An influential data guru expounds on why he thinks his party is losing ground: Their reserve army of young, upscale liberals keeps stepping on their message.
But what if, hidden below their laptop stickers and campaign totes, these young people represent a real political risk for Democrats? And what if, contrary to conventional Democratic wisdom, the power that these young people wield within the party is actually hurting its chance at the ballot box rather than helping it? They'll just cheat the ballots in big, swing-state cities, of course. That worked in 1960 and 2020.
At its most basic, Shor’s theory goes something like this: Although young people as a whole turn out to vote at a lower rate than the general population, the aforementioned type of young person is actually overrepresented within the core of the Democratic Party’s infrastructure. According to Shor, the problem with this permanent class of young staffers is that they tend to hold views that are both more liberal and more ideologically motivated than the views of the coveted median voter, and yet they yield a significant amount of influence over the party’s messaging and policy decisions. As a result, Democrats end up spending a lot of time talking about issues that matter to college-educated liberals but not to the multiracial bloc of moderate voters that the party needs to win over to secure governing majorities in Washington.
Yes, but will Obama accept this?
People who paid close attention to the 2016 presidential campaign probably remember the most-watched Democratic campaign commercial from the cycle, Hillary Clinton's "Mirrors" ad, which featured images of young women gazing at themselves in mirrors intercut with footage of Donald Trump making disparaging comments about women. It was powerful stuff ‐ at least among the young liberals on Clinton's staff.
But they loved Hillary since 2006.
The "Mirrors" ad featured prominently in a series of experiments that Shor did with Civis to evaluate the effect of various Democratic campaign commercials on voters' decisions. The findings of the experiments were not encouraging. For one, they found that a full 20 percent of the ads ‐ including "Mirrors" ‐ made viewers more likely to vote for Republicans than people who hadn't seen the same ads.
| *Snicker* |
"The reason is that my staff and me, we're super f---ing different than than the median voter," said Shor. "We're a solid 30 years younger."
You can view The "Mirrors" ad at the link.
| Is it fair to make our Readers more strongly Republican than they were before, including those among us who dislike Donald Trump? |