Ever since Pat Caddell became famous as the wunderkind pollster of the Jimmy Carter campaign, it seems as if there's always been a data geek of the moment who becomes both a guru and a lightning rod within the progressive movement. Today's DGOM is David Shor, an obsessive number cruncher who worked for the Obama campaign in 2012 and then achieved notoriety by getting himself fired last year from Civis Analytics, a progressive data science firm.
Today it's Ezra Klein's turn to interview Shor. Let's listen in:
At the heart of Shor’s frenzied work is the fear that Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe....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.
Unfortunately, this doesn't go nearly far enough. It's simply not possible in the era of Fox News to talk only about what you want to. The opposition gets a vote too, and Fox News will relentlessly hammer progressives at our weakest points even if we could, miraculously, get everyone to agree to shut up about our less popular views.
The problem with progressives today isn't messaging. It's our actual views. Let's run down a few of the more obvious examples:
Immigration. As recently as 2013 liberals were mostly on board with the compromise immigration bill backed by Marco Rubio. Today it would be a laughable nonstarter. During the Democratic primary debates, there was barely any daylight at all between the center of gravity of Democratic opinion and a policy of full-on open borders. Within the progressive movement, you will almost never hear even the slightest support for any kind of immigration enforcement.
The Great Awokening. Can we all agree, at a minimum, that woke culture has gone a bit too far? No? Not even that?
OK then, can we agree that, to an average, ordinary, nonpolitical, middle-class man on the street, wokeism has gone too far? That it's become more than just a few college kids blowing off steam and it needs to be reined in?
It's instructive that Shor himself became famous for being fired due to a lack of sufficient wokeness. What was his sin? During the George Floyd protests last year, he cited research by a Black scholar showing that while nonviolent protests helped Democrats, violent protests hurt them. This was judged beyond the pale and Shor was let go.
The Welfare State. There's nothing new about this. Democrats and Republicans have been at war over the social safety net forever.
But there's something that progressives simply refuse to admit about it: we won. Over the past few decades safety net spending has skyrocketed to nearly a trillion dollars a year—and that's just federal spending. What's more, it's not being hollowed out or chipped away or anything close to it. Spending has gone steadily up, up, up, and it's stayed up even though Republicans may hate it.
Despite this, progressives relentlessly insist that welfare spending is on the verge of collapsing, and that poor people in the US are practically sleeping in the gutters. None of that is true. There are, obviously, people at the very bottom of the income ladder who are truly in terrible need. But not that many. Even near the bottom, the average poor household receives something like $35-40,000 in cash and government benefits.
Despite that, we remain so obsessed with the poor that we've almost entirely given up on the middle class. Is it any wonder they've given up on us?
I won't go on about this forever. I assume I've made my point, and I assume it's every bit as unpopular as I think it is.
But it's for real. A lot of progressives don't really get this because they're college educated and all their friends are college educated too. They simply don't have any friends who are working or lower middle class that they can talk to honestly. If they did, some of this stuff would be a whole lot more obvious.
To accept all this, you don't have to be the kind of person who thinks "Defund the Police" was responsible for Democratic losses in 2020. You merely have to be outside your bubble enough to acknowledge that it sure as hell didn't help. Are you?
'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. '
Isn't it wonderful, that only Democrats have to behave like a legitimate political party? How does GOP Electoral Sabotage and Fraud play into his "data model"?
It's not great, but it's reality. The right doesn't have to follow rules and we do - which is in many ways expressly why we're the responsible adults in the room. The constraints on us chafe, but it we release them, we do meaningfully become substantially more like the republicans.
We're not great at fighting a culture war, but the reality on the ground is that there's a ton of grievance and resentment in the US today, and we do a terrible job speaking to it. Republicans can keep being relevant precisely because speaking to it is literally their only policy.
How about you take yourself & Kevin's immunocompromised self into an unmasked & unvaxxx'd diner in the Inbred Empire & find out what actually are the FAIR & APPROPRIATE (your words) grievances of the forgotten RILMURICAN?
No, it's not wonderful at all. But it very likely is reality, especially in Senate races.
Or maybe not.
Sara Gideon was nothing like Cal Cunningham -- she kept it in her pants -- but she still lost.
(Also, about CC: if he was a GQPer, he never would have lost, & in fact would be a favorite of the party, as with Roy Moore & Matt Gaetz. It's only the MORAL RELATIVIST SECULAR HUMANIST HELLBOUND Democrats who sloth off their degenerate members (Cunningham, Weiner, John Edwards) while the RIGHT WITH GOD GQP elevates theirs.
Another example of this: in Virginia, Justin "Black Kavanaugh" Fairfax finished a distant fourth in the gubernatorial primary, whereas in the GQP he would have been the betting favorite.)
Justin Fairfax gave voters no reason to vote for him. He whined at one of the early debates that he was being "lynched" in a room where two of the other candidates were black women. He wasn't doing good in the polls before that but then plummeted to not even a rounding error.
Terry Mac was the comfy shoe, the known quantity, similar to the reasoning that went into black voters supporting Joe Biden. Black Virginians threw their lot in with Terry an Irish American originally from Syracuse, NY but a Virginia resident for over 30 years.
Yes Democratic primary voters have entirely different values then GQP primary voters.
Republicans get to play it that way because the electoral rules set out by the U.S. Constitution tilt everything in their favor. Democrats don't just have to get more votes than Republicans do in order to win; they have to get a lot more. It isn't fair, but it's reality
On top of that, the Republican coalition is remarkably homogeneous. They don't have to wrangle groups that have fundamentally different interests into voting for each other.
They can get away with rhetoric that excites their base and offends a large chunk of the electorate, because they don't actually need the people that are mortally offended in order to achieve power. Democrats do. They have to thread the needle of exciting their base without offending people whose votes they need.
Mama, I want to cut off my fingers just like Jimmy!
Childish whinging on about the reality of data doesn't change the reality that one has to address real world constraints to actually win votes.
"I don't like it, it's not fair' childish whinging on doesn't change the reality.
Oh yeah… the vast moderate middle class. Flirting with nazis because the gays want to get married and the blacks are tired of being harassed. Progressives, gays, and criminal blacks, just need to stop being so uppity. Stupid pregnant women just need to deal with the childbirth. It’s really fine with me. Democrats have a new slogan. “We are the party of the status quo.” Go climate change! More summer weather! Just avoid the beach from mid August to mid September and all will be fine.
I think I’m never going to get anything useful from this government except that so it doesn’t matter if Trump the second is king.
I bet you think you are the first person to make this counter-argument. None of that stuff will happen if Republicans win. More of it will if Democrats win. You have to have power to do anything. You don't want to win, you want to be right and complain about it.
I don’t think that. I lived through Bush, Obama, and Trump. Absolutely nothing meaningful about my life is different as a result of who was President.
Justin must live under a rock. My life, and those of those around me, have been profoundly affected by the political actions an inactions of the last two decades.
This. Obamacare literally saved my life. Our trans kid was vilified by people in power in the last administration.
But regardless, life isn't always about "me me me." Sometimes we should think of others.
Omg, it's really, really hard to be raising a trans kid right now because Charles Koch is funding an astroturf campaign against trans kids to whip up the masses in a Tea Party like furor.
They are making quite a spectacle in my neck of the woods showing up at school board meetings hollering about OMG two gay/trans friendly books in school libraries!
As Rod Dreher would know, boys should be happy with their primitive root wieners & girls should be happy not to have their own.
I have an actual job so, like most, I don’t have any need for Obamacare.
That’s silly. Not my experience at all. So that’s the problem.
Don't feed the silly little troll. He's daring you to make eye contact while he pees himself.
Got it in one.
I’d rather you think of me as a troll than be an actual war criminal like you.
And he can't even get being right right.
Also, I don't see where Kevin said the Democrats should become pro-Life on abortion or friendly to anti-gay activism. Much of the country is conflicted on abortion (but don't want to see a hard ban) and fairly accepting of gay people these days. It's not 1980 any more.
I honestly don't think the country is conflicted on abortion. I think folks are either yes or no, a vocal minority are obsessed with preserving the white male patriarchy and controlling women while a majority of folks think it should be left up to women with mild regs but they aren't motivated to go out into the streets over it.
It's not 1980 any more thank goodness but the 20 percent crazy slice has apparently gotten their marching orders from Charles Koch and the Independent Women's Forum to raise the alarm about schools being gay and trans friendly as if the schools are going to convert kids into being gay or trans. It's spooky.
It's kind of rich. Shor was fired because he went off-message. The protests were, statistically speaking, overwhelmingly non-violent. But, of course, that's not what gets the coverage. Because fires are compelling video, so we'll show the same footage over and over. That was the issue, and complaining that "violent protests" don't help is A) stating the obvious, and B) giving more credibility to the idea that BLM protests were, in general, violent.
"Off message" is a familiar thing. It has very little to do with "wokeness".
OK, so now he wants to criticize Dems in general for going "off message". I find that rich.
Not that he's wrong.
Kevin needs to screencap this comment right here as an example of someone deep inside the bubble.
It has a lot to do with wokeness. That doesn't mean we can't advance social justice if we're in power, but we have to be in power.
The most annoying thing about the left is they think they should be in power for free, in a democracy, solely by virtue of being right. Neither Shor, nor I, nor Kevin, are saying your views are wrong. We are saying we can't get there from here if this is what we run on, and has evidence to back it up. You can dislike the evidence as much as you want, but all it will lead to is defeat.
This is not the first or second time this has happened. This has been happening to Democrats every election cycle I've been alive, at least since McGovern. And it's happened to the Republicans too, for example in 2018. And they didn't get the senate before 2014 because they couldn't find senate candidates who could do better than "I am not a witch."
So please, tell us why we should listen to you instead of decades of experience just so you can be right and then say hello to the other Nader voters.
You say I'm "deep inside the bubble" to dismiss me. It might well be that I know far more working-class people than you do. They are my relatives. They are the friends I grew up with.They are people I still talk to every day. But I don't know you, maybe you do that, too.
When I observe that Shor was fired for going off message, that's an observation, not an endorsement, which you seem to think it was an endorsement.
This is a common error. I'm tired of writing 5 paragraphs of qualifiers when a simple read of English would suffice. I didn't endorse OR condemn his firing. Just observed that it was for going off message. Which it was.
I recall being puzzled by this last summer, in fact. I recall being censured for worrying about the violence. Of course, you couldn't know about that, even if the Internet had a memory, which it doesn't, because it didn't happen on the internet.
I just wish we could stop believing we know everything about someone because of a few dozen words they wrote.
Oh you are so, so wrong. No matter what stance the Democrats take the astroturf disinfo campaigns will nutpick the craziest things said by some teenager in Oakland and convince voters that this is in the Democratic Party Platform. So it won't matter if the party runs as GOP lite, they will still not win over those voters.
Democrats should run on a platform of fair play for everyone and programs to give everyone a chance at the American Dream. If that is too "woke" for the Fox News crowd, well of course it is because anyone to the left of Hitler is too woke for them.
It doesn't matter if the protests were "overwhelmingly non-violent." Most trump rallies are "overwhelmingly non-violent," too. But there is something really sick going on there.
In the case of violence in the wake of the Floyd killing, I have to believe that most of the bad stuff was the work of organized street gangs exploiting the situation. I know for sure that it was here in the Chicago area. I don't understand why the left is loath to acknowledge that.
Violence made the news, that's for sure. For days.
The black gangs took advantage because they are criminals. Why wouldn’t they take advantage of the chaos?
Don't make eye contact with the troll. just try not to gag at the stench of urine and walk on by.
War criminal.
Don't blame the looting etc. just on black people. There were plenty of white people involved-- including some agents provocateurs from white nationalist groups.
Yes the police station set on fire was done by a white nationalist guy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-braces-for-third-day-of-protests-and-clashes-over-death-of-george-floyd/2020/05/31/589471a4-a33b-11ea-b473-04905b1af82b_story.html
Blacks kill blacks in the cities these days.
https://wwmt.com/news/local/noted-kalamazoo-public-schools-alum-charged-with-murder-after-18-year-old-shot
Whatever happened to Umbrella Man?
He was identified, discovered to be a white supremacist, and charged.
Many of the defences of violent protest totally ignored the reality of violent protest during the Floyd protests: a large fraction of the violent protesters were white (including two of the men who burned down the third precinct), and many of those white men were affiliated with white supremacist groups. Umbrella man wasn't the only one.
It's simply not possible in the era of Fox News to talk only about what you want to.
I think Shor's response to this would be that there aren't many persuadable voters watching Fox News. What you really want to do is target not overly political "normies." And to reach them, shaping your message is critical. So, yeah, talk about the things that poll well. Right now that would mean, say, talking about having Medicare negotiate drug prices. And it definitely doesn't meant talking about immigration reform.
A strong majority of Americans favor a Dreamers’ act, including a majority of Republican and Republican-leaning voters:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/19/public-backs-legal-status-for-immigrants-brought-to-u-s-illegally-as-children-but-not-a-bigger-border-wall/
Much of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better program, which is more progressive than most of us expected, has majority approval.
I think Shor exaggerates the importance of issues to the persuadable electorate. There are other dimensions that a reasonable person may consider: a candidate’s experience, record of accomplishment, competence, communication style and skill, who they choose to take advice from, and more. And then there are factors that have little to do with qualifications: demeanor, accent, ethnicity, religion, looks …
The main issue is passing them. Congress passed coronavirus bill and have spent 8 months with their thumbs up their ass. At least that's what it looks like. THATS what turns off people. Happened the exact same way with Obamacare and like with Obamacare the main problem is rightwing democrats making the bill shittier.
Biden set out to prove democracy worked but all he's done so far is show the opposite. That's not his fault but it's what he based his presidency on.
The Dreamers are irrelevant to the immigration debate.
A strong majority of Americans favor a Dreamers’ act, including a majority of Republican and Republican-leaning voters
Shor claims there's pretty strong evidence that immigration isn't a good issue for Democrats, and that Trump's focus on harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric helped him win in 2016 (by raising the issue's salience in the campaign). Remember, there aren't many persuadable voters, so, per his reasoning, that's the cohort you need to think about. He also points out — and I reckon he's pretty credible in that he does it for a living — that nearly all issue-centric polling is paid for by clients who have a dog in the hunt one way or another. And so it's inherently untrustworthy.
The claim that polls say Americans are not unreasonable bigots with respect to unauthorized immigrants brought to the country as kids sounds intuitive to my ears. But that's a far cry from saying Democrats ought to make it a focus in elections.
Really? Shor is skeptical of ’issue-centric polling’ but “claims there's pretty strong evidence that immigration isn't a good issue for Democrats”? Well, I guess his issue-centric polling is the exception.
I myself am skeptical of issue polls, but not because I suspect bias. Rather, it’s because I doubt that many marginal voters vote on issues (by marginal voters I mean the voters who have a party preference, but do not always vote. They are the ones who make swing states).
Yes, Trump’s anti-immigrant bigotry helped him in 2016, but he lost the popular vote by the largest margin of any EC winner, ever. He became President because our Constitution gives extra votes to dirt (or is it livestock?).
Dang, didn’t close the tag correctly.
Shor is skeptical of ’issue-centric polling’ but “claims there's pretty strong evidence that immigration isn't a good issue for Democrats”?
Yes.
(Hint: Polling isn't the only kind of "evidence").
I don't think we're going to be able to stop falling off this cliff. What I want is accountability when it happens. But that won't happen either.
Completely agree with you. I live at the edge of Pennsyltucky. There are lots of good Democrats here but precious few progressives. The whole woke thing seems bizarre at times. I hire H1B immigrants and am trying to figure out how to hire J-1 people. People universally accept it as these are good people making positive contributions. Open borders where we let everyone in? No way. That will never be accepted by other than a small group of people.
This all reminds so much of the Tea Party. The extremes in both parties are only happy if they get 100% of what they want. Just not how the world works. Take 80% of what you wanted and be happy. Boehner couldn't pass anything because of the Tea Party and now Progressives will make sure we do the same thing.
Steve
Amen. I live in a rural area. Even my Democratic friends can't quite bring themselves to understand what the hell is going on in cities and colleges even while largely sympathetic.
What the scolds in this thread need to remember is, as you point out, the Tea Party would've probably been even more successful if they hadn't had that one cycle full of insane senate candidates. Is that recent enough?
People seem to think they should be in power because they are right. And I don't disagree with the progressive left on many issues. Substantively, I probably am progressive; I just cannot agree with their tactics.
Though to be fair they have acquitted themselves well on reconciliation, but note that that is not about cutting edge social issues.
There haven't been a lot of good Democrats in Appalachia since Michael Dukakis was the flagbearer of the party.
The American Midlands are about as Democrat as Augusta National Golf Club is Jewish.
The Republicans are trolling the Democrats. That is way they are trying to coop memes from the left. "I can't breathe" goes form a protest against police brutality to a protest against wearing masks.
The response needs to be ridicule, not righteous indignation.
Show a picture of a child wearing a mask, playing with friends. Show a person being intubated. "Wear a mask so you can breathe".
Abortion? That's why we advocate for paid time off and paid family leave and access to medical care. Having a child shouldn't mean you lose your job and medical coverage. However, we're not going to force women to bear children against their will.
Minority rights? How does it hurt you if we treat people right?
The first time I heard "Defund the Police," I felt like I was going to throw up. I told a friend it was the stupidest thing I've ever heard and the greatest gift trump could ever have hoped for. I feel exactly the same now.
That didn't save Trump, who was widely seen as an agent of chaos himself. But it sure the heck didn't help with down-ticket races.
Spot on. I told my son it’s the. Dumbest political thing I ever seen. Politicians that actually quoted it an accepted were morons.
Sigh - So, what's the plan to dial back the excesses of wokeness? Obama took that on in the run up to last year's election with a public criticism. Does Biden need to create a Sister Souljah moment and publicly call out some woke excess? Or does more need to be done? Are you asking Democrats to abandon the fight for racial justice and police reform so they can spend their time fighting to right every injustice flagged on Fox News? Because that is what Fox is pushing society to do when the constantly try to divert the focus away from ongoing racial injustice to random examples of "wokeness" or "critical race theory".
>Does Biden need to create a Sister Souljah moment and publicly call out some woke excess?
It probably would have helped Hillary a lot more to do that and she must have thought about it since you know, it was her hubsand (and therefore probably really her idea).
But yes, admitting there is at least one excess on your side is a good thing. It now gets dismissed as "both sidesism" but that has turned into a strawman for ever not toeing the party line over the years.
Who was the Sister Souljah of 2016? The cafeteria manager at Oberlin College?
On immigration, as far as I can tell there's been little substantive change from the last administration, so what's the complaint? Oh, that right wing media continues to demagogue the situation? What are we supposed to do about that?
On "wokeness," what the hell does it even mean? That kids on campuses talk differently from you or me? They also listen to different music and dress differently and so on. Ignore it if you don't like it -- it does not affect you.
"progressives relentlessly insist that welfare spending is on the verge of collapsing," No, nobody influential says this.
And of course you have to trot out the "defund the police" trope. No one is saying this any more other than some people of color who are in fact victimized by the police and would in fact benefit from them being defunded. Mainstream Democrats moved on long ago. But it's great that you're helping Fox News keep the trope alive.
BBC quotas is a good example from a non-American woke gone mad.
Spot on. I told my son it’s the. Dumbest political thing I ever seen. Politicians that actually quoted it an accepted were morons.
What happened to the edit function?
The DNC gives progressives too much power in the House considering their paltry numbers, numbers that will likely go down in the future as they are redistributed out. Everyone wants to find the next New Deal Coalition or post Civil War Republican alliance with its massive numbers. The current mix doesn't work and Republicans have a edge due to land coverage, but not enough to get anywhere near those 2 political dynasties. I am probably one of the few people that supports Medicare for all, complete freeze on all immigration, industrial policy, ending woke policies in entertainment, supporting 5/7 conservation/climate initiatives, ending court activism.
Fwiw, the labor shortage is really undermining the minimum wage argument for helping the poor while at the same time making 15$ level more likely sooner. Hahaha.
The big programs you have heard progressives talk about for the past 10 years or so are free college/student loan forgiveness and single-payer healthcare. These programs are for everyone, not just the poor. The other big program that was pushed through and that Dems are trying to keep is the expanded child tax credit. Also not for the poor, though Kevin found some other reason to beef about this.
Free college doesn't sell. At all. Most people don't want to go to college. Why you can't get this, amazes me.
Medicare simply doesn't have the plurality right now. Maybe it will in the future. But that day is not now.
Regardless, you are missing the point here. Kevin says Democrats aren't pushing programs to help the middle class. I mention three big ones. Regardless of if they are popular or not (and I am saying nothing either way) they serve to undermine Kevin's point.
Single payer is not exciting to anyone outside the progressive camp. I'm a strong believer in universal healthcare (not the same thing) and it doesn't excite me. We need to do better than the ACA, but herding everyone into Medicare For All isn't going to win votes-- and may lose them. How about a voluntary public option instead, which the ACA was originally supposed to have?
Biden didn't propose MFA and isn't pushing it. His expansion of medical programs would help the middle class a lot. Except for the Supreme-Court and red-state imposed Medicaid hole, the poor are pretty well taken care of by Medicaid and the ACA.
There have to extreme demands (though single-payer is not extreme world-wide) so that the actual leaders such as Biden can look moderate - which he actually is.
"Even near the bottom, the average poor household receives something like $35-40,000 in cash and government benefits."
The idea that this is somehow adequate is nutty, especially since many of these transfers are NOT cash and require lots of bureaucratic hoops to jump through (hi, means testing!). This is barely higher than the official poverty line for cash only.
Note also that safety net spending that is not a direct cash transfer often comes with enormous time costs to the recipient, whether it's in obtaining the benefit in the first place or having to fill out sheaves of paperwork every time you want to use it or every X interval (year, month, whatever) to prove you're still poor.
To the overall point about the level of social safety net spending: sure, it's been going up up up. But I'd actually argue that that's a bad thing, because it means our economy is not working for more people than ever before (and again, much of that spending isn't direct cash transfers!). I wonder why that is. It's not like we added anything in the way of a new safety net program between 2011 and 2018.
It's more adequate than you think.
Please explain how a household of 1 adult + 2 children (or 2 adults + 2 children) living on (for example) 20K in wages and 20K in noncash + small amount of once-per-year cash transfer (tax refund) is "adequate" when rents for a 2BR, let alone a 3BR, apartment are over 60% of their gross income.
Then add in food and utilities.
Have you ever been poor? Do you even know how much these things cost?
I have, and I do.
+1 - spending is going up means “our economy is not working for more people than ever before”.
That is the answer we should give to “47% pay no income tax” - True, because employers are paying most of them so little they fall off the lowest tax bracket.
Thanks for this observation! The ancient Republicans I consort with are convinced it's because the 47% are all "parasites on Welfare". I keep trying to remind them about how exemptions and deductions (etc) are standard in arriving at an "adjusted gross income" and lots and lots of folks who work full time (or more) fall below the minimum income to tax. Then I observe that even the Mighty Businesses get to take deductions -- for all sorts of things, beyond most people's wildest imaginings, -- so deductions and exemptions are good, right?
Deaf ears. A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. If you don't owe income tax every year, you're a worthless parasite. (sigh)
Imagine if 47% of the people were shiftless deadbeats on TEH Welfare.
Do your neighbors know what 47% of 330 million is?
They probably think that it's all the non-white people. /s
Kevin,
Same old. Same old. Punch down on the "left" and the political nirvana awaits. It is such a tiresome argument. And it is a dead loser because it relies on splitting off the most politically active component of the Dem coalition.... The Reagan wins in '80 and '84 still haunt you, I guess. But 1984 was nearly four decades ago.
As for public policies that allegedly will appeal to this mythical middle class, perhaps you could put forth a few of them? You never seem to get around to doing so.
Reagan's win in 1980 wasn't haunting. He was hardly over like in 1984. Carter had a awful 1980 after things were looking pretty good going into 1979. Maybe the worst election year anybody had until lil Don.
They've been punching down on the left for years and it fails them every single time.
Like bread, we shall rise.
Progressives are listening to the middle class. Two tier wage rates, mandatory overtime, and reductions in employer subsidies for health care imposed on labor are supported by progressives just as enthusiastically as ensuring US global military hegemony. Unfortunately for progressives, business incorporation and protecting wealth with trusts are already easy to accomplish and most Americans are fatigued by America's wars of terror, leaving progressives with only a pivot to China to excite the Middle Class with foreign policy. Progressives supported the opening of the East coast of the US for drilling. Biden is increasing oil and gas drilling permits. Progressives have long supported increasing punishment for drug possession and the building of new prisons to house the superpredators. The US incarcerates more people than any other nation. Progressives need to improve their public relations so Middle Class voters reflexively recognize the significance of their accomplishments.
Bush in 2000 and 2004 and Trump in 2016 should haunt us as well. One could argue that Reagan was inevitable given the decade of events that preceded him and yes it put Democrats in a defensive cringe for far too long. But Bush and Trump were not inevitable. How and why Gore and H. Clinton lost are important questions.
I don't know that David Shor has a perfect answer but we should not dismiss him because what he's telling us makes us uncomfortable. To paraphrase Lincoln "We all would love to righteousness on our side but we have to have
Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. "
We need to understand these folks too:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/us/politics/democrats-votes-midwest.html
Gore lost because of a one-time black swan mess involving the Electoral College an Floridian foolishness. 2000 was not a 1984 blowout. It was mostly just bad luck.
Yup.
Certainly bad luck was part of it but I think Gore/Bush was a practice run for that whole eastern elite egghead vs guy you could have a beer with nonsense. Gore was not a natural politician to say the least but he was also hurt on several fronts - one of them was Nader, a bit of a precursor to the
lefty woke purists of today, no ?
Florida wasn't the only state Gore lost that he could've won.
Lest we forget, if the Supreme Court had allowed a complete statewide recount, which as I recall the Florida Courts wanted, Gore would have won.
Actually Gore lost because Clinton's d*ck. Simple as that.
Not really. He wins a full recount. Supremes didn’t allow it.
Yup.
He could have picked anyone but Liebermann if not for Monicagate.
"Can we all agree, at a minimum, that woke culture has gone a bit too far?"
I honestly would like to know what exactly "woke culture" is supposed to be and how it has gone too far. Is it some people getting mad on twitter? companies deciding not to employ people who say racist or sexist or other shitty stuff? the occasional student group protesting a conservative professor? As Kevin has pointed out himself many times, in a country with 350 millions people you can find a handful of examples of any kind of craziness across the political spectrum. But as far as I can tell, that's all the "woke culture run amok" adds up to.
Their the institutional liberals from the 70's. It's nothing new.
Rockefeller Republican Kevin Drum both abhors & revels in Nutpicking.
I mostly agree with you, but there are a few things that have made the news that were pretty dumb:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/san-francisco-renaming-spree/617894/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/opinion/wisconsin-Fredric-March.html
The renaming of schools thing got enough push back that it was reversed. I don’t know about the Frederic March thing. Right wingers have their own wokeness culture, of course but no one seems to notice. Just be careful who you say “happy holidays” to.
On Epiphany 2022, I will be wishing all the GQPers a Happy 1st Anniversary of the March on Washington.
"A lot of progressives don't really get this because they're college educated and all their friends are college educated too. They simply don't have any friends who are working or lower middle class that they can talk to honestly."
I agreed with most everything KD said until these couple sentences. Not all people who think liberals and wokeness have gone to far are working and lower middle class. All of my friends have college degrees (many have masters and a few are medial doctors). At least two-thirds if not three-fourths of them lean conservative and represent the type of people to whom KD is referring. Just because you're not liberal doesn't mean you're some kind of uneducated bumpkin. Kevin's inadvertent allusion to this trope is another example of why many republicans find the woke left intolerable.
Nor are all uneducated racist. I learned that working at Honda Ohio back in the day. Our Team Leader was black and pretty popular.
Exxept Drum is neither woke nor left. I often wonder if at least part of the reason he retired was because he was completely against the rest of the staff on various issues.
I agree regarding KD not being woke. He's definitely left but not far left. Yet he did use the stereotype of anyone who is not liberal being uneducated.
The fact that not ALL college educated voters are Democrats or liberals is not
at issue. It's the big difference in support for Democrats between the college educated and the non- college educated that Kevin is addressing and his concern is that the liberal college educated readers here are not likely to have a lot of friends who aren't like them and hence are unlikely to understand the resentments that working class and lower middle class non college educated voters have over immigration and "wokeness" and welfare. I suspect Kevin is underestimating the readership here a little.
Ok, fair enough. Maybe is was reading too much (or not enough?) into those couple sentences.
It also ignores that "a lot of progressive" who are "college educated and their friends are college educated too" come from these places with working and lower middle class people.
Some of us grew up poor or working class or lower middle class (or started lower middle class and ended up poor).
And those of us from the midwest, the very places Kevin seems to think that we don't and can't understand as an inherent part of being woke or being progressive or whatever - we DO understand the people in the places we came from, because we came from there. We're (mostly) the ones with the Qrazy aunts and uncles and cousins, with anti-vax family that could be nominated for Herman Cain Awards.
I dare say we understand what it's like, and why these people believe what they do. For most, it's largely a matter of low effort/low information and environmental factors and being taken in by the political death cult, and it's very, very sad. I'm not sure there is any single person more responsible for more widespread misery than perhaps Rush Limbaugh (for pioneering and then mainstreaming faux-reasonable conspiracism), and that's including the guy who invented leaded gasoline.
It wasn't progressives who bollixed the ACA. It isn't progressives who are opposing the parts of the reconciliation bill that are popular with and would help the working/middle class, it's the so-called moderates.
Nope. Your not even trying.
Shades of troll.
So the Dems should suddenly be anti-immigration and pro oil industry? (That’s the upshot of Shor’s comments, as I understand it.)
If you think Fox News is rough on Democrats now, wait til you see what they do with these new Shor Democrats. Hypocrites who’ll do anything for power is just for starters.
Run a hot economy - I think more than anything that’s what the middle class cares about. Make it easier to vote. Don’t worry about other stuff.
Or antiimmigration and pro-nat gas while decreasing carbon emissions. That is where Obama was leaning. Then it backslid.
I don't usually disagree with your points but I don't think you are reading Shor's comments fairly. You don't have to be "anti-immigration" to distance yourself
from completely open borders. And you can acknowledge that when protests about the police turn violent they do not help the liberal cause and not be a hypocrite.
But I agree the best thing we can hope Biden can do in the next year is get as good a deal as possible for his Build Back Better plan and close down the COVID nightmare so that we are running a hot economy next year.
Those are good points but one thing I found frustrating in E Klein's very long piece is that we hear much talk of polarization and the Dems being too distant from working class voters, but it never gets boiled down to the actual bumper sticker slogans that real politicians have to run with/on.
So indeed I am extrapolating from what I sensed in the interview were the key areas in which Shor believes the Dems are politically too far from the median voter. On immigration and there's a section saying the Real Folks don't care about climate, if I'm remembering correctly.
Another thing I find kind of weird is the point that Dems as college educated city-folk are too far culturally from their constituents but if true isn't that even a bigger problem for the Rs? I mean, if the Rs are basically a rural party, how are Ted Cruz (Harvard Law) and Josh Hawley (Yale Law) stars of the party.
My own person answer is that even after the disruption of Trump and his bad taste and bad manners America is basically aspirational. The closest thing we have to a national religion is that people should have opportunity and your kids lives should be better than yours. Thus, Harvard and Yale still have some cred (though diminished) among the rural.
And I think the upshot of that, as I said, is, Dems should just focus on the economy and expect the pummeling on the cultural stuff.
But I think somewhere in Ezra's giant piece he points out that Hillary talked about jobs much more than she talked about immigration, so perhaps I'm just talking in circles here...
Sigh. Agreed, this is just hard to watch because I really don't know what the hell Democrats and liberals and progressives and everyone left of reactionary can do to stop the complete awfulness that is the GOP right now. I don't think David Shor has all the answers but Dems need to take his points seriously . As I said elsewhere paraphrasing Lincoln "We all would love to have righteousness on our side but we have to have Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. "
Hawley is Stanford & Yale matriculated, & LECTURED himself at Cambridge.
He's fancier than that there lezbo Rachel Maddow.
+1
Why did dems change so dramatically in regards to immigration over the last 5 to 10 years or so? Is it just a one-way march towards pen borders now? there's no chance of dems reining it in some?
I don't know. I blame them trying to be anti-Trump.....Which really proves how stupid people fall for cons.
It didn't get bad until 2018.
Not sure most Dems are in favor of open borders. Why did Republicans become immigration idiots though. Dubya proposed sensible immigration reform years ago and it wasn't Dems who stopped it dead in its tracks.
Because the party is torn between voters that want scabs and voters who don't. The problem Trump found out is, illegal immigration is hard to stop. Which is why he pivoted to legal immigration, which put more pressure on illegal immigration. The debt based system is built around it. People don't have respect for tribe or nation. It's just me me me and self gratification.
Why did dems change so dramatically in regards to immigration over the last 5 to 10 years or so?
There are basically two things going on: A) immigration didn't used to be a particularly partisan issue; that is, both parties were home to a variety of opinions on immigration. That has changed. B) To the extent that the Democratic Party's policy wing is increasingly dominated by college-educated (especially younger, elite college grad) people, its policy goals tend toward the aspirational, edgy and less moderate. As with much of the partisan divide these days in America, immigration can be pretty plausibly explained along educational attainment (itself probably a proxy for socioeconomic status) lines.
I see the takeaway of Shor's comments as "talk more about issues of wealth and class, and shut up about the identity stuff.*"
*when campaigning, mostly. We can govern however we want, once elections are over most people tune out until the next one.
So, he's a crypto-Berner Lester Maddox Democrat.
Yes, undoubtedly Shor is a proponent of putting most of your "concerns about political communication strategy" energy into elections.
I see I've been deeply misunderstood above, so I'm going to try this another way.
What if we realized that we can't stop other people from saying what they want to say these days, even if it seems silly or scary, and instead worked harder on what WE are going to say, and how and where and when.
I didn't like "Defund the Police" as a slogan much. AND, I think AOC quite rightly, in caucus last January, pointed out that many of her colleagues colleagues had not leveraged social media to get their own message out - they didn't understand it, they didn't use it, and that allowed the opposition to define them.
My own Rep is in this group, it's just that she has a very solid, safe seat, so she's not threatened by this kind of thing.
The opposition will always seek to define you. Don't let them.
Perhaps it’s because I live in a liberal city, and also the fact that I’m currently in some grad classes, but “woke” culture seems more or less omnipresent to me. So, I find it interesting when people here ask what the term “woke” is even referring to.
“Can we all agree, at a minimum, that woke culture has gone a bit too far? No? Not even that?”
Apparently not even that. In a previous reply to one of Kevin’s other posts, I pointed out the rather obvious excesses of the San Francisco school board. Removing President Lincoln’s name from a school because he’s no longer acceptable by Leftist standards is exactly the kind of extremist behavior that the vast majority of American citizens think is insane. Especially when the same school board declines to remove the name of Malcolm X from a different institution. But, even in these comments, there was the usual type of push-back against my concerns about these types of Lefty outrages.
I do not always run into problems like these at my classes (thankfully); but, when I do, it’s typically an over the top situation. I’m in a Composition class where we have discussed extraordinarily little regarding the pedagogy of Composition. Instead, there are seemingly endless essays to review about diversity, the injustices faced by American Indians, and the meaning of identity. I’ve mostly stopped reading most of the assigned material for the class and have sought out my own materials - more directly related to Composition - to complete a final project. My semester project will be on the need for a Composition class to focus on teaching students how to write, rather than indoctrinating them into a given ideology. I do not expect to remain very popular in this class.
And I cannot overstate how popular “defund the police” was (and maybe still is) among the generally young-ish students I have encountered. I do not know why, and I’ll probably never understand it, but that slogan swiftly seemed to obtain the status of religious injunction among various groups. There was no way to discuss it with the initiated. That would have been like attempting to debate the ten commandments with a Christian.
So, these are largely anecdotal experiences; but, wokeness is quite real, and quite disturbing. As I’ve mentioned in similar comments before, it really should be called out and resisted: not just by conservatives, but also by liberals.
Woke isn't Marxist or class based leftist either,. It really is identity based more in common with illiberal movements like Nazism.
Where do you even get this stuff? Is your brain short-circuiting while you type?
Are you a retard???
It's best not to engage the racist troll.
Especially when he's off his face from vodka or gin.
I agree with Kevin that some things like wokeness, defund the police and expanded immigration (which Biden is not doing) are not winners for Democrats, but they are not really the problem, nor is it that the middle class is not getting enough. The problem is that millions of white voters don't want to give up their white privilege and the dominance of their religion. Many of those voters who are middle class are actually voting against politicians like Biden who would give them more economic benefits, and for politicians like Trump who blatantly give all the economic benefits to the very rich. Republicans are not promising economic benefits for the middle class at all - they are not winning the battle on either ideological or actual economic grounds, they are winning on racism and religious extremism. They make nonsensical claims about how Biden wants to bring in Marxism, but this is not something that their lower-income followers really believe and act on, it is largely a way avoiding the charge that they vote on racism.
If might help a little if Democrats promised more economic benefits for the middle class, but neither Shor nor Kevin are addressing the real problem.
So, if the real problem is " that millions of white voters don't want to give up their white privilege and the dominance of their religion" what do you propose doing about it ? Berate them and tell them how awful they are ? Wait 20 years until they die off ? The Democrats need to strip off some percentage of that demographic to win in key states like Michigan et al. An economic message that stresses the practical value of investing in human as well as physical infrastructure is the best message I can think of. It won't convince the racists and Fox news cultists but it could win over enough people in win elections. What else ?
What "white privilege" ??? The Republicans sure don't give that except for wall street bankers and corporate elites. My guess that isn't the issue.
Unfortunately, KD has it backwards. Since 1994, the GOP has been running on racial and sexual hatred every year. Before I and most 40-somethings even knew that gay marriage was a thing, the GOP was running against it like their lives depended on it. The pro-gay-marriage side had to catch up with the anti. The GOP isn't merely comforting the electorate who's uncomfortable with change, they cultivate and direct it with powerful institutions like Fox News at precisely the people who are different and socially powerless. THEY CREATE CONFLICT BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO. KD, in his typically Boomer-esque sense of impotence, wants to blame all this on "darn millenials on the Twitters" but ignores the fact that most of the right wing news machine doesn't need a few leftist wags on Twitter to give them their next cultural-electoral obsession. KD just gives them comfort with anti-liberal talking points like this.
Though I think Kevin, like me a relatively well off old boomer white guy, can be a little glib sometimes and a little too dismissive of what younger progressives are pushing for, I don't think he has fundamentally changed from where he has always been politically. And for his critics here, I'll it's clear to me that what Kevin wants more than anything is for Democrats to win so that we can actually have a serious discussion about how to move forward as a country and then start acting on it. After January 6th and the threat that the Trump led GOP cult represents the single biggest thing that matters is that they do not get control of this country. We need to stop them and that will take everyone from every corner of our party to make that our priority. Full stop.
Here, here! Agree totally.
Yes.
To be honest, making sure Republicans don't win should be (and should have always been) our number 1 priority. We can argue about what we're going to do with governing power after we have it.
And I say this as a rather strong social-democrat. I definitely fall well outside of the mainstream in terms of political leaders, although not really so far out in terms of what's supported by the public when you poll on issues one at a time.
The only answers I have for why Democrats haven't rebranded themselves with all of these issues front and center are "lobbyists/donors" and "the party nomination machine."
Oh, stop it. "Woke culture" isn't even a real thing. It's a catchall term conservative pundits use to describe anything and everything they want to paint as contrary to "American values."
If you take any single element of supposed woke culture and ask folks about it, at worst, they don't much care.
Thank you.
"To accept all this, you don't have to be the kind of person who thinks "Defund the Police" was responsible for Democratic losses in 2020. You merely have to be outside your bubble enough to acknowledge that it sure as hell didn't help. Are you?"
Or, we are in a whirlpool of seething resentments and genuine grievances that will gyrate to its own angular momentum until, hopefully, a more stable configuration emerges. Beating oneself on the head about perceived wokeness or stepping outside imaginary bubbles isn't going to hurry up the process.
This whole depressing comment thread proves the point that democrats are possibly their own worst enemies. Sigh. Repuglicans have it so easy. Hatred is such a such a unifying principle.
The main problem with "wokeness" culture is really bad slogans. Taglines like "defund the police" are really unpopular, and it's crazy to have that as your slogan of you don't actually mean it (adding social workers to your city budget is not the same thing as totally getting rid of the police department). "Abolish prisons" is even worse, especially amidst headlines about people like Jeffrey Epstein and mass shootings.
My profession has started having a lot of conferences about "white supremacy" in the field. But in this context "white supremacy" is just having lots of white people in the field. They don't have to actually do or say anything racist, just merely be white. "If most of your coworkers are your race, it is white supremacy." No wonder some people think it has gone too far.
Meanwhile there is a growing literature on "cultural competence" as a necessary part of education and health care. The thing is, if you read the whole articles, 90% of the examples are just being kind and respectful to others. Sure, you can call that "cultural competence," but you can also just call it being a decent person, and make sense to people across the political spectrum.
Where does Kevin come up with stuff? Fox News? It would help if he would list both the specific woke incident, the players, and who carried the story. If he doesn't do so, this is all so much hokum that may just as well been blast-faxed from Republican Central HQ.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/virginia-school-board-wokeness-checker-wants-toni-morrison-banned-for-porn
Manning herself has become Woke. Everything she whines about, she has become(also rumors of Lesbianism).
I fail to see how "rumors of Lesbianism" (and why are you capitalizing it? what a weird thing to do) are at all relevant to anything.
Her obsession with lesbian sex and rumors create quite the feeling of hypocrisy. It's also a good example of taking "woke" out of context while your doing the same "canceling" .
Fwiw, the bluest eyes is a racist book. But porn??? Bhahaja