What's Gone Wrong with the Democratic Party & How to Fix it | David Shor

Hidden Forces

Demetri Kofinas

Business, Government

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2020

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In Episode 167 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with political data scientist David Shor. David was recently described in New York Magazine as Obama's "In-House Nate Silver" for his work on the president's re-election campaign where he was responsible for building and maintaining the campaign's election forecasting system, which accurately predicted the outcome to within a point in every state and was the primary input to the campaign's resource allocation decisions in the 2012 election.

In this conversation, David shares his theory about why Democrats have struggled to win elections in recent years, why the polls have been so off in both of the last two presidential elections, and what the implications of his findings are for the viability of the party and its ideological platform and rhetoric.

We also look at how Republicans gained support from African American men and Hispanics in an election year that we were told was supposed to be a referendum on white privilege. Does this mean that identity politics has run its course, or does it just validate the assertions of people like New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow who claim that this is simply further evidence of the entrenchment of white supremacy in American society?

David also shares his predictions on the Georgia senate races and gives his opinion on how polling should be reformed. Lastly, Shor explains how education levels correlate with ideological extremism, how this has put Democratic candidates out of step with the majority of Americans, and what this means for policy choices in the event that the Democrats retake control of the senate in 2020 or 2022.

You can access the episode overtime, as well as the transcript and rundown to this week's episode through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.

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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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Episode Recorded on 12/01/2020

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Hidden Forces Podcast features long-formed conversations, broken into two parts,
0:05.3	the second hour of which is made available to our premium subscribers,
0:09.3	along with transcripts and notes to each conversation.
0:13.0	For more information about how to access the episode overtime's, transcripts, and
0:17.0	rundowns, head over to patreon.com slash Hidden Forces.
0:22.0	You can also sign up to our mailing list at Hidden Forces. You can also sign up to our mailing list at Hiddenforces.io.
0:26.0	Follow us on Twitter at Hidden Forces pod and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
0:32.0	And with that, please enjoy this week's episode. What's up, up, everybody? What's up everybody? My guest on this episode of Hidden Forces is political
0:59.3	data scientist David Shore. David was recently described in New York magazine as Obama's in-house Nate Silver
1:07.4	for his work on the President's re-election campaign where he was responsible for
1:11.8	building and maintaining the campaign's election forecasting system,
1:16.0	the Golden Report, which accurately predicted the outcome to within a point in every state and was the primary input to the campaign's resource
1:24.3	allocation decisions in the 2012 election. This past summer David gave an
1:29.7	interview for New York magazine's Intelligencer, where he laid out his unified theory of American politics,
1:37.0	and it goes something like this.
1:39.0	Over the last 40 years, social trust among voters in the United States has declined by roughly 50%.
1:48.3	The drop on its own is concerning, but until recently it had been largely uniform.
1:53.0	Whether you were a Democrat or a Republican didn't matter,
1:56.0	the decline in trust was a bipartisan phenomenon.
2:00.0	But sometime around the 2016 election this began to change.
2:04.4	Exit polls found that voters who registered as low trust
2:07.8	broke in large numbers for Donald Trump.
	...

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