Telling Democrats What They Don’t Want to Hear

[Dill]

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.
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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.

[Dill]

Post #2  Note: I bold sentences and phrases to emphasize main points here, not the supporting ones.
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The Democratic strategists and analysts who Shor said are causing the party’s problems seethe at his criticism and the influence he has commanded over the past few years. Among them, a few counterarguments dominate.

The first is that Shor doesn’t really show his work. There’s no comprehensive paper or experiment in which he has constructed and footnoted a full theory, in which his data can be rerun and his footnotes picked through. He sometimes refers to polling he conducted but doesn’t release the underlying numbers and cross-tabs. To be fair, that’s often because he can’t: He conducts much of his polling on behalf of clients, and they own the results. But it frustrates those trying to assess the arguments he makes publicly....

This is somewhat unfair. Shor’s tweets and even his comments are thick with citations to political science papers and regression tables. Compared to most pundits, he is amply footnoted. But it’s true that compared to other data analysts, he’s not. Speaking mainly through tweets and interviews lets him sidestep some of the standards that others in his profession are held to. In their view, Shor has cloaked himself in the aesthetics of data, but he’s not doing the rigorous, reviewable work demanded of others in the field. Some of his most influential theories are plausible, but he has never fully laid out the evidence needed to prove them.

“In the summer, following the emergence of ‘defund the police’ as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined,” Shor said in a March interview with New York magazine. “So I think you can tell this microstory: We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on. And then, as a result, these conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.”...

In the same interview, Shor said he based this theory on “extensive postelection surveys of 2020 voters” he conducted with partner organizations. He told me he couldn’t release the underlying numbers because they belonged to another group, but he sent me a table that showed the relationships between various issue positions and whether Latinos shifted their vote between 2016 and 2020, and it indicated that views on defunding the police were the strongest driver.

Other analysts, however, came to very different conclusions using more visible data sets. Robert Griffin, a research director at Democracy Fund, and Natalie Jackson, the research director of the Public Religion Research Institute, both tweeted that their polling data didn’t show Latino voters moving to Trump as a result of the Floyd protests. But it’s possible, as Shor noted in the same thread, that those polls could have had the same flaws that biased other polls toward Biden.

More work was done after the election to try to sort this out. EquisLabs produced a huge study of Latinos in the 2020 elections, conducting over 40,000 interviews with voters across 12 states. It found that Democratic policies did alienate working-class voters but that it wasn’t “defund the police” that did it. “For many who had jobs, there was a calculation to not rock the boat, a fear Biden would come in and shut down the economy,” Carlos Odio, EquisLabs’ senior vice president, told me. “That’s the baseline shift.” ...


The second level of disagreement is more fundamental: Many in the Democratic data world simply disagree that policy communication holds the power Shor believes it does or that the popularity of a message is as important as he thinks it is.

“There’s no argument that saying unpopular things is better than saying popular things. My argument is it’s not close to being an important enough factor to warrant attention,” Podhorzer told me. “If the object is for Democrats to win, that’s a tertiary, at best, factor.”

The suspicion here is that Shor has come up with a class-polarized way of responding to class polarization. He’s a smart, wonky nerd who thinks about politics in terms of polling and policy, and maybe he’s projecting that onto the electorate, too. According to this line of thinking, even as he’s trying to escape his ideological biases about what voters believe, he’s replicating his biases as to how they think and act.

“It’s almost laughable to me the notion that what people think about Democrats is made out of what Democrats say,” said Anat Shenker-Osorio, the founder of the progressive firm ASO Communications and a principal on the Race-Class Narrative Project. “I wish we lived in that world. I’d probably be on vacation. But that’s not our world.”

Our world, Shenker-Osorio argued, is one in which the voters Democrats most need to reach are the ones paying the least attention. What they hear comes at the end of a long game of telephone, and they’re only half-listening even then, as their kids are yelling and the bill collectors keep calling. If you start with that model of the electorate, you end up with different recommendations. “A message is like a baton. It needs to be handed from person to person to person,” she said. “If it gets dropped, it’s not persuasive. Unless you’re testing for what the base — what I think of as the choir — is willing to sing, then you’re going to be hard-pressed to get the middle to hear that song, to get the congregation to hear that song.”...

“Look, he’s right about a class and cultural divide,” Odio said. “He’s right about a liberal establishment that’s out of touch with working-class voters. He’s right that Latino and Black voters used to be insulated from polarization and now aren’t. But where he falls short is in investigating why that is. He’s really missing a race and ethnicity lens. If you fail to incorporate group identity into the analysis, you really miss why Black voters have been voting at astronomically high levels for Democrats. Why have Latinos, who are more moderate and even conservative in his analysis, been voting for Democrats? There’s a group threat that factors into their analysis. If you only talk to Latinos about immigration, you lose voters on the table. If you only talk to them about economics, you’ll arguably leave more votes on the table.”

But if there’s a narrowness to Shor’s focus, there can be a dissonance in the arguments of his critics. On the one hand, they frame this moment in politics as existential, an era in which democracy itself is teetering on the edge of calamity. And in the next breath, they treat message discipline, of any sort, as an impossible and perhaps even useless ask to make of the Democratic Party. At times, their arguments carry an air of resignation. . . .