Message of the Day: Economic Opportunity, Hunger, Disease, Human Rights, Personal Growth
The Blue-Collar Fight for Social Justice, Sunday Review, The New York Times, October 10, 2021
Today’s Sunday Review in The New York Times, one of the most widely-read sections of print in the world, in print and online, has two remarkable pieces. If they were not planned to be read together, they should have been.
Truth, when delivered in a manner that is both straightforward and complex at once, is a striking thing. These “companion” pieces deliver.
Farah Stockman of the Editorial Board is the author of one piece and Ezra Klein of the Time’s podcast The Ezra Klein Show the other.
Here’s an excerpt from Stockman:
I first met Shannon in 2017, shortly after her bosses announced that Rexnord, the bearing factory where she worked, was shutting down and moving to Mexico and Texas. I followed her for seven months as the plant closed down around her, watching her agonize about whether she should train her Mexican replacement or stand with her union and refuse. I also followed two of her co-workers: Wally, a Black bearing assembler who dreamed of opening his own barbecue business, and John, a white union representative who aspired to buy a house to replace the one he’d lost in a bankruptcy.
One of the biggest takeaways from the experience was that some of the most consequential battles in the fight for social justice took place on factory floors, not college campuses. For many Americans without college degrees, who make up two-thirds of adults in the country, the labor movement, the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement largely boiled down to one thing: access to well-paying factory jobs. …
Shannon’s feminism felt radically different from the women’s liberation movement that I grew up with. The movement I knew about was inspired by Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” the groundbreaking second-wave feminist tract that spoke of the emptiness and boredom of well-off housewives. That movement focused heavily on breaking glass ceilings in the white-collar world: the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court (Sandra Day O’Connor, 1981); the first female secretary of state (Madeleine Albright, 1997).
But low-income women, especially Black women, have always worked, not out of boredom but out of necessity. Their struggles, which the labor historian Dorothy Sue Cobble has called “the other women’s movement,” garnered far less media coverage. Who knows the name of the first female coal miner? How many know the full name of “Mother Jones,” the fearless labor organizer once labeled “the most dangerous woman in America” because legions of mine workers laid down their picks at her command? (It was Mary Harris Jones.) …
Of course, for every story like Shannon’s, there’s a story about a woman in India or China or Mexico who has a job now — and more financial independence — because of a new factory. Globalization and social justice have many sides.
But those foreign workers don’t vote in American elections. The fate of our democracy does not depend on them the way it hinges on voters like Shannon, Wally and John. The American experiment is unraveling. The only way to knit it back together is for decision makers in this country, nearly all of whom have college degrees, to reconnect with those of the working class, who make up a majority of voters.
And an excerpt from Klein:
For Shor, cancellation, traumatic though it was, turned him into a star. His personal story became proof of his political theory: The Democratic Party was trapped in an echo chamber of Twitter activists and woke staff members. It had lost touch with the working-class voters of all races that it needs to win elections, and even progressive institutions dedicated to data analysis were refusing to face the hard facts of public opinion and electoral geography. …
Shor believes the party has become too unrepresentative at its elite levels to continue being representative at the mass level. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the people we’ve lost are likely to be low-socioeconomic-status people,” he said. “If you look inside the Democratic Party, there are three times more moderate or conservative nonwhite people than very liberal white people, but very liberal white people are infinitely more represented. That’s morally bad, but it also means eventually they’ll leave.” The only way out of this, he said, is to “care more and cater to the preference of our low-socioeconomic-status supporters.” …
Shor is right about how the Obama campaign understood the electorate. David Simas, the director of opinion research on Obama’s 2012 campaign, recalled a focus group of non-college, undecided white women on immigration. It was a 90-minute discussion, and the Obama campaign made all its best arguments. Then they went around the table. Just hearing about the issue pushed the women toward Mitt Romney. The same process then played out in reverse with shipping jobs overseas. Even when all of Romney’s best arguments were made, the issue itself pushed the women toward Obama. The lesson the Obama team took from that was simple: Don’t talk about immigration.
“You don’t have the luxury of just sending one mobilization message that isn’t going to be heard by a whole bunch of persuadable voters,” Simas told me. “So if we make immigration the central part of a message in Wisconsin, what’s that going to do to the massive amount of non-college whites who’re much more concerned about bread-and-butter economic issues?”
These are barely tastes of the depth of these pieces.
A quote from Stockman bears repeating, that for every story about a woman (or man) whose job has been lost to globalization, there’s a story about a woman in India or China or Mexico who has a job now — and more financial independence — because of a new factory. Globalization and social justice have many sides.
Yes. Which is why globalization needs to evolve to what philosophically supported it–The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the most basic rights of food, shelter, health care and education for all.
We’ve been saying this for some time and history has been proving it for some time–we’re in one world and the global system has to work for everyone.
In the meantime, as Stockman points out, only Americans vote in America, and American democracy will be sustained or not on the provision of basic needs and rights for all. America is still the linchpin for the rest. And both the linchpin and the rest have never been more at risk.
Read on, please:
“What Killed the Blue-Collar Struggle for Social Justice”
Ms. Stockman is a member of the editorial board. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, “American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears.”
In 1998, Shannon Mulcahy’s boyfriend beat her up so badly that prosecutors in Indiana decided to press charges. She hid in a closet rather than obey the subpoena to testify in court. How could she help convict the man who put a roof over her head? Over her son’s head? Eventually, she left him. Shannon, a white woman in her 20s, got the money and the confidence to strike out on her own from a job at a factory. She worked at a bearing plant in Indianapolis for 17 years, rising to become the first woman to operate the furnaces, one of the most dangerous and highly paid jobs on the factory floor.
I first met Shannon in 2017, shortly after her bosses announced that Rexnord, the bearing factory where she worked, was shutting down and moving to Mexico and Texas. I followed her for seven months as the plant closed down around her, watching her agonize about whether she should train her Mexican replacement or stand with her union and refuse. I also followed two of her co-workers: Wally, a Black bearing assembler who dreamed of opening his own barbecue business, and John, a white union representative who aspired to buy a house to replace the one he’d lost in a bankruptcy.
One of the biggest takeaways from the experience was that some of the most consequential battles in the fight for social justice took place on factory floors, not college campuses. For many Americans without college degrees, who make up two-thirds of adults in the country, the labor movement, the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement largely boiled down to one thing: access to well-paying factory jobs.
Shannon had experienced more abuse and workplace sexual harassment than anyone I knew. Yet she hadn’t been drawn to #MeToo or the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton. To Shannon, women’s liberation meant having a right to the same jobs men had in the factory. She signed her name on the bid sheet to become a heat-treat operator, even though no woman had ever lasted in that department before. Heat-treat operators were an elite group, like samurai warriors and Navy SEALs. They worked with explosive gases. The men who were supposed to train Shannon tried to get her fired instead. “Heat treat is not for a woman,” one said.
She persisted. Heat-treat operators earned $25 an hour, more money than she’d ever earned in her life. She wasn’t going to let men drive her away. She wasn’t above using her sexuality to her advantage. She flirted with the union president and wore revealing shirts into the heat-treat department. “Am I showing too much cleavage?” she’d ask. She paid particular attention to Stan Settles, a much older man who knew how to run every furnace. If his shirt came untucked while he was bending over, exposing the top of his butt, Shannon would issue a solemn warning: “Crack kills, Stan.”
In the end, Stan took her under his wing and taught her everything about the furnaces that there was to know. By the time I met Shannon, she was the veteran in charge of training new heat-treat operators. She took pride in the fact that she didn’t depend on a man — even, and perhaps especially, Uncle Sam.
Shannon’s feminism felt radically different from the women’s liberation movement that I grew up with. The movement I knew about was inspired by Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” the groundbreaking second-wave feminist tract that spoke of the emptiness and boredom of well-off housewives. That movement focused heavily on breaking glass ceilings in the white-collar world: the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court (Sandra Day O’Connor, 1981); the first female secretary of state (Madeleine Albright, 1997).
But low-income women, especially Black women, have always worked, not out of boredom but out of necessity. Their struggles, which the labor historian Dorothy Sue Cobble has called “the other women’s movement,” garnered far less media coverage. Who knows the name of the first female coal miner? How many know the full name of “Mother Jones,” the fearless labor organizer once labeled “the most dangerous woman in America” because legions of mine workers laid down their picks at her command? (It was Mary Harris Jones.)
It was not until 1964 that the law enshrined workplace protections against discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race. Women were added to the Civil Rights Act at the last minute, a poison pillmeant to ruin its chances. But the bill passed, changing the course of history. The percentage of working women rose to 61 percent in 2000 from 43 percent in 1970. From 1976 to 1998, the number of female victims of intimate partner homicides fell by an average 1 percent per year. (The number of male victims of intimate partner homicide fell even more steeply.
But the Civil Rights Act did not benefit all women equally. By far, those who reaped the greatest rewards were college-educated white women who joined the professional world, who grew rich on economic shifts that swept their blue-collar sisters’ jobs away. Today, well-educated women — who tend to be married to well-educated men — sit atop the country’s financial pyramid.
The struggles of blue-collar women against a system of occupational segregation — called “Jane Crow” in Nancy MacLean’s book “Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace” — continued against the headwinds of economic challenges. For instance, in 1969, a female steelworker in Chicago named Alice Peurala had to sue to get a job that had been assigned to a man with less seniority. She won and went on to become president of the Steelworkers local. But in the years that followed, the steel industry collapsed. Eventually, her plant shut down for good.
In 2016, about three million American women worked in manufacturing, a far greater number than worked as lawyers or financiers. Yet the urgent needs of blue-collar women for quality child care, paid medical leave and more flexible work schedules rarely made it into the national conversation, perhaps because the professional women who set the agenda already enjoyed those benefits.
So much of the debate about sexism and women’s rights focuses on how to negotiate salaries like a man and get more women onto corporate boards. Meanwhile, blue-collar women are still struggling to find jobs that pay $25 an hour. And the United States remains one of the only countries with no federal law mandating paid maternity leave.
To Wally, the Black man I followed, the major success of the civil rights movement was that Black people got a chance at better jobs on the factory floor. Black people had been barred from operating machines, from tractors to typewriters, well into the 20th century, according to “American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor,” by Jacqueline Jones.
Wally’s uncle Hulan managed to get hired at the bearing plant in the early 1960s, with the help of the N.A.A.C.P. But like every other Black man there, he’d been assigned a janitor’s job. Hulan complained to the union steward. “There are only so many jobs in this building,” the steward replied. “If you take one, that means that our sons or son-in-law or our nephew can’t have it.” The day after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, Hulan asked his boss for a chance to operate a machine. The boss, who was known as tough but fair, sent him to the grinding department. But the white man assigned to train him refused to even speak to him. Hulan had to learn by watching from afar.
Eventually, Hulan figured out how to do the job. Over the years, he won over his white co-workers and was promoted to foreman, the first (and last) Black man to serve in that role at the plant.
For Uncle Hulan’s generation, the blue-collar battles for social justice were largely successful. Factory floors today tend to be far more racially integrated than the corporate boards that run them. But in many ways, the progress was short-lived. As soon as Black workers began to get good jobs in the factories, factories began moving away.
By the time Wally’s generation came of age, several of the largest factories in Indianapolis had closed down. Many of the boys in Wally’s neighborhood found work on the corner, selling dope. More than 10 percent of the Black boys in Wally’s neighborhood ended up in prison as adults. Wally served time in prison, too. “I was locked up,” he told his co-workers. “I’m blessed to have this job.”
In many ways, the decline in American manufacturing hit Black people the hardest. According to a 2018 study of the impact of manufacturing employment on Black and white Americans from 1960 through 2010, the decline in manufacturing contributed to a 12 percent overall increase in the racial wage gap for men.
When you follow a dying factory up close, it’s easy to see how globalization left a growing group of people competing for a shrinking pool of good factory jobs. Affirmative action becomes more fraught as good jobs get scarce and disappear.
Even for John, the white man I followed, factories were sites of important social protest. If a boss disciplined a worker for refusing to wear safety glasses, John thought that all the other workers should take off their safety glasses and hurl them on the floor, forcing the manager to bring back the disciplined worker or shut down the whole assembly line.
John was a die-hard union man who came from a long line of union men. His grandfather and great-grandfather had been coal miners. His father-in-law had been an autoworker. To John, factories were places where the working class fought pitched battles with the company for higher pay and shorter working hours. He traced his identity to the miners and steelworkers who had been beaten, arrested and even killed for demanding an eight-hour workday and a day off every week. That’s why nothing stuck in John’s craw like the phrase “white privilege.” The words implied that his people had been handed a middle-class life simply because they were white. In John’s mind, his people had not been given dignity, leisure time, safer working conditions or decent wages just because they were white; they had fought for those things — and some of them had died in the fight.
After the bosses announced that the factory would close, he walked around the plant urging his fellow workers to refuse to train their Mexican replacements, in a last-ditch effort to keep the factory in Indianapolis. As the shutdown at Rexnord continued, John preached about the need for worker solidarity.
“If you want it, fight for it,” he told his union brothers and sisters of their doomed plant. “I’ll fight with you.”
I began to understand why white workers tended to view the closure of the factory — and the election of Donald Trump — differently from their Black co-workers. Over the course of a decade, John had seen his wages sink from $28 an hour to $25 an hour to $23 an hour. After the plant closed, he struggled to secure a job that paid $17 an hour. His declining earning power hadn’t been tempered by social progress, like the election of a Black president. To the contrary, his social standing had waned. Rich white C.E.O.s sent blue-collar jobs to Mexico. But when blue-collar workers complained about it, college-educated people dismissed them as xenophobes and racists.
Working-class white men at the bearing plant may not have wanted to share their jobs with Black people and women. But they had done it. And now that Black people and women worked alongside them on the factory floor, everyone’s jobs were moving to Mexico. It was more than many white workers could take. One white man at the plant quit and walked away from more than $10,000 in severance pay simply because he couldn’t stand watching a Mexican person learn his job. “It’s depressing to see that you ain’t got a future,” he told me. One of John’s best friends volunteered to train. “I don’t hate you, but I hate what you’re doing,” John told him. They never spoke again.
The union reps, nearly all of whom were white, saw training their replacements as a moral sin, akin to crossing a picket line. But many Black workers and women did not agree. It had not been so long ago, after all, that the white men had refused to train them. Black workers had not forgotten how the union had treated their fathers and uncles. Many considered the refusal to train the Mexicans racist. The most unapologetic trainers were Black.
The announcement that the factory would close, the election of Donald Trump and the arrival of Mexican replacements at the plant took place within the span of three months, in 2016, unleashing a toxic mix of hope, rage and despair. In the years that have passed since, the workers scattered like brittle seeds, trying to start their lives over.
Economists predicted that they’d get new jobs — even better jobs than they’d had before. Some did. But most of the workers I kept track of ended up earning about $10 an hour less than they had been making. One started a bedbug extermination company. Another joined the Army. Another sold everything he owned and bought a one-way ticket to the Philippines, determined to make globalization work in his favor, for once. Wally made progress with his barbecue business, until an unforeseeable tragedy struck. John agonized over whether to become a steelworker again or take a job in a hospital that had no union. Shannon stayed jobless a long time, which made her miserable. The old factory continued to appear in her dreams for years.
Of course, for every story like Shannon’s, there’s a story about a woman in India or China or Mexico who has a job now — and more financial independence — because of a new factory. Globalization and social justice have many sides.
But those foreign workers don’t vote in American elections. The fate of our democracy does not depend on them the way it hinges on voters like Shannon, Wally and John. The American experiment is unraveling. The only way to knit it back together is for decision makers in this country, nearly all of whom have college degrees, to reconnect with those of the working class, who make up a majority of voters.
Farah Stockman joined the Times editorial board in 2020. For four years, she was a reporter for The Times, covering politics, social movements and race. She previously worked at The Boston Globe, where she won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2016. @fstockman
. . .
“David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don’t Want to Hear”
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.
[Get more from Ezra Klein by listening to his Opinion podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.”]
That, at least, is what David Shor thinks. Shor started modeling elections in 2008, when he was a 16-year-old blogger, and he proved good at it. By 2012, he was deep inside President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, putting together the fabled “Golden Report,” which modeled the election daily. The forecast proved spookily accurate: It ultimately predicted every swing state but Ohio within a percentage point and called the national popular vote within one-tenth of a percentage point. Math-geek data analysts became a hot item for Democratic Party campaigns, and Shor was one of the field’s young stars, pioneering ways to survey huge numbers of Americans and experimentally test their reactions to messages and ads.
But it was a tweet that changed his career. During the protests after the killing of George Floyd, Shor, who had few followers at the time, tweeted, “Post-MLK-assassination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2 percent, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon.” Nonviolent protests, he noted, tended to help Democrats electorally. The numbers came from Omar Wasow, a political scientist who now teaches at Pomona College. But online activists responded with fury to Shor’s interjection of electoral strategy into a moment of grief and rage, and he was summarily fired by his employer, Civis Analytics, a progressive data science firm.
For Shor, cancellation, traumatic though it was, turned him into a star. His personal story became proof of his political theory: The Democratic Party was trapped in an echo chamber of Twitter activists and woke staff members. It had lost touch with the working-class voters of all races that it needs to win elections, and even progressive institutions dedicated to data analysis were refusing to face the hard facts of public opinion and electoral geography.
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. He became ubiquitous on podcasts and Twitter, where Obama posts his analyses and pundits half-jokingly refer to themselves as being “Shor-pilled.” Politico reported that Shor has “an audience in the White House and is one of the most in-demand data analysts in the country,” calling his following “the cult of Shor.” Now he is a co-founder of and the head of data science at Blue Rose Research, a progressive data science operation. “Obviously, in retrospect,” he told me, “it was positive for my career.”
At the heart of Shor’s frenzied work is the fear that Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe. Since 2019, he’s been building something he calls “the power simulator.” It’s a model that predicts every House and Senate and presidential race between now and 2032 to try to map out the likeliest future for American politics. He’s been obsessively running and refining these simulations over the past two years. And they keep telling him the same thing.
We’re screwed in the Senate, he said. Only he didn’t say “screwed.”
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. You can see Shor’s work below. We’ve built a version of his model, in which you can change the assumptions and see how they affect Democrats’ projected Senate chances in 2022 and 2024.
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. A high school dropout who owns a successful pest extermination company in the Houston exurbs might have an income that looks a lot like a software engineer’s at Google, while an adjunct professor’s will look more like an apprentice plumber’s. But in terms of class experience — who they know, what they believe, where they’ve lived, what they watch, who they marry and how they vote, act and protest — the software engineer is more like the adjunct professor.
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, despite its losing the popular vote in 2016, the House in 2018 and the Senate and the presidency in 2020. “Sure, maybe he underperforms the generic Republican by whatever,” Shor said. “But he’s engineered a real and perhaps persistent bias in the Electoral College, and then when you get to the Senate, it’s so much worse.” As he put it, “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. As recently as 2008, the correlation between how a state voted for president and how it voted in Senate elections was about 71 percent. Close, but plenty of room for candidates to outperform their party. In 2020, it was 95.6 percent.
The days when, say, North Dakota’s Republicans would cheerfully vote for a Democrat for the Senate are long past. Just ask Heidi Heitkamp, the defeated North Dakota Democrat who’s now lobbying her former colleagues to protect the rich from paying higher taxes on inheritances. There remain exceptions to this rule — Joe Manchin being the most prominent — but they loom so large in politics because they are now so rare. From 1960 to 1990, about half of senators represented a state that voted for the other party’s nominee for president, the political scientist Lee Drutman noted. Today, there are six.
Put it all together, and the problem Democrats face is this: Educational polarization has made the Senate even more biased against Democrats than it was, and the decline in ticket splitting has made it harder for individual Democratic candidates to run ahead of their party.
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.
Popularism, Explained and Questioned
Shor’s theory of popularism, at its heart, is a critique of the professional staffers, consultants and organizers who shape the Democratic Party’s message, image and strategic choices.
“I think the core problem with the Democratic Party is that the people who run and staff the Democratic Party are much more educated and ideologically liberal and they live in cities, and ultimately our candidate pool reflects that,” he said.
Nor is Shor’s ire aimed only at the liberal wing of the party. Popularism isn’t mere moderation. One of the highest-polling policies in Shor’s research is letting Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices, but it’s so-called moderates, like Sinema, who are trying to strike that from the reconciliation bill. To Shor, this is lunacy.
Shor believes the party has become too unrepresentative at its elite levels to continue being representative at the mass level. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the people we’ve lost are likely to be low-socioeconomic-status people,” he said. “If you look inside the Democratic Party, there are three times more moderate or conservative nonwhite people than very liberal white people, but very liberal white people are infinitely more represented. That’s morally bad, but it also means eventually they’ll leave.” The only way out of this, he said, is to “care more and cater to the preference of our low-socioeconomic-status supporters.”
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.
“In the data world, if you take Shor on, you face intense backlash now,” said Michael Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., who’s something of a godfather in Democratic data circles. “You’re seen as less rigorous or pleading a woke case. I’m in an unusual space: I’m an older white man with access to a lot of the data, so I can say it. I feel like he’s found this weird sweet spot with the media where he never actually shows anyone the evidence for his claims. He just does interviews with reporters.”
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.”
It’s a striking argument, and it fits Shor’s broader theory of the case: Liberal Democrats were either backing or cowering before a politically toxic slogan that had taken over Twitter but was alienating them from their working-class supporters. And even though Biden publicly and repeatedly repudiated the idea, it hurt him anyway, because voters don’t distinguish between different Democrats anymore.
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.”
EquisLabs’ research found support for other theories, too, including that some Latino voters worried that Democrats would be too soft on border security and that others feared socialism. Odio also believes that because neither campaign emphasized immigration in 2020, conservative Latinos who were repelled by Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric in 2016 felt able to vote for him in 2020. “What doesn’t come through is ‘defund the police,’” he said. “That feels like part of the elite discourse criticizing another part of the elite discourse. That was not part of the conversation happening at kitchen tables, when it mattered.”
There are other data points supporting Shor’s views. He pointed to a regression analysis by Alexander Agadjanian, a political science Ph.D. student, that used public data to show that pro-police views were unusually potent in increasing the probability that a voter would switch to Trump, though somewhat less so for Latinos than for white voters. The problem with all of this regression data, though, is that voters who switched to Trump in 2020 might have adopted his views on policing rather than switched because of his views on policing.
Having spent a lot of time trying to untangle this debate, I’d say it left me sympathetic to those who wish Shor would release more of his data and make these arguments in thicker formats. “I agree with David that ‘defund the police’ is an unfortunate slogan in a number of ways,” said Sean McElwee, a co-founder of Data for Progress and a frequent collaborator of Shor’s. “I’m a little skeptical that it was particularly devastating.” Again, the argument isn’t that Shor is wrong that “defund the police” hurt Democrats but that he hasn’t done the work to prove that he’s right. “There was never a comprehensive David Shor putting out a report showing that ‘defund the police’ cost us,” McElwee told me.
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.”
Shor’s critics argue that he’s too focused on the popularity of what Democrats say, rather than the enthusiasm it can unleash. When pressed, Podhorzer called this theory “viralism” and pointed to Trump as an example of what it can see that popularism cannot. “A lot of things Trump did were grossly unpopular but got him enormous turnout and support from the evangelical community,” Podhorzer said. “Polling is blind to that. Politics isn’t just saying a thing at people who’re evaluating it rationally. It’s about creating energy. Policy positions don’t create energy.”
Podhorzer also pointed to Biden: “He’s done much more than I thought he’d be able to do. All the things he’s doing are popular. And yet he’s underwater.”
What does create energy, Podhorzer thinks, is fear of the other side. His view is that Democrats’ best chance, even now, is to mobilize their base against Trump and everything he represents. “The challenge in 2022 is to convince people that they’re again voting on whether or not the country is going in a Trumpist direction,” he said.
This is an argument Shor is happy to have. “I think the conventional wisdom has swung too far toward believing policy isn’t important,” he said. He agrees that enthusiasm matters, but it has to be enthusiasm for a message that doesn’t alienate the undecided. “A lot of politics is about what you talk about,” he told me. You should sort your ideas, he said, by popularity. “Start at the top, and work your way down to find something that excites people. But I think that what actually happens is people sort by excitement first. And the problem is the things that are most exciting to activists and journalists are politically toxic.”
Shor showed me, as an example, a set of environmental talking points he’d tested, in which the ones that mentioned climate change performed worst. “Very liberal white people care way more about climate change than anyone else,” he said. “So when you talk about climate change, you sound like a weird, very liberal white person. This is why policy issues matter more than people realize. It’s not that voters have these very specific policy preferences. It’s that the policies you choose to talk about paints a picture of what kind of person you are.”
I should say that the polling differences here struck me as modest: The best environmental message on Shor’s list increased Biden’s approval rating by 1.7 percentage points, while the worst-performing message cut it by 0.4 points. On the other hand, a percentage point here, a percentage point there can be the difference between winning the White House and losing it.
Shor’s example speaks to the hardest questions raised by popularism. “Talk about your most popular, most energizing ideas” isn’t controversial advice. The real disagreements come on the ideas that don’t poll so well. There are a lot of issues that Democrats want to talk about that Shor thinks they’d be better off not talking about.
Hillary Clinton “lost because she raised the salience of immigration, when lots of voters in the Midwest disagreed with us on immigration,” Shor said. This is where popularism poses its most bitter choices: He and those who agree with him argue that Democrats need to try to avoid talking about race and immigration. He often brandishes a table showing that among voters who supported universal health care but opposed amnesty for unauthorized immigrants, 60 percent voted for Obama in 2012 but 41 percent voted for Clinton in 2016. That difference, he noted, was more than enough to cost her the election.
This can read as an affront to those who want to use politics to change Americans’ positions on those issues. “The job of a good message isn’t to say what’s popular but to make popular what needs to be said,” Shenker-Osorio told me.
Shor’s rejoinder to this is that the best way to make progress on race and immigration policy is for Democrats to win elections. Obama’s twin victories loom large in his thinking here, since he watched Obama’s brain trust carefully decide what to avoid and the result was the election and re-election of the country’s first Black president, to say nothing of all the policies he passed.
Shor is right about how the Obama campaign understood the electorate. David Simas, the director of opinion research on Obama’s 2012 campaign, recalled a focus group of non-college, undecided white women on immigration. It was a 90-minute discussion, and the Obama campaign made all its best arguments. Then they went around the table. Just hearing about the issue pushed the women toward Mitt Romney. The same process then played out in reverse with shipping jobs overseas. Even when all of Romney’s best arguments were made, the issue itself pushed the women toward Obama. The lesson the Obama team took from that was simple: Don’t talk about immigration.
“You don’t have the luxury of just sending one mobilization message that isn’t going to be heard by a whole bunch of persuadable voters,” Simas told me. “So if we make immigration the central part of a message in Wisconsin, what’s that going to do to the massive amount of non-college whites who’re much more concerned about bread-and-butter economic issues?”
This is the kind of thinking Shor thinks Democrats have largely lost. “Obama and his messaging team were very calculated and measured about that,” he said. “That’s the piece we dropped. I think it’s great to push the envelope and be ahead of history. But you want to be five years ahead of history, not 15 years.”
But one difference between 2016 and 2012 is that Romney was complicit in making economics the center of the campaign. Like Obama, he preferred to argue over tax policy and spending cuts and was plainly uncomfortable talking about immigration or race. He ran, self-consciously, as a former management consultant who would govern on behalf of America’s makers rather than its takers. Trump descended a golden escalator to call Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists. What was Clinton supposed to do?
The implication of popularism is that Clinton shouldn’t have heavily engaged Trump on immigration and race, no matter the provocations. Instead, she should have stuck to a higher-polling economic message. Shor’s critics think that theory is, to put it gently, impractical. The media focuses on the points of controversy between the candidates, and Trump relentlessly weaponized the energy contained in America’s deepest divisions. Clinton talked far more about jobs and the economy than about anything else on the campaign trail, but the comments that generated the most media attention and popular energy were the ones that engaged Trump’s attacks.
But even if Clinton could have sustained Shor-level message discipline, would it have worked, or would the perception that Clinton wasn’t standing up for her voters or their ideals have left large swaths of the Democrats’ base demoralized?
“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.
“I don’t think there’s a short-term solution to the predicament we’re in,” Podhorzer said. “There’s not a set of things Democrats can say that will make them popular to the extent they can start winning the Senate. I don’t think it exists.”
In a way, this is where Shor and his critics converge: They are both deeply pessimistic about the near-term chances for Democrats and thus for democracy.
What Democrats Need to Understand
Models can mislead. The demographic triumphalism that Democrats felt a decade ago has vanished, as reality proved more complicated than regressions. The same may be true here, too. McElwee, for one, thinks these disasters are being projected “with more certainty than is warranted.” He noted that the Democrats’ new coalition may put them at a disadvantage in the Senate but college-educated voters are more likely to turn out in 2022. “Educational polarization could be a stabilizing force for Democrats in midterms,” he said. “I think there’s reason to believe, looking at Georgia and Nevada and California, that we now have a coalition that’s much more robust in midterms.”
Trump may also prove unique in his ability to polarize the electorate along class lines. If he doesn’t run again in 2024, will a Ron DeSantis or a Mike Pence really be able to generate the fury and fervor that Trump did in 2016 and 2020? His successors might polarize the electorate somewhat differently, just as Romney and John McCain did before him.
But no matter who Republicans nominate for president, Democrats face a terribly uphill battle in the Senate, and they don’t seem to have a plan for what to do about it. If the stakes are as dire as they appear to be and Republicans are as dangerous as Democrats say, Shor is right that they need one. Now. And any such plan will require compromises and discipline that many Democrats will loathe.
“When I first started working on the Obama campaign in 2012, I hated all the last remnants of the Clinton era,” Shor said. “When I go back now and think about the fights between the analytics team and the consultants, about 80 percent of the time, they were right. There was an old conventional wisdom to politics in the ’90s and 2000s that we all forget. We collectively unlearned those lessons over the past 12 years. We’ve told ourselves very ideologically convenient stories about how those lessons weren’t relevant — that tax phobia isn’t real or we didn’t need to worry about what conservative white people thought. And it turned out that wasn’t true. I see what I’m doing as rediscovering the ancient political wisdom of the past.”
Sometimes, when I report on a debate, I emerge with a strong view on who’s wrong. In this case, I think both sides are right. Democrats are often trapped in an echo chamber of their own making — a problem Twitter has made immeasurably worse — and they are too quick to dismiss evidence that their ideas and messages are alienating voters. The political system is stacked against them, and unless they are going to change it by adding states and reforming election laws, they need to campaign with the constant recognition that the pivotal voter is well to their right and skeptical of everything they say. On all of that, Shor is offering a warning Democrats should heed.
At the same time, I think he overstates the power of policy communication and the control Democrats have over the debates that will dominate politics. There is little Biden can do to stop Sinema from making a hash of his agenda and muddling his message, and Democrats can’t, in reality, avoid talking about race and immigration and climate change, for reasons both practical and moral. Politics is also about changing what’s possible tomorrow.
I think Shor overreads the experience he had on the Obama campaign: It’s precisely because Obama was a thrilling, historic figure that he could tailor his message so carefully. Unless Democrats can conjure up a generational political talent for every election, they’ll often have to mobilize their base in ways that might unnerve the uncertain or fight on ground that the other side has chosen. But that’s precisely when a bit more of a Shor-esque obsession with polls and skeptical voters might help them most.
To a debate full of inelegant coinages — “popularism,” “viralism” — let me, with apologies, add one more: partyism. The core problem Democrats face is that almost all politics is now national. They are one party facing electoral disaster, and they will rise or fall together. Democrats cannot escape one another, no matter how they might try.
This, to me, is the most important part of Shor’s argument: He is right to insist that the Democratic Party is an institution that is composed, at the top, of a narrow group of people and that is afflicted by many of their blind spots. Whether he is right about what those blind spots are or his critics are right that he is adding some of his own is a secondary concern. For the Democratic Party to chart any course out of the peril it faces, it must first accept that in the minds of most Americans, it is a party, a singular entity. And before that party can shape what voters think, it must find a way to see itself clearly and act collectively.
Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor-at-large of Vox; the host of the podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. @ezraklein