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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And, you know, I think that a lot of the things that we're most concerned about, Elon causing chaos in the federal government, cuts to, you know, Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security, extending tax breaks for the rich. Obviously, this list of things is not exactly the same as my top five things that I am personally most concerned about with the Trump administration.
But I think that the Republicans are making a lot of unforced errors that make it easier to thread the needle on these things than I think it otherwise would be true.
Can you just like think for a second? Can you imagine 70 words? You like stop a Trump voter on the street and you say the 70 words to him and then there's a 2.5% chance he changes his mind. I think that's incredible. Like, I think it is a big deal.
I just think that these two pieces of data tell a story of how we should try to shape the campaign against Trump in the next couple months, which is that he is... wrecking havoc in the federal government.
I think that is consistent with our principles and also something that voters are very concerned about, you know, that he is trying to slash support for the safety net and that he's trying to do tax cuts against the wealthy. And, you know, I think that a lot of this critique of Trump is really very similar to the campaign that we ran against Mitt Romney.
And I think that this kind of gets back to what I was saying before of I feel like, you know, we were so shocked by Trump that we kind of forgot the old rules of politics.
Thank you very much. to tie what he's doing to harming individual people. In ads, one of the clearest patterns in ads is that getting a real person and just having them stare at a camera and talk about the ways that Republicans have personally hurt them. It's the best content. It's funny, if you hire actors, it doesn't work as well. People have tried.
And that's why, in some ways, I'm optimistic that Democrats will be able to thread the Because the two things that we should do is fight against social welfare cuts and also attack Elon Musk for the chaos he's creating. And I think that that's something that basically every wing of the party should be on board with.
The most predictable thing in American politics, and we get surprised every single time it happens, is the president comes in, he wins a trifecta, and then he does a bunch of unpopular stuff, he overreaches, and then he becomes very unpopular and loses big in the midterms. You know, that doesn't mean you can't avoid the cycle.
But I think that in order to avoid it, like when you look at the people who did the best job, you know, Clinton in 1998 or Kennedy in 1962, you know, they did it by engaging in an enormous amount of policy restraint. And that is just not what Trump has been doing at all. And I think that you can just see in the data that his approval rating is dropping pretty quickly.
And you can see that he's just pissing off lots of people and that a lot of the stuff that he's doing and drawing attention toward is really quite unpopular.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. But, you know, that said, it gets to this, like, tension in all of these, like, Democratic soul-searching conversations, which is if Democrats do nothing, really, like, they'll probably be okay in 2026. Because all of these voters, you know, who get their news from TikTok, who don't care about politics, these, like, voters under 25, they just really...
are not going to vote very much in the midterms. But if we don't fix this problem, then four years from now, we could be in the same trust deficit on all of these core issues. And these voters that didn't turn out in 2026 will come back. And except we'll be running against a candidate who's a lot less unpopular potentially than Trump. And it could be a real pickle.
If you had told me in 2019 when I started worrying about the 2024 Senate election that we would have 47 seats, I would have jumped for joy. You know, the really big factors there is like Republicans ran a bunch of really terrible candidates in a bunch of swing races. And it turns out those Democratic candidates did a good job of distancing themselves from the party.
You know, I don't want to spend too much time speculating about the 2026 map. But I think that even though the bias in the electoral college has gone down quite a bit because of the swing among immigrants, that doesn't really change that the Senate—it's very hard for Democrats to take the Senate unless they can consistently outperform how Harris did and how Biden did in most of the country.
These problems won't be fixed unless we spend the next two years or four years changing the party's brand among, you know, working class voters who are overrepresented in the Senate.
OK, the one exception to this, I think, and, you know, this is just controversial and, you know, might get me in trouble, is I think that if you look in Nebraska, the single biggest overperformance that we had was Osborne, you know, running as an independent candidate. He outperformed the top of the ticket by 7.1%. Now, obviously, Nebraska is an extremely red state.
And I think that we've only ever tried this strategy of running people who are literally formally not tied to the Democratic Party in extremely red states. But I think the argument for doing that kind of thing in merely red states, in places like Florida or places like Ohio or Iowa, you know, those are hard questions and it's not up to me, you know, what we end up doing.
But I think it's something that we have to really seriously consider. And, you know, then that also just brings up the really awkward point of like, well, what do we do with the reality that by land area in most parts of the country, it's almost impossible for a Democrat or someone with a Democrat on their ticket to win?
Democrats are not in power right now. And so we don't have agenda control. And I think a lot of this just depends on what Trump does and then who replaces Trump. You know, like something I'll say going back to the first time that Trump was president is that when we were looking at polling of non-college whites, you know, and these Obama Trump voters, their approval rating for Trump was...
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