The Best Way to Lose an Election

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.7 • 963 Ratings

🗓️ 28 November 2020

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Most people believe that the candidates they like best are also most likely to win. If you are far left, you are likely to think that far left candidates are also most likely to beat their opponents. If you are moderate, you are likely to think that moderate candidates are most likely to beat their opponents. David Shor is the rare exception: a self-described democratic socialist, he believes that the Democratic Party needs to moderate its rhetoric and abandon some of its policies to win the majorities it needs to pass ambitious legislation. Long known to insiders as one of America’s most acute public opinion analysts, Shor first rose to public prominence when he was fired from his job at Civis Analytics after tweeting a study by Princeton professor Omar Wasow (a member of Persuasion’s Board of Advisors) according to which violent protests in the 1960s helped to propel Richard Nixon to victory in the 1968 presidential elections. In this week's episode, Yascha Mounk and David Shor discuss why the polls keep getting it wrong, why the left's dream of winning by mobilizing progressive voters is unrealistic, and how Democrats need to change to have a chance of building congressional majorities. . Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: goodfightpod@gmail.com Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by John T. Williams and Rebecca Rashid Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're going to. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
0:17.0	Hi, I'm John McQu.
0:22.0	Hi, I'm John Mcwater, and I'm a linguistics professor at Columbia University and host of
0:27.2	Slate's Lexicon Valley Podcast.
0:29.5	I recently wrote an article for persuasion called Living in Blackface. The Chattering Classes
0:35.8	never truly finished with Rachel Dahlizal, the white woman who was
0:39.4	discovered in 2015 to have spent her adult life passing as black. She was in the news for only a few weeks
0:45.9	in June of that year until the white supremacist Dylan Roof murdered nine black people in
0:51.0	Charleston taking the national spotlight elsewhere.
0:54.4	However, Dahlizal was more than a mere curiosity.
0:57.8	She, along with a similar case revealed this past September, the history professor Jessica Krug, who passed for 20 years as a person of color,
1:06.1	are revealing about black identity today, as well as how all of us navigate what has been
1:11.3	called our racial reckoning since the murder of George Floyd last
1:15.2	spring.
1:16.2	And lightened wisdom today is that, however Black Lives Look from the outside, to go about
1:21.8	as a Black person in these United States remains an ongoing
1:25.1	almost daily burden.
1:26.9	Overall, were to understand that the changes in the Black American condition since 1968 have largely been rearrangements of the deck chairs on the
1:35.6	Titanic. The point is usually made with statistics. Whites have about ten times the
1:40.7	wealth of black people, a gap similar to that in 1968. A black man has a
1:45.7	one in one thousand chance of being killed by a police officer. Partly because of disparities in
1:50.7	health care, black people are three times more likely to get COVID and
	...

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