Wik, thanks for your feedback, and I apologize for harping on the tired metaphor of sausage. It is indeed a great food, precisely because of how it makes a tasty whole that's so much more than the sum of its less appetizing parts. I only wish that were true of legislation.
Re Kamala Harris, she does seem to be trying to either choose issues that are blandly apolitical, or just stay out of the spotlight. Not unlike a First Lady, actually, which is more than a little sad. Like Michelle Obama suppressing her intelligence and talents for eight years. I think Harris's latest photo op was at a preschool. O-kay.
But maybe that's the safest approach, to at least try not to turn any more people off. I'm more and more worried that the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot by not managing to come together in support of anything at all positive.
The latest piece of incompetence is all the rehashing of the January 6 'insurrection,' which clearly does not interest anyone at all outside the Beltway -- except if, like a neighbor of ours, they listen to conservative talk radio and think the federal government has jailed innocent people who were only there and not acting violent.
Surely some of the party insiders must know that all their messages are currently failing? Including, obviously, with Sinema and Manchin. /-:
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David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don’t Want to Hear
By Ezra Klein ...
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.
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. ...
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. ... 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. ...
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. ...
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 ... 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 ... 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 believe, as does Shor, that educational polarization is serving here as a crude measure of class polarization. ...
Either way, the sorting ... 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. ... 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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ... 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. ...
... Michael Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., who’s something of a godfather in Democratic data circles ... “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.” ...
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. ...
“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. ...
Our world, Shenker-Osorio argued, is one in which the voters Democrats most need to reach are the ones paying the least attention. ... “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 ... [is] about creating energy. Policy positions don’t create energy.” ...
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. ...
Shor ... agrees that enthusiasm matters, but it has to be enthusiasm for a message that doesn’t alienate the undecided. ... 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.” ...
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. ...
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. ...
... Shor ... 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. ... 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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/de...
https://www.nytimes.com/column/ezra-klein-podcast
Transforming America With a One-Vote Majority
Joe Biden’s economic plan is stalled in Congress because the warring wings of his party aren’t yet desperate enough to compromise. They could be soon. ...
Competing demands by Manchin and Sinema illustrate just how difficult the Democratic leadership’s task is. Manchin, who won his seat after airing an ad
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIJORBRpOPM )
in which he literally shot a hole through Obama’s 2010 climate bill, opposes several of the Democratic proposals to combat climate change. He wants the party to base its reconciliation bill on reversing the 2017 Trump tax cuts. Sinema, however, reportedly opposes raising corporate and individual tax rates but wants to prioritize the climate provisions. Democrats need both to vote for the final bill, and they need the support of 218 members of the House who have wish lists of their own.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/...
