It's a long interview, and quite interesting. I read it last weekend and continue to find myself mulling it over.

Gender seems underscrutinized as a factor.

Will Republicans continue to squander their chances at increasing their vote share from voters of color? I think yes, in the next few cycles anyway.

His Senate discussion is pretty frightening.

I guess I don't disagree about broadband killing ticket splitting -- we're among the last hold-outs on that here -- but I think Fox has played as strong a role in this.

I definitely agree that the campaign finance as bribery point has been way overplayed, in ways that have been hugely detrimental. I don't think folks who buy into this theory are particularly open to persuasion, though, so candidates are just going to have to find ways to make do without fossil fuel money etc.

I'm not reading anything this weekend, but I think Turd Blossom's 50% strategy kills split ticket voting as much as anything.

" If education-based polarization reaches a point where Texas becomes the tipping-point state, then that means that Michigan and Minnesota and Maine and Wisconsin are all gone. "

hang on, I thought TX was shifting due to more brown folks voting?

Maybe that's a longer term trend? The polling is pretty clear that the drop in Trump's support is coming from college educated white people who are now remembering that it isn't just the poor people who need a functioning government. Trump may be doing a bit better with Hispanic voters in 2020 than he did in 2016.

I was very impressed by this interview, posted it, and got this comment from a friend: "A 28-year-old data nerd thinks the 'salience' of racial resentment among voters explains elections rather than requires explanation. His argument for the comparative unimportance of economic conditions and economic policy is facile. Why wasn't racial resentment 'salient' in 2008 when McCain went low re Reverend Wright and Palin railed on Hussein Obama for 'palling around with terrorists'? I submit '08 economic conditions and the Bush administration's economic policies made it unsalient and Shor has no idea why...candidates in different elections just talk about different stuff on his version of events...So he's wrong about his central claim. But even if he were right, why isn't he advocating as Democrats' top priority to pay for universal higher education so they don't have to keep appealing to voters who score high on racial resentment and low on being open to new experiences? Psychological voter profiles and campaign messaging is about how deep this guy gets.

"Shor isn't connecting the dots on right-wing authoritarian, anti-immigrant political ascendancy across the West in the direct aftermath of the Great Recession. There was almost nothing in that interview about the impact of the economy on elections or the role government policy plays in influencing it. But consider the last 40 yrs in the US: the executive branch mostly switched parties when the economy was poor ('80, '92, ''08 ...'16?) and mostly didn't when the economy was reasonably good/improving ('84, '88; '96, '04, '12?).

"The economy isn't the only factor but it's obviously important. Meanwhile Shor's insights seemed confined to issue polling, campaign messaging and psych voter profiles. IMO, advising Democrats not to talk about immigration or police reform is less important than advising them to ram through Biden's stimulative $2 trillion climate spending, not offset it with spending cuts elsewhere, and appoint a Fed chair who will support growth thru 2024.

"Shorter: government is a thing that exists in the world. It influences the economy, which influences elections. A 'unified theory of politics' that doesn't address this isn't one."

I felt let down by the contrast with the headline ("unified theory") after getting halfway through and seeing a bunch of observations that seemed moderately interesting individually but not very connected or clearly leading to much of any systemic proposition. Also, it's an interview, not a great format to present a grand theory in. Does it get to something like that eventually?

I think the gist of the alleged unified theory is just that Democrats could win more elections by making the issues voters agree with them about more salient to voters in those elections. But the interview is more interesting than that sounds, because Shor makes a lot of seemingly novel and well-supported observations about how Democrats have succeeded and failed at that in various elections.

No, I think the headline is inaccurate. I thought it was interesting, but not a grand theory.

6: Your friend conflates "economic conditions" and "economic policies." Shor doesn't talk about economic conditions because his interest is election campaigns, and nothing a campaign can do affects economic conditions. On economic policies, although free college starting in 2021 would increase the number of college-educated voters starting in 28, advocating free college won't necessarily win votes in 2020, as the Democratic primaries demonstrated.

And speaking of facile, "economy was poor" is not well defined, but GDP growth was stronger in 12 (no party change) than in 16 (party change), and stronger in 00 (party change) than in either 96 or 04 (no party change).

and nothing a campaign can do affects economic conditions.

Maybe, but Trump's has managed to spread a plague and start a low-intensity civil war.

Yeah, but how both those stonks?

6: "Why wasn't racial resentment 'salient' in 2008..."

It was. From Seth Stephens-Davidowitz analysis of google search data, it cost Obama from a bit more than 3% of the popular vote.

I haven't read the article, but the quote in 6 made me want to agree with the author.

I think Shor is well-served by his agreement not to talk about how he was "canceled." The result is the most intelligent response by a "victim" that I've seen. The rest of the interview makes him look good, too.

10: Tim's response: "GDP growth is just one economic indicator. The relevant stat is Q4 GDP growth. So '96 and '04 were incumbent wins during relatively strong growth. (I recalled 2000 being worse than it was, but note Gore won the popular vote in 2000 after 8 yrs of Democratic rule.) For 2016, more fine-grained GDP/other data show a mini-recession in areas of Trump strength in Q4. Finally, what is the best explanation for Trump's slowly rising approval rating from 2017 to early 2020? He was slowly getting credit for the economy, because that matters.

"Yet Shor claims racial resentment screens off all other variables for Obama-Trump voters and makes long-term projections based on this 'unified theory of politics.' Democratic politicians love to hear they can just campaign-message their way to victories without having to deliver rising living standards for the majority when in power. Many literally don't believe they have the tools to create widely felt growth. By contrast, they already know to throw POC under the bus. Clinton orchestrated his Sistah Souljah moment, Obama heavily criticized Rev. Wright, helped kill ACORN and increased deportations, etc., etc. What Democratic politicianss need to hear is that using the tools of government to improve the lives of voters matters to their electoral success. Myopic data nerd analysts like Shor are standing in the way."

I thought the relevant metric was Q2 economic growth.

I think that makes too much of the claim that Shor is offering a unified theory. If there is anything he is trying to unify, it is explaining cross-national patterns of right-wing populism, not a unified theory of campaigning and governance.

I think it is important to argue in favor of more active government, but I don't think that contradicts his observations.

This is the section I was thinking of

In describing the Democrats' troubles with non-college-educated white voters earlier, you put a lot of emphasis on discrete decisions that the Hillary Clinton campaign made. But, in my understanding, the 2016 election just accelerated a preexisting trend: In both the United States and Western Europe, non-college-educated voters have been drifting right for decades. Doesn't that suggest that something larger than any given campaign's messaging choices is at work here?

That's a great point. I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out, you know, "Where did things go wrong?" You see Matt Stoller and Ryan Grim do this, where you try to pinpoint the moment in time when Democratic elites decided to turn their backs on the working class and embrace neoliberalism. Maybe it was the Watergate babies. Maybe it was the failure to repeal Taft-Hartley. Maybe it was Bill Clinton in 1992.

But then you read about other countries and you see that the same story is happening everywhere. It happened in England with Tony Blair. It happened in Germany with Gerhard Schröder. The thing that really got me was reading about the history of PASOK, the Social Democratic Party in Greece. And you're reading about an election in the 1990s where it's like, "the right-wing New Democracy party made gains with working-class voters," and you realize there are broader forces at work here.

So why is this happening? The story that makes the most sense to me goes like this: In the postwar era, college-educated professionals were maybe 4 percent of the electorate. Which meant that basically no voters had remotely cosmopolitan values. But the flip side of this is that this educated 4 percent still ran the world. Both parties at this point were run by this highly educated, cosmopolitan minority that held a bunch of values that undergirded the postwar consensus, around democracy and rule of law, and all these things.

Obviously, these people were more right wing on a bunch of social issues than their contemporary counterparts, but during that era, both parties were run by just about the most cosmopolitan segments of society. And there were also really strong gatekeepers. This small group of highly educated people not only controlled the commanding heights of both the left and the right, but also controlled the media. There were only a small number of TV stations -- in other countries, those stations were even run by the government. And both sides knew it wasn't electorally advantageous to campaign on cosmopolitan values.

So, as a result, campaigns centered around this cosmopolitan elite's internal disagreements over economic issues. But over the past 60 years, college graduates have gone from being 4 percent of the electorate to being more like 35. Now, it's actually possible -- for the first time ever in human history -- for political parties to openly embrace cosmopolitan values and win elections; certainly primary and municipal elections, maybe even national elections if you don't push things too far or if you have a recession at your back. And so Democratic elites started campaigning on the things they'd always wanted to, but which had previously been too toxic. And so did center-left parties internationally.

I don't know if that's true, but it's an interesting theory to wrestle with.

I only know of him through youtube videos. Does anybody know Mark Blyth?

20: I like his research. As a person, I'm told he has #MeToo issues.

Adding to Shor's point in 18 -- the quality of college education changed I think between 4 and 35%. Put crudely, the 4% were better educated, possibly smarter on average, and much more realistic about their place in society and how their values weren't widely shared. Most, I'd guess, didn't even want their values widely shared.

16: As already mentioned, looking at Q4 of election year as an explainer of elections is incoherent, because Q4 is only one third over by election day. Also much less than one third of the quarter's economic activity has occurred, since Q4 is driven by Christmas buying on the spending side and year-end bonuses on the wages side.

Also, Q4 2016 (party change) was stronger than Q4 2012 (no party change),

Name dropping anecdata: I took freshman Macroeconomics in Spring 1981. Professor Edward Tufte, who had recently published Political Control of the Economy, guest lectured about how Q4 1980 had incredible 7% annualized GDP (maybe GNP?) in Q4 1980, but it was too late to re-elect Carter. He even hand-drew an impressive mutli-color graph on the blackboard.

Also, this trope of "my friend is telling me this stuff" is getting annoying. That's all for me.

I bet he had nice slides.

Mr. F - I'm going to repeat what Nick said:

I don't think that contradicts his observations.

Because it didn't seem to make an impression after unimaginative said the same thing:

Shor doesn't talk about economic conditions because his interest is election campaigns

The key here is that electioneering is a specific discipline that takes into account conditions as they actually exist. That's what Shor is talking about -- and he's very clear that he's not making policy suggestions. Tim's gripe isn't with Shor, it's with American democracy. (Mine too!)

Part of what makes Shor's piece interesting is that he specifically separates truth and correct policy from selling that policy. (He doesn't blame neoliberalism for defections to Trump, but he thinks it's fine politically to say that.) Tim wants to complain about the product, and to argue that it would be easier to sell a different product. Maybe. But that's not what Shor is talking about.

You're appreciative of Tim's comments because you have given over your thinking entirely to the Pundit's Fallacy: That which you would prefer is good politics. (Hence your absurd suggestion that dropping Biden would be politically wise.) You're going to look for explanations of democratic choices that suit your politics, instead of what's actually going on in elections. Shor is trying to do the opposite: He's explaining how professionals in his particular profession must listen to what the public wants in order to determine what constitutes good politics.

24: It was 1981. There were no slides.

Some teachers used film-based slide machines.

I bet he had nice transparencies for the overhead projector.

In high school, we had a teacher who would use an overhead with a scrolling sheet to lecture on algebra. He constantly licked his finger to erase. Then, at the end of the day, some kid would have to clean the whole scroll.

Today's overwhelming DNC vote on West Bank settlements fits right in, I imagine. Among single issue voters, are there more actual votes to lose from opposing settlements than there are votes to gain from opposing settlements? Is there more to lose in narrative terms one way or the other?

For folks on the minority end of this, it's plenty exasperating. On the other hand, if they can't make the electoral case, then a body focused on electoral considerations isn't going to get out in front of where voters are. Not nationally, anyway. Is that enough to explain the lopsided vote? No, I think a whole lot of folks take a particular side on this.

Lots of Dem friends of mine are very dismissive of platforms, saying they're just Republican fodder. There's a lot of merit to this view: the platform doesn't bind anyone, office holders and candidates do what they want regardless of what organized bodies say. On the other hand, there is a useful function, I think, in recognizing the historically underrepresented. On the whole, though, the messaging that really matters comes from the candidates themselves.

And one can readily imagine Biden telling folks he really didn't want to have to have a discussion of this issue over the next 100 days.

17 and 25: Thanks for helping me respond to Tim. Politicalfootball, I have not fallen prey to the pundit's fallacy, but thank you for your concern.

And one can readily imagine Biden telling folks he really didn't want to have to have a discussion of this issue over the next 100 days.

This brings us back to the original post, in that it asks us to think about what compromises are appropriate in our fallen world.

I am absolutely in the camp that would describe the occupation in dire terms. I suppose I wouldn't call it genocide, but referring to the remaining Palestinian territory as bantustans? Yup. This is apartheid. Israel's policy is repugnant, full stop. And the US has the ability to stop it, and should do so.

I'm not sure, but Charley may somewhat understate the policy relevance of the DNC's position. I do think it has some discernible policy relevance.

And yet ... I think the Dems need to run away from this as an election issue, to the point of damaging the hopes that decent policy will be enacted. I don't know how I would have voted if I had a DNC vote.

Note that this isn't the attitude that Shor is promoting in the linked article. This action by the DNC genuinely implicates the kind of issue that Mr. F's friend wants to talk about: What policy compromises are correct when you consider that such choices have an impact on electability?

I suspect this is a place where the Democrats are wise to be ambivalent on basic human decency.

32 I think DNC is tail, not dog, on this one. It's an indicator, rather than a driver.

Whatever policy a Biden ends up pursuing, if there is a Biden administration, will be driven by a whole range of considerations. I don't think a vote one way or the other by the DNC makes the list of the top 100 of these.

And if one agrees that the platform has limited or no policy relevance, then we really are in Shor territory: what do we want to talk about over the next 100 days.

As I've mentioned before, I was a delegate to our state platform conventions in 2016 and this year. Everything was kind of messed up this year, because you can't do the real work of it on timed zoom calls, and we ended up with some pretty incoherent stuff getting through. (Example, the get rid of cash bail that keeps poor people in jail for minor offenses proposal ended up being have no pretrial detention for anyone ever, period -- rapists, murderers, Californians: no matter, no conviction, no jail time. I think this'll get cleaned up, somehow, in editing.) 2016 was a lot more orderly -- and our senior senator's lead staffer had thoughts to share on some of the issues.

I think DNC is tail, not dog, on this one. It's an indicator, rather than a driver..

I think that's right. But that's a choice. The DNC could help drive a push to decent policy. (Or it could, as an indicator, reflect the existence of a shift toward decency.)

I don't think a vote one way or the other by the DNC makes the list of the top 100 of these.

Yeah, there are complicated interactions here, but on the whole, while I agree the DNC position isn't important, it's clear that I assign it more importance than you do. But yes, one of the key bits of ambiguity here is whether it's important as an indicator or a driver. I'm not sure.

I will say that, on balance, I think the DNC was correct in choosing an objectively repugnant position.

I was going to say that as an individual DNC voter, I would support the DNC's stated position, but paradoxically, that's not true. I don't believe in protest votes as a principle, but I would have cast a protest vote here. On the other hand, if I thought the vote were going to be close, I would have also voted also in favor of decency, on the theory that my fellow voters -- as "indicators" -- were indicating the real possibility of change. Or on the theory that the DNC is capable of promoting change as a "driver".

35 written before reading 34. I agree with 34.1, but I am less comfortable than you are that the DNC position has no meaningful policy relevance.

In general I think both platforms and the DNC are way less important than a lot of politically engaged people think they are.

To be clear, I do agree with 37.

The Republicans aren't even bothering to come up with a new platform this year. They're just reusing the one from 2016.

The best part was that they didn't even delete the stuff about how bad the incumbent was.

If I was a delegate and Joe Biden called me on the phone and asked me to vote his way, I might do it. Otherwise, I'd vote conscience, and I'd presume that if it really was going to be close, that would be an indication that we, as a party, were electorally ready to take a step.

I find myself continually boggling that teo's point in 37 isn't the commonest of common knowledge. I like our DNC delegates well enough, but the idea that they, or people like them from around the country, are actually running the thing is beyond ridiculous. Candidates drive messaging. Parties are vehicles. The ease with which Trump hijacked the one vehicle shows how empty they really are. All through 2016 the punditry kept acting like there were people who could tell Trump to drop out, or draw some red line or other, or pull the plug, or something. People can say stuff, sure. The head of the NRA isn't without influence, and neither are the heads of the main unions. But the party governing bodies? They're not even popes.

The Democratic party is every bit as ripe for takeover, imo, but it's not enough to get the chair of the DNC to your side, or various state functionaries, or, more likely demonize/neutralize them; you have to win over the voters. That's what Trump did.

(Obviously, though, if Mr. F got his wish and Biden decided to drop out after the convention, the DNC would suddenly be unbelievably relevant. With basically no mandate from the voters. If Biden dropped out before the convention, then you have a majority of the delegates with no mandate at all. This is why I think that if Biden decides he needs to drop out for health reasons, he'll do it after the inauguration.)

This is counting your chickens and all that but if/when Biden wins I hope his first international trip will be to NATO HQ in Brussels. He can make a stop in Canada on his way.