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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These were obviously the best ads in the campaign. And the point I just want to say is I think this reinforces the point that what voters cared the most about was the cost of living and that voters were really mad, you know, about the actual situation. And I think that Harris being able to, you know, in this ad, acknowledging, oh, things are actually very bad. I don't like this.
I have a plan to fix this is part of what made it so effective.
I think that there was this big strategic question that Democrats faced, and it wasn't just the Harris campaign, which is polling would tell them you should talk about the economy or voters care a lot about the cost of living. But it's very hard, one, to get media attention on those things. And two, I think that Trump has done a good job of baiting us.
I think what's really interesting about a lot of the democracy and authoritarian stuff is just that It's how concerned you are by it really varies a lot by political engagement and by education and the kind of people who set media decisions, you know, at CNN or who work in politics are the kinds of people who are going to be much more concerned about it than working class folks are.
Asking the hard questions. Yeah, I think, you know, obviously, I think that democratic messaging last cycle was not economically focused enough. I think that it focused too much on, you know, narratives of defending institutions, defending democracy. And I think it's just very easy for folks to fall into that trap.
The thing I'll say, you know, in terms of why I'm sympathetic to the people who actually had these jobs and had to make these decisions is it just feels wrong. You know, like I have a situation, I mentioned this before, where donors will email me and they'll be like, oh, look at this crazy, absolutely terrible thing, this evil thing that Trump is doing. We need to test it.
We need to tell the voters. You test it and it really doesn't work. People want to hear about eggs, you know, and it's easy for me to say that, you know, because I don't really, I'm not directly in charge. But I just think it just feels really wrong when you're in the moment. It's just very, it's very hard to totally shift direction, you know, just because data tells you one thing.
Each coalition's campaigns are ultimately going to reflect, you know, the aesthetic and cultural choices of the people who staff them. And it makes sense. Like if you had just said two years ago, oh, Trump's going to end by showing up at a McDonald's, like it just wouldn't have been surprising, I think. And so it's just hard to escape, you know, that kind of demographic pull.
But we have to try because we have to actually win these people over. OK, and so now I just have a couple more slides I want to go through. I talked about this before, but voters cared a lot more about delivering change than preserving institutions. And then we have this other polling question here, which I think is interesting, which is just asking people to pick between the statements.
Things could be going better in America, but what we need is a return to basic stability. And the other is things in America are going poorly, and what's needed is a major change and a shock to the system. And when you have those two things, it's 53-37, which is a lot wider than the election result ended up being.
there's an enormous amount of status quo bias in politics. Campaigning on big policy changes, you know, can be pretty unpopular. But I think, you know, the way to thread the needle is that this, what this is really saying is that voters were very angry about the state of things. And what they wanted tonally was someone who acknowledged that anger.
Because, you know, Ruben Gallego did a lot of criticism of the status quo and was able to outperform.
When people think about moderates, they think of somebody like Joe Manchin, someone who's just like down the line on everything. And, you know, the reality, I think that's an accurate description of what highly educated moderates are like. But most low socioeconomic status moderates, they're very extreme on some issues. They're very conservative on other issues.
When you think of that, it's maybe less surprising that a lot of them like
That's exactly right. And, you know, the way I like to put that in math terms, you know, the issue correlations for highly educated people are just a lot higher than they are.
All right, but I'm glad we started talking about ideology because that dovetails to the next slide. Here, we just ask for each of the candidates, do you think this candidate was more liberal than me, more conservative than me, or close to my views?
You know, 49% of voters said that Kamala Harris was more liberal than me, while only 39% of voters said that Donald Trump was more conservative than me. And so there was this big difference ideological perception gap where a lot of voters saw Donald Trump as more moderate than Kamala Harris.
So in 2016, it looked fairly similar to this. In 2020, perceptions of Donald Trump being too extreme went up relative to 2016, and perceptions of the Democratic candidate being too extreme went down from 2016 to 2020. Now, you know, that I think wasn't a property of Joe Biden per se. Like, obviously, him being moderate was a big part of his brand at that time.
But, you know, in our polling, you know, we would ask, you know, do you think that Joe Biden is too liberal or too conservative or whatever? And we saw that over the course of 2021, as his approval ratings dipped, the perception that he was too liberal also went up.
That eroded. But, you know, the thing I want to say here before... I move on is I'm really not trying to beat up on Kamala Harris here.
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