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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Like, I think if you just step back, if you have a situation where only 42 percent of Americans trust the Democratic Party on the economy relative to 58 for Republicans, you know, obviously the standard bearer of the Democratic Party is going to be perceived as too left wing unless they unless they do a lot of stuff to try to counterbalance that.
You know, I just want to say, you know, the TheyThem ad that everybody talks about, it was a good ad, but it was like a 70th percentile ad, you know, in our testing. If you look at all of the best testing ads from Donald Trump, it was basically the economy, it was gas prices, it was immigration, crime. And so I think that there's definitely been an overfocus on DEI, on wokeness, on trans issues.
I think it definitely, you know, played a role on the elite discourse and why, you know, So many tech CEOs have become more right wing and, you know, all of all that. But I think the Republicans are making a mistake, honestly, to focus on these things so much relative to concrete issues that people actually care about.
You know, I think that there's this bigger picture point I want to make where I think that a lot of people see the Trump administration as kind of. A break that shows that all of the traditional rules of politics no longer apply. And I think that to some extent that's wrong, that a lot of what's happening is really very easy to understand.
You know, Donald Trump, you know, to go back to the ideological thing. He broke with his party. You know, he might have been dishonest about it, but he disavowed Project 2025. He said that he wouldn't cut social programs. He ruled out a national abortion ban. And I think that, you know, that kind of thing just plays a big role in his success.
And I think that a lot of these newer things, you know, that we talk about might be less important than we think. So now I just have the last slide of the retrospective. And so, you know, what I have here is we have the share of voters who get their news from TikTok by year, the share of voters, of young voters who get their news from TikTok more than quadrupled in the last four years.
This is the biggest and probably fastest change in media consumption, you know, that has happened in my lifetime. And it was... quite correlated with support change. Now, obviously, TikTok users are younger, they're less politically engaged. It's not surprising that we dropped among this group. You'd expect that from demographics.
But if you go and you do the regressions, I think there was definitely a causal element there. And when you zoom in, particularly, to people who get their news from TikTok who don't care very much about politics, this is a group that's eight percentage points more Republican than they were four years ago, and that's a lot.
I don't know the answer to that. It's totally possible. We know that they do dial turning on some topics, stuff like Ukraine or Tiananmen Square or whatever. But what I'll say is I think that TikTok represents something fairly radically different than social networks that came before it. And I'm sure that there could be some malfeasance on the part of people who work there.
But the thing that I think about sometimes is just that I think TikTok is really the first social media platform that is really truly decentralized. And what I mean by that is just, it's not based on follower graphs. Like if you look at Reels or Twitter or whatever, how many people see a video or a piece of content is highly correlated with how many followers that person has.
TikTok's a lot more random and there's like very interesting machine learning reasons for why. But I think that it really allowed a lot of content that never would have gotten a lot of views on Twitter or on television to suddenly escape containment and get directly into the eyes of people who don't care that much about politics. And I don't know.
You could tell a story that maybe just anti-incumbent stuff is going to do really well on TikTok and Democrats are going to do great now. I don't really know. But I think that... For whatever reason, this big change, I think, really did help Republicans. And it's just an example of how the world has really changed a lot.
I think there's a lot of truth in that. I think that TikTok is genuinely strange relative to platforms before it in that its audience is more politically disengaged and more working class. And I think it's just been very hard for us as a party to find creators and content that appeals to people like that. Because all of the people who work in democratic politics are not like that.
And I think that in the old traditional media world, we were a lot like the media gatekeepers. And so it was kind of clear how to win that war. And I think Democrats did a good job of doing it. But now we have a totally different fight. So... You know, just, you know, to move on and talk a little bit about the present as opposed to the long, long time ago of, you know, four or five months ago.
So you've talked a lot in your previous episodes about Trump's flood the zone strategy. And what we've done here is, you know, we've pulled all his executive orders and stuff that he's campaigned on. I think we have something like 60 dots here. Every one of these dots is a policy that we've pulled. And, you know, what you can see is that there's a lot of variance.
You know, a lot of the things that he campaigned on, you know, no taxes on tips, deploying the military to the border, voter ID laws, ending remote work for federal employees. A lot of that stuff is very popular.
While the flip side is a lot of stuff that he's actually doing, you know, he talks about this stuff less, but Medicaid cuts, repealing the ACA, extending tax cuts to billionaires, a lot of that stuff is really unpopular. I mean, just to say something a little controversial, I think a lot of the challenge of the Trump era is, is that they're going to try to bait us.
And, you know, we should do everything we can, you know, to actually meaningfully resist and protect the populations that we care about and everything. But I think we need to make sure that we're preserving a considerable amount of time, you know, to attacking Trump on the most effective things that voters are concerned about.
You could imagine a theoretical world where we would have really... hard and unpleasant trade-offs. But I think the world we actually live in is that a bunch of the things that we're extremely concerned about are actually really unpopular.
And just kind of going forward to the next slide, here's some randomized controlled trial data that we did that, like I was talking about earlier with the ads, where we just kind of went through and we looked at 58% different things that Trump's going to do. And then we kind of rank ordered them by how persuasive they were at actually changing people's votes and making people disapprove of Trump.
Showing 101–120 of 146 · page 6 of 8
← Previous
Next →