikes. To see how bad the map is for Democrats, think back to 2018, when anti-Trump fury drove record turnout and handed the House gavel back to Nancy Pelosi. Senate Democrats saw the same huge surge of voters. Nationally, they won about 18 million more votes than Senate Republicans — and they still lost two seats. If 2024 is simply a normal year, in which Democrats win 51 percent of the two-party vote, Shor’s model projects a seven-seat loss, compared with where they are now.
Sit with that. Senate Democrats could win 51 percent of the two-party vote in the next two elections and end up with only 43 seats in the Senate.
The “Physics” of Elections
Projection is an uncertain exercise, but that doesn’t make it useless. There is, as Shor puts it, a certain “physics” to elections. How a state votes in presidential elections is largely how it votes in midterm elections. Partisanship and demographics are uncomfortably revealing and don’t change much from year to year. None of this is inevitable or unalterable in the face of campaigns or catastrophe. But it’s somewhat predictable, and attempting a prediction can force a confrontation with reality that would otherwise go ignored until it’s too late.
This is the confrontation Shor is trying to force. The Senate’s design has long disadvantaged Democrats. That’s in part because the Senate overweights rural states and Democrats are a disproportionately urban coalition and in part because Republicans, in a bid for political advantage, added a flurry of states in 1889 and 1890 — North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho and Wyoming — many of which largely vote Republican to this day. But that’s been true for decades, and Democrats have held their own in the Senate. What’s changed the equation, Shor believes, are several interlocking forces.
First, educational polarization has risen sharply in recent years, particularly among white voters. Democrats are winning more college-educated white voters and fewer non-college white voters, as pollster shorthand puts it, and Donald Trump supercharged this trend. There was a time when Democrats told themselves that this was a byproduct of becoming a more diverse party, as non-college white voters tend to be more racially reactionary. Then, in 2020, Democrats lost ground among Black and Latino voters, with the sharpest drops coming among non-college voters.
I want to stop here and say I believe, as does Shor, that educational polarization is serving here as a crude measure of class polarization. We tend to think of class as driven by income, but in terms of how it’s formed and practiced in America right now, education tracks facets that paychecks miss.
Either way, the sorting that educational polarization is picking up, inexact as the term may be, puts Democrats at a particular disadvantage in the Senate, as college-educated voters cluster in and around cities while non-college voters are heavily rural. This is why Shor believes Trump was good for the Republican Party, ...“Donald Trump enabled Republicans to win with a minority of the vote.”
The second problem Democrats face is the sharp decline in ticket splitting — a byproduct of the nationalization of politics.
Atop this analysis, Shor has built an increasingly influential theory of what the Democrats must do to avoid congressional calamity. The chain of logic is this: Democrats are on the edge of an electoral abyss. To avoid it, they need to win states that lean Republican. To do that, they need to internalize that they are not like and do not understand the voters they need to win over. Swing voters in these states are not liberals, are not woke and do not see the world in the way that the people who staff and donate to Democratic campaigns do.
All this comes down to a simple prescription: Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff. “Traditional diversity and inclusion is super important, but polling is one of the only tools we have to step outside of ourselves and see what the median voter actually thinks,” Shor said. This theory is often short-handed as “popularism.” It doesn’t sound as if it would be particularly controversial.
It is.