David Shor
speaker
146 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
David Shor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And then it never recovered. And so, yeah, I don't know. I mean, you can never tell a counterfactual world, but I think that Biden would have had an even harder time distinguishing himself from his record.
Yeah, I think that that's the big salient fact about this election. And I don't think it was impossible for Kamala to do better. This was a winnable election at the end of the day. It was very close. But this was the big thing that was weighing Democrats down.
And so, you know, I just want to move forward, you know, just in terms of why in our polling, the way that we measure issue importance is we show people two random issues and we just ask which of these problems is more important, you know, to the, you know, to the problems facing the country today.
And, you know, people pick and, you know, when you model it out, whenever you have cost of living or inflation put up against something else, eight or nine out of 10 people picked that cost of living and inflation was more important.
No, we did. But, you know, we did a survey where we just asked people, you know, what's more important right now, preserving America's institutions or delivering change that improves people's lives? And it was 78 to 18, delivering change that improves people's lives. But, you know, what's really hard...
I think this has been one of the hardest things about being a political consultant in the last eight years is that every day Trump does terrible things that I think are objectively awful and scary and that piss me off. I'm going to prosecute my enemies or whatever. And then we do a bunch of tests. And voters really don't want to hear about it from us.
I think that Trump would do better if he didn't do that stuff, for sure. But I think that voters want us to talk about concrete ways that they're going to improve people's lives.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's when we measure issues, you know, we measure how important voters find it. And then we just measure, do you trust Democrats or Republicans more on this issue? And what you see here is if you look at the top issues that voters care the most about, cost of living, the economy, taxes and government spending, you know, the deficit, foreign policy, you know, health care.
Other than health care, where Democrats have a narrow lead, Republicans have massive trust advantages, 15 points. on all of the issues that voters care the most about. And so the story that I would tell in response to your question is that in this election, voters trusted Republicans way more than Democrats on all of the most important issues
but also bought into this idea that Donald Trump was a terrible person who couldn't be trusted with power, that made the election be close. But four years from now, Donald Trump will not be the nominee. And maybe they'll nominate somebody who's just as terrible and just as unlikable. But if we don't get out of this trust deficit, I think that, you know, we'll have a lot of problems.
Yeah, I think it's just worth saying that four years ago, the number one issue was COVID and healthcare. And those also were the issues that people trusted Democrats the most on. And so the strategy was really obvious, you know, just talk a lot about COVID and healthcare. But, you know, this time we had a much harder problem, which was that
The issues that people cared the most about, for the most part, voters didn't trust us on. And the issues that people did trust us on, you know, climate change and reproductive rights, probably the big ones, voters just didn't care very much about. And so that was just a very difficult strategic position. And it's also one that was just very different than it was four years ago.
You know, what we saw in our data was that as the Biden administration became a lot more unpopular, all of these things dropped a lot. So some of it was uniform shift. But I think that the last four years, there were some things that structurally changed a lot.
In every center-left party in the world, you know, generally the left has its issues that it owns and the right has its issues that it owns. But usually the economy is pretty neutral. During the Trump administration, the economy was fairly neutral.
Another really big shift was just that education has gone from being basically one of the best issues for Democrats to being something that's basically neutral now. And, you know, we saw that, you know, in the Virginia gubernatorial election in 2021, we even saw it be an advantage for Republicans.
And then, you know, the other big shift, you know, on the other side was that reproductive rights used to be a fairly neutral issue for Democrats. And immediately after Dobbs, we saw party trusts on reproductive rights shoot up. And so I think, you know, these numbers, they do change.
And this is, you know, one of the big messages I want to get through is just that the world has changed a lot in the last four years. It's going to keep changing and we have to kind of adjust in response to what happens.
You know, one of the big things that my firm does, it's probably our biggest product, is that we do randomized controlled trials on ads. The idea is that for a given ad, you take a thousand people, you split them into a treatment and control group. You know, 500 people see the ad, 500 people don't. And then you survey them after and you ask them who they're voting for.
And then the difference between treatment and control is can be described as the causal effect. And so, you know, we tested... you know, on the order of, I'd say probably like four or 5,000 Harris ads last cycle. And I just wanted to call out these two ads that were in the top 1% of ads that we tested. One is from Kamala Harris.
Obviously, there's a lot for several parts of the Democratic coalition there. And then on the another ad by Future Forward just shows tax him for a national sales tax for the idea that Trump. Tax him being Trump. Yeah, tax Trump.
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