David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics | Hacker News Reader

David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics

nymag.com

50 pointszdw59 comments

From the article: But a lot of people on the Clinton campaign tricked themselves into the idea that they didn’t have to placate the social views of racist white people.

This seems like a pretty important insight and I really wish the interview could have unpacked this a lot better. It seems to be an operating assumption of the Democratic campaign, and I imagine if one is locked into this view (by implacable statistical analysis), then it would be really difficult to hear any other concern as anything but dog-whistling racism. While Shor did somewhat outline his thinking, it would be nice to be able to follow this trail to see why, exactly

From the article: There’s a paper by the political scientist David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones.

The words a paper in that quote links not to the paper itself, but to a Vox interview, from which all links are to a draft paper that 404. I would like to read this paper for myself, but apparently it has been withdrawn

I wonder if David Shor is quick to cite papers that support his preconceptions, rather than let the quality of the papers lead him to conclusions? This is why I would like to actually see the results of these polls and such for his first assertion.

Took a while to find, but "How Ideological Moderation Conceals Support for Immoderate Policies: A New Perspective on the “Disconnect” in American Politics"

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.688...

Thanks. Oof. 54 pages is no joke. It will take me some time to absorb it

I'd like to see that paper too if you find it. Over in the UK, Cummings credits his win of the Brexit campaign to a similar insight about "moderates". (Oh and there's a PG blog on the topic too).

I think it is dead wrong on almost all accounts. I don't think people are widely racists and the accusation wasn't even underhanded, it was very well perceived. That did cost a lot of votes. Especially since the democrats even wanted to penalize people for allegedly being racist. Like a monarch that went crazy. This is really bad overall advice in my opinion.

> that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones.

Anyone advocating ideologically consistent views should be eyed with suspicion.

Perhaps people are interested in how their situation can be improved instead of how their alleged opinions can be bettered. Some of those people hoped for a little less hubris, which was in vain if you read stuff like this.

Sorry, but it is really that bad and I wonder how these people became sociologists in the first place.

To suggest that you can only win an election while appealing to racist white people is so far removed from reality...

"I think it is dead wrong on almost all accounts."

I suspect it is too, but I would at least like to see the reasoning behind it if any

His argument doesn’t even make sense within his own theory. Obama-Trump votes correlated strongly with Google searches indicating “racial resentment.” Okay, but why did those people vote for Obama in the first place? Sure, someone could be a racist and vote for Obama, but what changed? Schor says the salience of different issues changes in different elections. That makes sense. But surely race was a highly salient issue during the election of the first Black President. Yet Iowa voted for Obama by almost a 10-point margin in 2008 and for Trump by almost the same 10-point margin in 2016. Wisconsin voted for Obama by a 14 point margin and Michigan by a 17 point margin.

David Shor is a pollster and cannot admit that fact that polls do not tell the whole story, especially with a unpopular candidate like Hillary. Hillary, in America, is loathed by many as a pretentious Marie Antoinette who rode her husband's coat tails and looked down upon the working class. I personally know several folks who voted Democrat their whole life and voted for Trump in 2016. i.e. her infamous deplorables speech. https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorabl...

Working class voters saw their manufacturing jobs shipped overseas. They were told to "retrain" to get high tech jobs. They took on a mountain of student loan debt and still could not find jobs that were as good as their manufacturing jobs. Even white collar workers are angry with what they see as corporate malfeasance. e.g. H-1B programs that make it legal to replace American citizens with low paid foreign workers. Under Title 8, of the US Code, you can be imprisoned for six months for hiring an unauthorized alien but with H1-B, the corporations can get away with it. What David Shor and other Democratic Party Elitists describe as "racist white people" are the working class who feel abandoned by the Democrats. I think the working class mostly voted out of frustration in 2016. What worries me is that the Democratic Party Elite still don't get it and will continue to foist tone-deaf candidates on us, who only know to toe the corporate line and ignore the working class who are becoming more and more desperate.

Wow. This guy is a really strange combination of brilliant and clueless.

Care to outline what you think is clueless?

Lots of little things that suggest Shor is so deep into politics he can't remember what a regular person is like. For example:

  The single biggest way that highly educated people who follow politics closely are different 
  from everyone else is that we have much more ideological coherence in our views.

  If you decided to create a survey scorecard, where on every single issue — choice, guns, unions,
  health care, etc. — you gave people one point for choosing the more liberal of two policy options...

He completely misses the fact that the liberal-conservative spectrum we see in American politics is pretty arbitrary and has more to do with tribalism then ideological coherence. For example, it would be "ideologically coherent" to be both pro-life and pro-gun-control. Or concerned about climate change and pro-nuclear-power. Or anti-racism and anti-immigration. So his conclusion is wrong. Highly educated people who follow politics are not more ideologically coherent, they're more ideologically conformist.

Another example:

  At some point, you have to be like, oh, actually, these people were motivated by racism. It’s just
  an important fact of the world ...

Who's he talking about? Obama-Trump voters. He's looking at this sophisticated polling where they ask questions designed to probe for "racial resentment" and seeing no other way to interpret them. Ok... so why did they vote for Obama? Were they motivated by racism then? Did their motivation change between elections? These aren't rhetorical questions; I have no idea why Obama-Trump voters made those choices. But Shor is so deep in the numbers he can't see that his conclusion is nonsense.

Thanks for elaborating. Your points are both good - the first one in particular jumped out to me as well as I was reading the article. I do think clueless is overstating it a bit, but admittedly you prefixed it with "brilliant and" ;)

This article gives a perfect, if unintentional synopsis of why Trump is in power. The left has embraced hook-line-and-sinker Critical Theory and Identity Politics. All power and victimhood is seen through the lens of identities, causing the left had to abandon class because it is not an immutable category. The working class abandoned the Democratic party because the party abandoned the working class and then poured salt onto their abandonment by shaming them as racist/sexist/homophobe, etc.

When was the democratic party ever truly "left"?

My impression of them is that they were arguably mildly SocDem in the past, and then turned into (neo)liberals in the 90's. Liberals are not leftists.

Same as the Labour party in the UK, and the Labor party in Australia. While the politicians might be socialist, the parties are definitely centre-left neo-liberal.

I think you are on spot with that assessment and it might even happen again since the strategy is mostly unchanged.

A bit sad to see what the author believes about his countrymen and he doesn't seem to have noticed that many of those already picked up on them while even having fewer prejudices.

> All power and victimhood is seen through the lens of identities, causing the left [...] to abandon class because it is not an immutable category.

I don't think that really captures the motivation or pressure to stop talking about class.

Rather, class in the US is really really messy (compared to, say, Britain, where despite the additional complications of social vs. economic class, you can describe yourself as 'lower upper middle class', and be understood), and the fact that speaking about class at all got you branded as communist (in the past), or socialist (currently), or elitist (always). America is largely branded as a classless society rather than trying to get to grips with class. Confusing the issue even more is the denigration on the right of "coastal elites" that are largely middle class.

As far as US political rhetoric is concerned, socialism seems to be the new communism.

Meanwhile, though speaking using the lens of racism isn't exactly easy (eg. "That's racist!" "No, you're the racist!"), it is at least somewhat possible.

Is it any wonder that politicians on the (US) left don't talk about class? Confusing your audience isn't exactly going to win elections. They can talk about creating jobs and inequality, but that's about it.

This is interesting from the perspective of showing a particular ideological blindness very, very clearly. He claims that Obama to Trump voters are motivated by racism and cannot see any problem with the idea that a racist would vote for a black man to have the most powerful job in the world.

If that is something a racist can do in your categorization of the world, than juuuuust maybe your categories are broken.

Otherwise we're in a world where racists would happily pick Barack Hussein Obama over Mitt freaking Romney, but couldn't bring themselves to pick Hillary over Trump.

> And I think the real synthesis of these views is that Obama-to-Trump voters are motivated by racism.

Hmm.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...

> We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points... Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos. These numbers do not translate directly into support for the Republican Party; too many other factors are at play. Nevertheless, the results tell us something important: a majority across the groups we surveyed did not repudiate Trump-style rhetoric as obviously racist and divisive, but instead agreed with it.

Shor makes basically the same error as the authors of the New York Times piece above: assuming that opposing immigration and supporting law-and-order are inherently “racist” views.

Progressives need to ask themselves: is opposition to abolishing ICE (to use one of Schor’s examples) actually “racist?” Because if they just run with the assumption that it’s racist, they’ll force themselves into taking an incredibly unpopular position. As Shor himself points out, the people running the campaigns are ideologically progressive. Even if polling shows that abolishing ICE is incredibly unpopular, so long as they accept the premise that it’s the anti-racist thing to do, they will support it (or the far left will make them support it). This was basically the story of the 2019 Democratic primaries, where nearly every candidate embraced incredibly unpopular issues out of fear of being “called out.”

And “demographic destiny” won’t eventually vindicate progressives’ all-consuming view of racism. As the New York Times article above explains, a message focused around racial identity and the idea of pervasive “white supremacy” (like Elizabeth Warren ran in the 2019 Democratic Primary) actually polls poorly among Latinos (who are now the largest non-white group in the electorate). Meanwhile, Trump’s polling is up 100% among Black people and 60% among Hispanic people under 45 compared to 2016: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-losing-ground-.... If Republicans can convert that into votes, states like Texas and Georgia will stay solidly red. Shor is ultimately right. Democrats need to get back white voters in a country that will be 50%+ white for the foreseeable future. Because in the long run non-white voters aren’t as much of a lock as they assume. But they really need to introspect about why they would ever have thought otherwise to begin with.

Yes that’s one of Shor’s weak er arguments.

Shor is a self-described progressive who wants to help elect Democrats.

He’s mostly useful as a critic of the left from the centre. His “facts don’t care about your feelings” rebuttals of leftist fantasies are incredibly useful to both the centre and the left.

(This also got him fired on the first day of Floyd protests when he posted research showing that the riots will backfire in the long run, politically!)

he didn't even post the research - he re-tweeted the research of a black academic that showed that violent protests are less successful that non-violent ones. His firing was a travesty.

What do you mean by demographic destiny? I assume that means something like, over time the demographic makeup of society will come to look more and more like "college-educated coastal progressives"? Do people really believe that? If so, that is hard to believe. "College-educated coastal progressives" tend to have few or no children compared to the "majority of the country". It would seem the demographic makeup will go in the opposite direction.

> What do you mean by demographic destiny?

Presumably he means the same thing CNN means by it. https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/01/politics/election-2020-trump-... (emphasis mine):

“It happened four years ago when Donald Trump scored an Electoral College victory with his turn-back-the-clock campaign to Make America Great Again. He'll have trouble pulling it off again. That's partly because the pace of demographic change keeps shrinking the America Trump evokes in the rear-view mirror.”

I love how acceptable it is to brag about how eventually white people in the US will be outpopulated by non-white people who we assume will all vote Democrat. How would the reaction be if the mainstream media was bragging about white people outbirthing Mexicans in Mexico and soon taking over their politics?

Note: I'm not white btw so don't @ me, just making an observation

There's an entire genre of white supremacist media that goes on about this "replacement" endlessly, and has politics to match such as the "quiverful" movement encouraging white women to have lots of children.

I don't think people on the other side are bragging.

I think this sort of response to the interview misses the forest for the trees.

This is the best article on elections I have ever read. When I first read it I felt for the first time I understood how the game is scored. These two quotes stand out and are what matter:

> Persuadable voters trust the parties on different issues. And there’s a pretty basic pattern — both here and in other countries — in which voters view center-left parties as empathetic. Center-left parties care about the environment, lowering poverty, improving race relations. And then, you know, center-right parties are seen as more “serious,” or more like the stern dad figure or something. They do better on getting the economy going or lowering unemployment or taxes or crime or immigration.

> So I think Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means not talking about immigration.

That's the game for both sides: Talk about issues non-partisan voters trust and/or agree with your side on, and avoid the opposite.

Simple in theory. Impossibly hard in practice.

I agree the advice is astute. But you don’t necessarily get to pick what to talk about. Luckily, this election became a referendum on COVID—where the general empathetic association of Democrats plays strongly. But say COVID hadn’t happened. Instead, the last major pre-election issue was what happened this summer and law-and-order issues? (As Schor notes, this issue favors Republicans.) A whole lot of progressive Democrats turned a blind eye to police stations being burned down, etc. They had to: they had backed themselves into an ideological corner where they accepted the premise that any focus on the breakdown of law and order was “racist.” This was an incredibly unpopular position not only among white voters, but Hispanic voters of all ages and many older Black voters. Luckily, Biden was positioned to be able to say he understood the need for reform while having no soft spot for rioting. But Trump would have steamrolled over any of the other Democratic candidates by throwing their 2019 primary rhetoric back at them. And just not talking about the issue would have been a total non-starter—that’s what would have been on voters’ mind.

Democrats need positions in immigration and policing that aren’t the ones we saw from progressives over the past year and a half. Biden’s are fine. But within progressives’ current orthodoxy, Biden’s views would be deemed extremely “problematic” if Trump wasn’t there to be the bad guy.

I’ll give you another concrete example. Elizabeth Warren consistently used the term “LatinX.” This term actually polls terribly among Latinos. 70% have never heard of it. Of the 30% that have, the majority think it shouldn’t be used as a label to identify Latinos. Just 2% identified with the term themselves. Why use it? Because the people who work for Elizabeth Warren think the term “Latinos” isn’t gender inclusive. Schor would say not to use this term because of a high risk of alienating voters you need. But as Schor recognizes, the ideology of the campaign staffers has a powerful effect on the campaign’s messaging.

Possibly, but you could project the same argument backwards: "why is this King guy talking about race when it's incredibly unpopular with white voters?"

That fails to distinguish between politics and activism.

> That fails to distinguish between politics and activism.

Activism is politics. I think the distinction is between activism and running for office.

Lakoff's "Don't Think of an Elephant" says something similar: don't let the other side provide the frame for your narrative.

Elizabeth Warren’s primary campaign message was mainly focused on the economy, not race.

Yes, but the major difference between her and Sanders was that she’d thread race through every issue. As an academic matter this works just fine—failing municipal water systems are disproportionately ones that affect people of color. As a matter of political rhetoric (I watched her in person at several events in Iowa last year) it’s actually quite off-putting. Also, her tripping over the phrase “LatinX” (which just 2% of Latinos identify with, and 70% have never even heard of.)

here's some pointers to results summarising

1. higher racial resentment correlated with higher votes for trump 2. most positive views of rising diversity correlated with switching from voting for romney to voting for not-trump ; least positive views of rising diversity correlated with switching from voting for obama to voting for trump 3. correlation of support for trump and more negative views of rising diversity

the analysis for 2 & 3 "[...] controls for education, gender, age, income, ideology, party, views on immigration, racial resentment and personal finances"

https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1304772188030066689

> "This is all pretty pretty clear, I don't know what else you could want."

I do wish he would have talked more about what "racially charged internet searches" meant. As Paula Wright pointed out, I'd like to know what those "racially charged internet searches" which you have described as "racist" were. Immigration is surely not a race issue in the US, an ethnically diverse culture. Wouldn't illegal immigration be just as big a concern for black wkibg [sic]* class citizens?* and There was rhetorical slippage here from "racially charged" to "racist".

Hi - “racially charged” meant commonly used racial slurs against African Americans, not anything about immigration.

Hey, thanks for weighing in, David Shor. That puts a new spin on it.

Still, if it's possible, could you walk through the thinking, step by step, when you get a chance? Links to relevant results are fine, no need to write an essay.

Hi there, and welcome to HN. Have you done any analysis (or know of studies) that bear on the wonky technological (or tech adjacent) issues that tend to consume this forum? Examples would be copyright and patent issues, broadband availability, antitrust, net neutrality, technological unemployment [0], free trade / tariffs / trade war, H1B visas, gig work (eg. Uber), R&D spending, space exploration, AI/algorithmic biases/ethics, open source, capital gains taxes, etc.

Conversely, how do you view the structure and detail of party and candidate platforms (eg. Warren's "I've got a plan for that" vs., well, anybody else)? Is more detail better or worse in terms of election results?

[0] I've always had a soft spot for this episode of The West Wing: http://westwingwiki.com/2014/04/season-5-episode-19-talking-...

What does “rising diversity” mean in this context? Folks in Texas are angry about folks from California moving in and changing the culture. Is this racist? Equating anxiety about cultural change with racism is putting on ideological blinders.

This dude knows nothing about why Trump won if he thinks I went from Obama to Trump because I'm a closet racist.

Maybe it had to do with all the war, bombing, and drone campaigns?

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