If you’re a regular reader, some of this will be familiar territory. Still, it’s interesting to see the data being presented in this discussion by David Shor. Shor is a progressive data analyst who first came to my attention when he got canceled by progressives for posting a tweet which made the case that race riots were counterproductive.
Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage. https://t.co/S8VZSuaz3G. pic.twitter.com/VRUwnRFuVW
— David Shor (@davidshor) May 28, 2020
This wasn’t even Shor’s own data but it didn’t matter. Days after the death of George Floyd this was cause for outrage. If people were rioting, Democrats were supposed to support that and anyone who said otherwise was racist. You can read more about that incident here.
But since then, Shor has made a career of telling Democrats things they mostly don’t want to hear, such as the fact that defunding the police was extremely unpopular and therefore not a good message for the party to adopt.
In this conversation with Ezra Klein, he’s doing it again. Making the case that Democrats lost because the culture has shifted and they just aren’t appealing to as many people as they used to be.
In 2016, Democrats received 81 percent of the Hispanic moderate vote, while in 2024 they received 58 percent…
The main story here is just a continuation of the trends that we saw four years ago. Throughout the entire Trump campaign, we’ve observed this racial depolarization…
Why is this happening? Because the Democratic Party has moved so far left that the conservatives among minority groups no longer vote by race, they vote by ideology. You could say that identity politics has stopped working. (Klein’s comments are in bold.)
Democrats are winning 85 percent of Black conservatives in 2016 but only 77 percent in 2024. They were winning 34 percent of conservative Hispanics in 2016, but that falls by half, to 17 percent, in 2024. They were winning 28 percent of conservative Asians in 2016 — which falls to 20 percent in 2024.
It’s always a little bit weird for somebody who is a self-described conservative to vote for Democrats, who are quite a liberal party now. But what we’re seeing among nonwhite voters is people voting more by ideology and less by their ethnic group.
That’s exactly right. I would just say this shouldn’t be all that surprising. I think, now, we identify the Democratic Party as straightforwardly liberal. But the Democratic Party used to be a coalition between liberals, moderates and conservatives. And as liberals became the dominant coalition partner, it makes sense that the conservatives and moderates in the coalition — who were disproportionately nonwhite, given that this ideological polarization happened among whites 20 or 30 years ago — would start to shift.
They come back to this point a bit later. The left moved left and the rest of the country moved right. And that creates a big change when it comes to the last election. It’s no longer true that Democrats win by generating turnout. In fact, greater turnout in 2024 would have caused them to lose by a greater amount.
This problem didn’t exist four years ago. It’s not just that the New York Times readers are more liberal than the overall population — that’s definitely true. It’s that they’re more liberal than they were four years ago — even though the country went the other way. And so there’s this great political divergence between people who consume all the news sources that we know about and read about versus the people who don’t.
As a result of these changes, we’re seeing the reversal of a decades-long truism in American politics. For a long time, Democrats have said, and it’s been true, that if everyone votes, we win and that higher turnout is good for Democrats. But this is the first cycle where that definitively became the opposite.
I have some numbers here: If only people who had voted in 2022 had voted, Harris would have won the popular vote and also the Electoral College fairly easily. But if everyone had voted, Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly five points.
Next they move to the change in the electorate that Klein and Shor described as shocking: Eighteen year-olds mostly supported Donald Trump.
I find this part of this chart shocking. I sometimes talk about narrative violations, and if we knew anything about Donald Trump eight years ago, it was that young people didn’t like him. And Republicans had been maybe throwing away young people for generations in order to run up their margins among seniors.
But if you look at this chart, 75-year-old white men supported Kamala Harris at a significantly higher rate than 20-year-old white men…
It is a real shift. This is the thing I am the most shocked by in the last four years — that young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the baby boomers, and maybe even in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years.
As Klein would say later, “Democrats are getting destroyed now among young voters.”
The conversation wraps up with a discussion of messages that might work for Dems in the next election. And here what Shor has found is that messages about Elon Musk are the ones that seem to shift people the most.
It’s really telling that the Elon stuff floats to the top here because it’s very hard for something to compete with protecting Social Security and Medicare. The fact that there are multiple Elon-related things up at the top really does tell a story that there’s something unusual about what he’s doing.
It’s very easy to tie what Musk is doing to harming individual people. One of the clearest patterns in ad testing is the best content comes from real people staring into a camera and talking about the ways Republicans have personally hurt them…
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’s something that basically every wing of the party should be on board with.
Those may be the issues that work best and poll best but what happens if we have another six months of Democrats setting fires at Tesla dealerships. At some point, the sense of who is creating the most chaos can shift.
Anyway, I think the main takeaway here is that Democrats’ identity politics coalition is fractured and won’t be easy to put back together. On the contrary, it may continue to get worse as the shift of highly-educated white collar workers moving left and blue-collar workers moving right continues to divide people by things other than race.
