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Current Events => General Discussion => Topic started by: enslaved1 on October 14, 2021, 11:17:37 AM

Title: The Democrats’ Privileged College-Kid Problem
Post by: enslaved1 on October 14, 2021, 11:17:37 AM
The proggies might be starting to figure it out....

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/09/david-shor-democrats-privileged-college-kid-problem-514992 (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/09/david-shor-democrats-privileged-college-kid-problem-514992)

Quote

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?

In the eyes of David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s most coveted and most controversial data gurus, that’s exactly what’s happening. In some respects, Shor understands the power that young, hyper-educated staffers wield in the world of Democratic politics because he once wielded it himself — and to great effect. In 2012, at the age of 20, Shor joined Barack Obama’s re-election campaign to develop and oversee its election forecasting system, a complex statistical modeling system that helped campaign staff decide how and when to spend money to optimize support in specific areas. In 2020, during the height of that summer’s racial justice protests, Shor was fired from the progressive data firm Civis Analytics for tweeting out an academic study suggesting that riots have historically hurt Democrats in major election years. The firing, however, has not done much to diminish Shor’s influence within the party, and he reportedly still has the ear of both Obama and senior members of the Biden administration.

This week, Shor’s theory of the electorate was subjected to a long, skeptical but sympathetic scrub by Ezra Klein, who seemed persuaded by Shor’s pessimism about the Democrats’ chances to hold the Senate, but more mixed on his prescriptions for how to fix it. Shor has another theory, though, about the Democratic Party itself — a mirror he holds up to his own side, and which might be similarly unpalatable to its insiders and even his friends.

    “It is descriptively true that people who work in campaigns are extremely young and much more liberal than the overall population.”

    David Shor

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.
Title: Re: The Democrats’ Privileged College-Kid Problem
Post by: Ralph Wiggum on October 14, 2021, 11:34:57 AM
The proggies might be starting to figure it out....

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/09/david-shor-democrats-privileged-college-kid-problem-514992 (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/09/david-shor-democrats-privileged-college-kid-problem-514992)

Interesting read, and I'm sure we'll hear more about this after (hopefully) an ass-whooping in the mid-terms for the Dems.  The standard autopsy on what they got wrong and how to pivot in the aftermath.