David Shor & The Mathematics Of Winning Elections
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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Dominich podcast brought to you by Fox News Podcast. You can check out all of our podcasts at Fox News Podcast dot com. I'm happy to be joining you again today with an interesting interview about the future of the American political system.

We all know that after 2020, there's a very even divide, a narrow divide that we see at the federal level. Republicans performed exceedingly well when it came to state houses, when it came to state legislatures and the governorships across the country. They performed exceedingly well, beating any experts' recommendations or expectations when it came to the House of Representatives. Yet they underperformed when it came to the presidency.

with a much narrower defeat than perhaps the pundits had expected, but still one that left people shaking their heads about how close they had come. Today I'm going to be talking to someone who is on the other side of the Republican political divide. David Shore is a data scientist who has devoted his life to electing a lot of Democrats and electing particularly progressive Democrats.

He's someone who has worked at a number of different jobs, including at Open Labs, a progressive nonprofit. He serves as a senior fellow with the Center of American Progress Action Fund. He worked for many years as a senior data scientist with Civis Analytics in Chicago. He was an advisor to a number of different liberal political action committees and

He's a math prodigy who grew up in Miami, Florida, has a math degree from Florida International University. He actually started his undergraduate degree when he was at the ripe old age of 13. He's a multiple award-winning mathematician, someone who is definitely deep into the polling and data side of things. He's also someone who's very interesting to talk to because of his clarifying perspective on the nature of today's political divides.

He gave an interview recently to New York Magazine's Intelligencer in which he said this, quote, So I think the Trump era has been very good for the Republican Party, even if they now momentarily have to accept this very, very, very thin Democratic trifecta.

Because if these coalition changes are durable, the GOP has a very rosy long-term prospect for dominating America's federal institutions. The question is, can they get all of the good parts of Trumpism without the bad parts? And I don't know the answer to that question.

But when I look at the 2020 election, he says, I see that we ran against the most unpopular Republican ever to run for president. And we ran literally the most popular figure in our party whose last name is not Obama. And we only narrowly won the electoral college. If Biden had done 0.3% worse, Donald Trump would have won reelection with just 48% of the two-party vote.

We can't control what Trump or Republicans do, but we can add states. We can ban partisan redistricting. We can elevate issues that appeal to both college-educated liberals and a lot of working-class conservatives. If we don't, things could get very bleak very fast.

David Shore is one of the few people who I believe really come to these data-centric issues with a level of honesty and respectability, someone who you can appreciate for their perspective, even as you know that they're trying to do something that would elect a particular type of Democrat going forward.

It's an interesting conversation, one that engages in a lot of different issues and in the way that the coalitions were really upended by the rise of Donald Trump on both the Republican and the Democratic side. I hope you will listen and learn from this conversation. Coming up, we'll hear from our guest, David Shore.

Over 25 years ago, on September 29th, 1998, we watched a brainy girl with curly hair drop everything to follow a guy she only kind of knew all the way to college. And so began Felicity. My name is Juliette Littman, and I'm a Felicity superfan.

Join me, Amanda Foreman, who you may know better as Megan, the roommate, and Greg Grunberg, who you may also know as Sean Blundberg, as the three of us revisit our favorite moments from the show and talk to the people who helped shape it. Listen to Dear Felicity on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David Shore, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Pleasure to be here. I want to talk to you about a couple of different things, but first off, I have to start by asking, because I rarely get the opportunity to do this,

you're kind of a math whiz, like really a math whiz in the real sense, as opposed to just being someone who knows a few tricks and can impress their friends. When did that start to be a thing that you were obsessed with? That's a great question. I

I started college when I was 13 and I was a math major, but sometime in middle school, I started really liking math and that's kind of how it started. And then I studied it in undergrad. I tried to do about one year of graduate level math and then decided I wasn't quite smart enough for it. And that's when I switched to politics. In the world of politics, I think that there are very few people who legitimately understand math.

And so it's kind of an impressive skill to have within the space. What made you want to make that jump into politics? Was it just that you felt more passionate about using your tools to achieve certain policy ends? What was it that drew you in that direction?

Yeah, you know, I back and, you know, now I think if you have quantitative skills, there's a lot of different options. Data science is a big thing now. But when I was in back when I was in college, you know, in the mid 2000s, back then, the two options were kind of either academia or finance. And I, I kind of realized early on, I didn't want to do I didn't really want to do

academia. And so I did a little bit of work in finance and then, you know, not to turn anyone here off, but, you know, when Barack Obama ran in 2008, I was, you know, pretty inspired by that. I was 16 and I started like reading, you know, 538. Back then he had a, he was on, he had a first, he was first, he was on Daily Kos and then he had like a little

blog spot under the pseudonym Poblano. And, you know, that really got me into like regression and modeling things. And then I had a blog called Stochastic Democracy that nobody read. And, you know, that kind of got me, you know, because I was still taking math classes, but in my free time, I was kind of running this blog. And that's kind of the direction I went in. In terms of the level of data that we have today about voting patterns and the way that voters behave,

Is it really night and day difference from where things were even a few years ago? In some ways, yes. The methods that are being used today in polling, both in the private sector and Democratic and Republican politics are much, much more sophisticated than they used to be. You know, now there are national voter files that have...

You know, things like vote history. So we actually know who's voted in the past and who hasn't. You know, we know things like party registration. We can tie that to polling. There's very sophisticated modeling, I think, that happens on both sides. But I think the interesting thing, and it's something that's very humbling to me, is that I don't think we've gotten better at it. You know, something I think is really interesting is that, you know, technology is supposed to make things easier or problems easier.

But in public opinion research, you know, as technology has gotten better, response rates have declined. Like with telephone surveys, if you go back to the 1940s, something like 80% of people would answer phone surveys. And, you know, the reason is that the world used to be a lot more boring. You know, you'd have someone sitting around at home, there was no television, there was, you know, maybe you had some radio, and they'd get a phone call. And then they'd say, Oh, oh, my God, a

public opinion researcher wants to know my opinions on contemporary events. And then they would, you know, they'd stop what they were doing and answer. And now telephone surveys have closer to a 1% response rate. And, you know, the problem is that this 1% is very non-random, you know, in a lot of different ways, you know, people who answer surveys, you know, have a lot more trust in institutions. And, you know, we think this is one of the big reasons why polling was wrong in 2016. You know, they're much more politically engaged, something like 90% of people who answer phone surveys vote, you

And there's a bunch of other ways. You know, obviously, they're whiter, they're richer, they're older. There's a whole host of things. And so as that's happened, the industry has really had to become much more sophisticated because in order to kind of correct for how weird survey takers are. And that's been the big challenge. You know, I think I've been...

you know, doing polling and election forecasting since 2012. And I feel like the sophistication of the kind of work we do has increased tremendously. Like I think in terms of like pure computational flops, you know, we use maybe like a hundred orders of magnets, sorry, like a hundred or a thousand times more computing power than we did in 2012, but our results haven't gotten more accurate. And so it's really this treadmill because, you know, now there's this market for attention and time

And it's much harder to get people to answer surveys. - There's of course, a lot of skepticism out there about polling generally, particularly given the way that people interpret them versus the outcomes that they see.

What is what's right about that impulse among American citizens and what's wrong in terms of their analysis and takeaways when they feel like polls are missing so often? Yeah. You know, I think an important thing to remember about polling in 2020 was an unusually bad year for polling and 2016 was, I think,

a relatively bad year for polling. I think the important thing to remember though is that polling has never been super accurate. I don't really remember 1996, but obviously Dole ended up considerably outperforming his polling there. And so these kind of misses happen all the time. The thing that's really changed that I think is underappreciated in the discussion is that elections are a lot closer

than they used to be. If you look over the history of American democracy and you look at the list of like the top 10 closest elections, something like six or seven of them have been in the last 30 years. And so that's something that, that's like a big change. You know, it used to be that there were really big blowouts one way or the other, you know, with Reagan or, you know, with LBJ and that just doesn't happen anymore.

because the country is a lot more polarized. And so that means that if you're off by two or 3%, that suddenly really matters a lot more than it used to. But, you know, that said, I think people are right to be skeptical of polling. I think that there are a lot of real ways in which public opinion research under, you know, misstates public opinion, you know, that's true for

that's true for vote vote share who wins and who loses you know obviously Donald Trump did a lot better than a lot of people expected but it's it's really true across a host of issues both for measurement reason you know for both for statistical reasons you know as I said before people who when you look at

polling on lockdowns, for example, you know, the people who are answering surveys, and we think this is the big reason polls were wrong in 2020, are generally people who are home. You know, we can see in cell phone mobility data that Republicans, you know, that Democrats stayed home and spent a much larger fraction of their time home than Republicans did over the last year, for better or for worse. And that means that all of these surveys asking people about attitudes toward vaccines or lockdowns, you know, capture these people who are

are generally respecting the lockdowns. There are a lot of other things too. One of my favorite examples is in my last employer, we did a lot of polling on Common Core. And one of the big fights we had with some of the other vendors is that when groups like Gallup pulled Common Core,

They found that something like 80% of the public had an opinion on Common Core. And I personally, as someone who worked in democratic politics, did not know what Common Core was at that time. And so like, clearly, that's totally wrong. You know, and we did it when we tried to, you know, we tried to over overrepresent people who don't vote very often and all of that, you know, we found that almost the majority of people had no idea what Common Core was. And even that was probably an over an underestimate.

And I think the other piece, which I think your audience will be very receptive to, is just that I think that one of the big problems in the polling industry is that I think that most of the people who work in polling and most of the people who do public opinion research are liberals, not out of anything nefarious, but highly educated professionals run most institutions and they tend to be pretty liberal.

And I think social scientists, myself included, tend to be very liberal. And so one of the end results of this is when we write questions, even if we're not consciously doing it, our ideology kind of

gets embedded in how we ask things. And so I think when you look at issue polling, you know, you can come away with this idea that people agree with Democrats on literally everything. And that's clearly not true. You know, Democrats would win every election if that was true, and it's not. And so, you know, I think that it's very reasonable for people to be skeptical of the public opinion, you know, public opinion research in the industry,

Even, you know, I'm part of it and I'm part of this problem. But I think there's a lot of good reasons to be skeptical. If there was one question that you could actually ask and know the answer to constantly running through, you know, each election cycle, what would you ask? If you could just wave your magic wand and know the answer to what people thought about one particular thing.

I mean, the answer is ideology, I think. That's actually, and I know it's a little bit of a cheat, but one of the things that made polling in 2020 so hard, and which makes fixing some of the problems that came up in 2020 so hard, was that the...

The causal factor for what made the polls wrong was that liberals, mostly white liberals specifically, really took lockdown measures very seriously. And as a result, they started taking surveys at an enormous amount. You know, we see this like with our polls. We joined back to voter file data and we can see like what percentage of people who answer our surveys were registered Democrats. And it shot up.

around March and it stayed at this elevated level. And it's a really hard thing because you can't control for that with age or education or even questions like social trust because the actual problem is ideology. And I guess the other thing I'd say

is, you know, looking at polling, you know, the biggest problem is that the people who are answering surveys are not the same as the people who are. And that means that, uh, across a whole range of issues. And I think this is like the central problem in polling. You know, people like to talk about cell phones or they like to talk about, you know, shy Trump voters, they're pushing undecideds, but the single reason why polls are usually wrong, you know, isn't turnout. It isn't how people are answering. It isn't lying. It's that, uh,

There are really big shifts in who answers these surveys at any given time. And you need to control for a lot of factors. And there's a lot of stuff that we've looked at, you know, things like social trust, things like, you know, attitudes toward the Bible, things like whether or not you've ever traveled abroad. And, you know, unfortunately, you know, I mean, I'm not going to make an order of statement here, but the census doesn't ask any of these things.

And so it's a very hard challenge to figure out what these things actually are. One other fun thing I'd say is that in Sweden, this could never happen here, but in Sweden, the census actually asks partisanship once every six months. And so they publish like a poll of everyone in the country. And it's kind of a funny thing. I'm not saying we should do that, but sometimes as a public opinion researcher, I wish we did.

You gave this fascinating interview to New York Magazine, to Intelligencer, that I think prompted a lot of discussion. I certainly heard about it from a number of different politically engaged people across the spectrum ideologically.

And you were looking at a number of different things, but one thing in particular that I'd like you to speak to is about the voters who changed their minds between 2016 and 2020 and what you saw in terms of the patterns and the shifts that were happening between each party. Yeah, that's a great question. So just to, I'll just to walk through, you know, some of the high level changes that we saw, you know, that I talked about our articles in the article.

is going through subgroups, non-college whites seem like they basically didn't change very much. They might have increased by something like half a point to 1%. College educated whites, it seems swung toward Democrats by something like six or 7%. This increase in education polarization is not something that polls saw coming. Generally, most of the public

polls really thought that non-college whites would swing more than college whites and the gap would decrease when actually the gap substantially increased. And, you know, this led to a large increase also in the structural advantage for Republicans in the electoral college. You know, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton would have needed 51.6 percent of the two party vote in order to win. She got 51.1. Joe Biden got 52.3. But if he had gotten 52 percent,

than he likely would have lost. And so the, you know, this bias increased. Looking at non-white voters, it seems like African Americans swung about 2% against Democrats, which is a, you know, a continuation of trends that we saw in both 2018 and 2016.

And with Hispanic voters, which I think is what people have been talking about the most, it seems like there was something like a 7% swing toward Republicans among Hispanic voters, with that swing being particularly large in Florida, where it was about 14%. And then with Asians, it's a little different.

Tricky to know. Not all of the data is in yet. You want precinct data in California before you say anything. But it does really seem like there probably was a substantial shift on the order of something like 5% among Asian Americans with a particularly large shift among Vietnamese Americans. It's very clear if you look at the Vietnamese American neighborhoods that, you know, that happened.

What are the different issues that drove this shift to the degree that you can know or to the degree that you can make an intelligent guess? Yeah, you know, I want to stress it's very hard to know these things because the surveys were wrong. And so we really have to, it's a tricky thing because you can look at the precinct results, but the precinct results, you know, you can't ask, you know, you can't ask precincts why they did what they did. And you can't ask people, even if the surveys, you know, had a lot of biases. I'd say there's two big challenges.

two big patterns that really jumped out to me with respect to the Hispanic vote. You know, the first is that among

Among Hispanic precincts, precincts that had really large, had disproportionate Latin American ancestry, particularly people from Colombia and Venezuela, swung much more toward Republicans than other Hispanic precincts. One example I like to talk about is Doral in Miami. It's actually very close to where I went to college at FIU. And it went 40 points toward Clinton and Trump won it by 10 points. And I think that

When you look at surveys, something that's really clear is that, you know, even relative to Puerto Ricans or people from Mexico, people from Latin America are much more, are much less favorable toward socialism as a label, you know, particularly in Colombia and particularly in Venezuela and Hispanics writ large. And I think that's because, you know, socialism means something very different to them, you know, to Latinos.

you know, white liberals like myself, you know, we talk about socialism, we think of Sweden, you know, we think of Germany, you know, all of these nice places. But if you're from Venezuela or you're from Columbia, you know, you're thinking about Maduro, you're thinking about FARC paramilitaries who terrorized Columbia for decades.

And so I think that there is a lot of aversion to that kind of thinking. And then the other pattern is, you know, in surveys that we've done, we did a large post-election survey after the election of Hispanic voters. And we kind of looked at what were the predictors of switching from Clinton to Trump. And one of the big predictors was attitudes toward crime, attitudes toward public safety, attitudes toward policing. And then, you know, on top of that,

You know, when you look by gender in these surveys, Hispanic women trended more toward Trump than Hispanic men, which I think is contrary to a lot of the narratives people talk about. People like to talk about this inherent machismo. But I think it makes sense in the context of the, you know, the general polling finding that women are a lot more concerned about it.

crime than men are, I think for a lot of very natural reasons. And so I think that this really does paint a narrative that, paint a picture that the increase in salience and policing and crime, this

Crime is generally an issue that benefits Republicans and people trust Republicans more on crime than they trust Democrats. And that's an age old thing. It's true here. It's true in other countries around the world that, you know, people trust the center right more on crime than the center left. And I think on the police and, you know, a lot of the narratives around that probably played a pretty, pretty

pretty big role. And also just subjectively, you know, I grew up in Miami. I looked at my Facebook feed and it makes a lot of intuitive sense to me. What is this importation of white liberals doing to the Democratic Party and to its coalition? And how is it affecting the shift in terms of their policy priorities list as you see it?

Yeah, that's a great question. So there's a long-term trend that's been true in Democratic politics, that the party, liberals have become an increasingly large percentage of the party, of the Democratic primary electorate. Even if you go back 10 years ago, liberals were not a majority of Democratic primary voters, and now they are. As this education realignment has happened of college-educated voters, you know, entering the Democratic Party and non-college-educated voters,

voters leaving the Democratic Party, this has really shifted the internal balance of power. And I think that there's an additional dynamic on top of that, which is that, you know, as I said before, college educated voters have wildly disproportionate cultural power, you know, they donate more, they talk, they show up to events more, they're much more likely to have their views heard on the media. And so, you know, that means that if the

Democratic Party becomes 1%, you know, if the electorate becomes 1% more college educated, in terms of this share of voice, it has a larger than 1% effect. And so I think that one of the big trends of the last 10 years is that kind of younger college educated voters have had a really disproportionate effect on the brand of the Democratic Party. You

White college educated people under the age of 34 are only 5% of the American electorate, but they're near a majority of people who work in democratic politics, who write about politics and all of these other metrics. And I think that, you know, as that's happened, that's really turned off, you know, working class white people, but also I think it's turned off working class non-white people.

You know, something I talk about in my article is ideological polarization. You know, among white people, politics has been polarized by ideology for a long time. You know, roughly 80%-- sorry, roughly 90% of white liberals vote for Democrats and roughly 80% of white conservatives vote for Republicans. But among non-white voters, that historically wasn't true.

Democrats used to win Hispanic conservatives by pretty large margins. And there was some polling that came out this week that showed that Trump won Hispanic conservatives. There was something like a 20 to 30 point swing from 2016 to 2020. And I think that shows a real problem. Most of the country is not liberal. Maybe a large fraction of the country agrees with liberals on a variety of economic issues. But if you

build a brand for a political party around liberalism, then that is going to turn off the majority of the country that isn't liberal, the vast majority of the country that isn't liberal. On what issues for each party, Democrats and Republicans, is their elite, is the party elite leadership and powerful donors and the like most out of step with the people who actually elect those politicians?

You know, I'm glad you asked this with respect to both parties. There was this really great study, I think David Brockman was involved in it, that basically did a survey of high dollar donors. And you can use that, I think, as a good proxy for, you know, the kind of people who work in both sets of campaigns. And, you know, what you could see is

is that Democratic donors are to the left of the median Democrat on both economic and social issues and, you know, cosmopolitan issues like immigration. But the gap is much larger for social issues and for cultural issues than it is for economic issues. On the Republican side, you know, as I'm sure a lot of conservative activists are very frustrated about,

On economic issues, the median donor is to the right of the median Republican. But on cosmopolitan issues, they're to the left of the median Republican. But I think there's a real asymmetry here, which is that this bias pushes Democrats away from the median voter.

But the Republicans, it pushes them toward the median voter. And so I think that creates a real electoral asymmetry. There was another study that did a survey, and I was involved in this in 2012, of people who worked on the Obama campaign and then also did a survey of undecided voters. And what you could see is that

Obviously, people who work in the Obama campaign overwhelmingly identify as very liberal and undecided voters don't. But one thing I thought was really interesting was that most people who work in democratic politics, something like a third to 40 percent of them listed income inequality as the single greatest thing that they cared about. And that's true for me. That's why I got into democratic politics. That's why I do what I do. But undecided voters largely didn't care.

about income inequality. Yeah, it doesn't mean they don't care about economic issues, but they care about things like gas prices or wages or unemployment. And I think it just really highlights this tension. In democratic politics, people like to say, we shouldn't communicate, we talk too much about issues, we're too wonky, we need to talk about our values.

But I think the reality is that the median voter doesn't share our values. If they did, they'd be liberals. And so you have to actually talk about concrete ways that you want to help them if you want to win. If you focus just on, you know, our vision of a different society, you're either people either aren't going to understand us or they're going to be turned off.

After the 2012 election, the GOP obviously conducted an autopsy for the party, a look back and a report on what they felt that they had gotten wrong. And a big part of that autopsy was a push on immigration policy that they believed they needed to soften their message on that issue in order to win Hispanic voters and the like. And then along comes Donald Trump, who basically does everything that the autopsy does.

says not to do when it comes to a host of issues, but particularly that one. Why did the autopsy get things so wrong in terms of the immigration issue? And what does, how does immigration play a role in determining these outcomes when it comes to Hispanic voters? So,

What I'll say is I like to just ground this in numbers. Barack Obama got about 52% of the two-party vote in 2012, and Hillary Clinton got 51.1. And in any other country or electoral system, that would have been enough for Democrats to hold power. But what changed?

was that the electoral college went from being about one point biased in favor of Democrats. Barack Obama could have gotten 49.5% of the vote and he still probably would have won. There's a blue wall, but he did well enough to win in places like Virginia and Colorado.

But in 2016, there was a really large shift in the bias of the Electoral College. It went from being about a point bias in favor of Democrats to being about four points bias in favor of Republicans. And, you know, the reason why that happened is that there was...

Democrats in 2016 did about 10% worse among non-college whites and, you know, correspondingly better with college whites than in 2012. And white voters without a college degree, you know, disproportionately live in large Midwestern states that control the electoral college.

And so that was something that I personally didn't see coming. It became clear as we got closer to the election, but one year out, this was not something that occurred to me. And I think that that's been the big benefit. Donald Trump is very unpopular, though I think the polls did underestimate his approval rating. I think if you look at the exit polls, he ended up closer to 47 as opposed to like the 42 that people thought. But he made up for it by,

increasing, you know, the structural advantage that Republicans had in our institutions. And, you know, this is clear in the electoral college, but actually the effect was much larger in the Senate because rural areas have many more non-college educated whites than urban areas. There's a lot of sorting that happens on education lines. And that's why in 2018, when even though Democrats got 54% of the vote nationally, they lost two Senate seats.

And so as long as this education realignment that Donald Trump engineered really created a lot of durable advantages for Republicans. You know, the flip side is that even with those advantages, it's hard to win elections if you're getting, you know, 40, 47 percent of the vote. But these advantages are really real. And it's something, you know, personally, as a Democrat, it's something I'm very worried about.

And, you know, I think when you look with Hispanic voters, I think that a lot of people on both the Democratic and Republican side really assumed or wanted to believe that if you took a hard populist line on immigration, that it would cost you substantial support among non-whites.

And I think it's clear that that's not true. You know, it wasn't true in 2016. And it's definitely not true in 2020, though I think Trump did soften some of his immigration rhetoric ahead of 2020. And I think that this gets to this real point, which is that I think that a lot of

educated professional white professionals on both sides of the aisle, Democratic and Republican, really essentialize non-white voters. And this has been a big challenge in my career, where a lot of people will say, oh, you know, we want to win women, so let's talk about reproductive choice, or, oh, let's, we want to win Hispanics, let's talk about immigration. And, you know, the reality is that even though Hispanics are more liberal on immigration than the public overall, they are not

overwhelmingly liberal on immigration. When Pew did a study in 2015, only something like 54% of Hispanics said that they wanted the three options for undocumented workers was deport them all, give them legal status but not citizenship or give them citizenship. And only 54% of them picked citizenship. The reality is that a large fraction of Hispanics have conservative views on immigration. And more importantly than that,

Survey after survey shows that immigration is not the top issue for the vast, vast majority of Hispanic voters. I think in one of the surveys we did, only 4% of Hispanic voters listed immigration as their top issue. And so I think that, you know, when it comes to both parties trying to appeal to different groups, whether it's women or non-white voters or anything, it's really important not to essentialize them. You know, like in test after test that we've done,

the best message to win over Hispanic voters is to talk about schools, you know, and it's something that makes a lot of sense. And if you don't treat people as people, then they aren't going to vote for you or a lot of them won't vote for you. One thing that I wanted to ask you about is that quadrant thing that I think everybody's seen by this point.

where it is basically a way for people online to point out how overrepresented libertarians are within the conversation, given how few of them actually exist in America. As someone who is not just a libertarian, but ironically, I am a registered libertarian, which seems very un-libertarian. I'm curious about that quadrant sort of presentation.

And how accurate you think it truly is. And also, basically, what why do you think it is that libertarians have such an outsized voice within, you know, right of center politics in particular, given how little how few of them there seem to actually be within the country?

Yeah, it's another great question. I keep saying that. A lot of great questions here. Something I like to talk about is that in politics, we talk a lot about ideological coherence.

I think one of the great successes of Donald Trump is, and I think an underrated aspect of his candidacy was first in the 2016 Republican primary, his base was moderates and actually the group he did best among were former Democrats, people who are registered Democrats. We did a citizen when I was there, we did a great thing with the New York Times about this. And when you flash forward to the actual general election,

He was rated substantially more as substantially more moderate in sort of by survey takers than Hillary Clinton. And actually, he was rated as one of the most moderate Republicans to ever run for office. And, you know, I think the key to this kind of success was that he did something that most people who professionally work in politics don't want to do is I think on every issue, he kind of took the most popular thing and he went with it, even if they weren't

ideologically coherent with each other. He said, I'm not going to cut social security. I'm not going to cut Medicare. And also I want there to be less immigration. And that's a view that an enormous number of Americans hold, but very few college educated voters hold. And so when we talk about ideological coherence, you know, ideology is almost tautologically defined as what educated people believe that among very educated people,

You have, you know, libertarians, uh, libertarian conservatives on one side who want smaller government and you have kind of very liberal, um, uh, left-wing people on the other side and they, they fight with each other, but it's a, that's, uh,

uh, a political argument that only happens among, among the most educated segments of the population. You know, most working class people, uh, have relatively conservative views on social issues, you know, for a lot of, a lot of reasons, you know, religion is a big one, um, uh, that generally speaking, you know, uh, educated people are much more secular, um, than working class people. Um, but there are, even when you control for that, you know, there's other reasons too. Like if you look at opinions toward, uh,

And I think if you look at other factors, one of my favorite is social trust, which I talked about before. Generally speaking, highly educated people have much more social trust. They're much more likely to say people can be trusted. They're much more likely to trust institutions. And then working class people. And I think another interesting thing, and I think that this really highlights why is it that both libertarianism and leftism is popular among people

educated people is this general idea around positive some change. There have been really interesting behavioral economics experiments where they have people play iterated prisoners' dilemmas and something that we see

is that educated people are much, much more supportive. They really believe in this idea of positive sum change. And that manifests in different ways by ideology. You know, libertarians believe that any mutually beneficial transaction must be welfare improving. And leftists believe that, you know, everyone...

we can all come together and make a government program and make everybody better. But there's really like a lot of trust in this idea for positive change. And I think that that's because educated people really live pretty blessed lives, you know, full of mutually, like every interaction I've had with an institution, I've been made better off and they've been better off.

But I think that working class people, their lives aren't like that. I think that they constantly get screwed all the time by everyone they interact with. And that's not an ideological claim, whether it's the government or whether it's employers or whether it's people in their neighborhood. I'm curious if your opinion on that is that a lot of it has to do with the differences in how we interact with systems, whether either cultural or government or within a workplace or something along those lines, that basically

more highly educated people tend to interact with systems that are about, you know, only to the degree that they have to basically. And whereas a lot of working class people end up in systems

that they have to navigate in order to get either some benefit or to have some outcome or, you know, that it seems a lot more like the institution is against them as opposed to trying to serve their needs, you know, treating you like a customer or something along those lines.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think a big part of it is that, you know, educated, educated people, you know, come into the world with a lot more power, they have a lot more social capital, they have a lot more options. And I think that, you know, just something I think about a lot is that, you know, if you look at like,

working class jobs or retail settings, it really is a very zero sum thing. If you're running a Walgreens, you know, there's not, it's a very low margin business. There isn't very much profit. And there really is this zero sum conflict between how much the managers make or how much the company makes and how much you make in a way that isn't true if you have a white collar job.

And, you know, I think that there's a lot of deep reasons. And I think one of the things you brought up is very real. But I think it makes it makes working class people much more skeptical of people on both the left and the right when they talk about how wonderful these systems, these abstract systems can be. And I think that that really that really turns people's

working class people off, both from socialism, particularly the kind of socialism that's become more popular over the last 20 years. You know, something that I think is really interesting is just that across the Western world, you know, leftism, like men and working classes,

used to be much more in favor of left-wing parties. And I think that back then, they had a very center-left parties really talked about things in terms of us versus them mentality of class warfare, us against the bosses. And now we've really switched. And this is,

you know, probably been electorally beneficial on that. But now we talk, the center left talks about things very differently. You know, they talk about it, they talk about things in aspirational terms, you know, we were all in this together. And that's something that I think is a harder sell from working class voters than, you know, what we were saying before. I am really curious as to your opinion about the diminution of

the conservative Democrat. They were everywhere in the 90s when I was growing up and I remember meeting and interviewing Virgil Gude and his people who were in that kind of space of occupying a populist, socially conservative, but kind of pro-bigger government programs, pro-more entitlement spending, pro-military type position.

What has happened culturally in terms of the sort between the parties that really has made the kind of conservative Democrat wing of the party shrink to an extremely tiny portion? Yeah, I mean, most most of them have become Republicans, including, you know, Virgil Good, as you said. But.

But it's a real, there's been a lot of ideological sorting. I think there's kind of two trends here. Is that the first is that since the 1980s, way fewer people identify as moderate than they used to. And then the other piece is that the correlation between ideology and voting used to be much lower. You know, I mentioned that we get, that Democrats get 20% of white conservatives. But if you go back to the,

you know, 70s or 80s, that number was much higher. It used to be that there were tons of liberal Republicans and tons of conservative Democrats. And, you know, I think that it's an interesting question of like, why did these groups disappear? And I think the biggest reason

Like the biggest reason why this has happened is that education levels have increased a lot. I think this is a really underrated trend, you know, to understand American politics. If you go back to the 1940s, only 4% of voters had a college degree.

Flash forward to 2020, and that number is something like 40%. And so this is an absolutely massive shift. If you go back to the 1940s, 80% of people hadn't even graduated high school. And now that number is 7%, and that 7% is mostly immigrants. And so I think it's a...

That really has changed what's possible. I think it's still true that conservative Democrats would do very well in elections. But if you go back to the 1970s, you Democrats didn't have the choice of running liberals. You know, something I like to joke about is that George McGovern was Hillary Clinton running in 1972.

And the demographics were very different back then. And she lost in a landslide. He lost in a landslide. But what's very funny is if you look at this 1972 results, they weren't really very correlated with 1968 or 1976. But they do show a remarkable similarity to the modern demographic map of really underperforming in Appalachia, doing unusually well with professionals. And so...

You know, the story I like to tell is that both the Democratic and Republican Party and the center left and center right, broadly speaking across the world, after World War II were dominated by highly educated, cosmopolitan professionals. They were a very small fraction of the electorate, but they still ran everything.

because that's how institutions work. But they both knew that they couldn't run on cosmopolitan values because they would lose. And so they kind of had this ideological cartel that to be clear was bolstered by the fact that there were only three or four media channels. And they made politics be about

you know, how high should taxes be or what should the proper role of government be. But as the educated share of the electorate rose, you know, you started to reach a point where you could win a Democratic primary in New York or a governorship of California or even, you know, the presidency if there's a recession at your back. And, you know,

Democrats, once they had that option, you know, these like highly educated people in the Democratic Party, they always wanted to run these kind of campaigns. And once they had the option to do so and not face near certain laws, they started to do it. And I think the other interesting thing is that I think the Republican Party and the center right in general didn't want this to happen.

I don't think they wanted education polarization to happen. They were really dragged into this, you know, for the basic reason that as Democrats moved to the left on, you know, some of these social and cultural issues, this really created a lot of space. And it was gradual, you know, at first, but Donald Trump was the first person to really just

sees it. I think that, you know, I think other people, if they had tried, they probably wouldn't have gotten the media attention, and they would have lost a lot of friends. But I think it took someone like Donald Trump to, you know, actually, actually do it, because he didn't care about any of those things. And he had a microphone.

So let's let's finish with some conversation about the upcoming midterm elections. Obviously, you are someone who works to get Democrats elected, but you're also sounding a significant note of warning about what the party is facing in the midterms.

How do you see the state of play? And what is the real factor here in terms of giving Democrats the ability to win in an environment in which a lot of people expect Republicans to at the very least take the House?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's two numbers I'd like to bring up here, which is, you know, in 2008, Democrats had 60 seats in the Senate and an overwhelming House majority. They still lost. And now we have a much, much, much smaller, you know, 50 Senate seats and a very small House majority. Something I like to say about midterms is that midterms are usually very predictable, right?

You know, on average, the party out of power gets about 47% of the vote. And that's been pretty steady. You know, some cycles are worse than others and some are better. You know, 2002 was a good cycle for Republicans due to 9-11. But for the most part, midterms are usually very bad. The party that's held the presidency has lost seats something like...

something like 25 out of the 28 times in the last 100 years. That number is slightly off, but that's like something that's roughly the proportion. And so that means that going into this, Democrats are in a pretty bad position. Like if we just do business as usual,

then we're going to lose an enormous number of House seats and a couple of Senate seats and then not and then go into 2024 in a very weak position just because there are an enormous number of Democrats who are in seats that Trump either won or that are more Republican in the country overall. And so that's

Yeah, I don't know. I think that there are headwinds in the other direction. You know, you can't always project a straight line into the future, you know, and expect it to go forward. I think that, you know, one thing I find very interesting is that, you know, Biden's approval rating has not dropped over the last month, which is very unusual. That's literally never happened as far as I can tell. And so I think you can tell a story that, you know, maybe now that

Now that voters, now that Democrats have a higher fraction of college educated voters than they used to, that they'll have some kind of advantage from a turnout perspective in midterms. You know, we saw this in 2017 where Democrats did better and kind of the lower turnout specials while Republicans did better in relative terms and the higher turnout specials.

And I also think you can tell a story that maybe polarization means that there isn't going to be this like inexorable decline that's happened for every other president before then. But the flip side is that, you know, most of the time when people say this time is different, they're wrong. So I think on balance, if I was a Republican, I would be relatively optimistic. I hope I'm wrong. One question about that before we wrap up. It does seem to me that a big part

question mark here is the culture war issues that early in his presidency, Biden has kind of waded into with some of these executive orders and the like. He was someone who was obviously branded incorrectly by President Trump as on the campaign trail as being, you know, an economic socialist or something like that, you know, something that

No one really thinks of when they think of Joe Biden. But one thing that I do think kind of received less attention was that his cultural agenda is very much of a piece with the sort of the elite liberal set. And that's something that is at odds with a lot of his reputation for moderation and the like.

Do you see a potential here for this midterm election to, assuming that there's not some kind of economic crash and things continue to kind of improve within that space, become kind of a culture war election? And if so, does that bode poorly or well for Democrats?

- You know, and I'll try to be quick, but I think that both parties have different strengths. You know, people generally trust Republicans on the economy. They trust the Republicans on law and order. They trust Republicans on issues like immigration and guns. And they trust Democrats on issues like helping the middle class, though less than they used to be, you know, making things more fair, making healthcare more affordable.

And the job of Democrats, roughly speaking, should be to make sure that they focus their agenda on the good parts. And if they don't do that, then I think it will be something that's really hard for them. The two things that really trip up

Democratic incumbents are one, trying to pass, I mean, this is actually just true for all presidents, trying to pass an unpopular healthcare bill. Bad idea. You know, I think something that's really funny about George Bush is, you know, 2002 was probably mostly about 9-11, but he is the only president who has not tried to pass an unpopular healthcare bill, I think, in the line, since Ronald Reagan. And it was, he decided to pass a popular healthcare bill. He probably should have tried that in 2010.

You know, and and I think Joe Biden's not going to do that. I think the big question is so far his legislative agenda has been focused on covid relief. And that's something that's very popular. And if he decides to keep that focus, stay on infrastructure, stay on jobs, then I think that works to his benefit.

Whether or not he can overcome historical gravity is not something I know right now. But there are a lot of people in the Democratic Party who want him to shift focus to some of the more controversial objectives. And, you know, the main thing that I try to say is that, you know, we really face a very uphill battle. If we don't stick to doing very popular things that people agree with us on, it'll be very hard to win.

David Shore, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Thank you so much. So that was an interesting conversation with David Shore. I hope that you all gained some insight from it. And I certainly appreciate him being willing to sit down and talk for such length with someone who politically is very much not aligned with his views on a lot of different issues. I wanted to talk for a moment about something that is of interest to me and that I've been reading a lot about in the last week.

It's something that you can read about in a couple of articles. One at the Wall Street Journal by Ben Cohen called The Whales of NBA Top Shot Made a Fortune Buying LeBron Highlights. They were early to the hottest NFT market and their collections are now worth millions of dollars. And then another piece at

Wired Magazine by Kate Nibbs, the next frontier of the NFT gold rush, your tweets. Crypto art is huge right now and it's moving far beyond digital images. So what the heck are they even talking about?

What they're talking about is something called non fungible tokens. And the way that I would try to describe this to somebody who's not that interested in blockchain or crypto or anything like that is that it's the equivalent of a limited edition baseball card or a limited edition photo print where you can own the only authentic original edition of a particular thing.

However, as this source has sort of shifted to looking at the digital market versus something that is tangible that you can hold in your hand or that you can put in a frame on your wall, we've seen just a ridiculous explosion in the level of value that's being placed.

on these different items. There's incredible, you know, millions of dollars to be made. An artist named Beeple recently sold a single NFT for 6.6 million. And in the sports world, you've seen this situation take over when it comes to NBA digital highlight reels, which have, you know, basically take a LeBron dunk, take a Giannis move, take, you know, any kind of

Russell Westbrook, you know, fast breakaway type of thing. And you can make a ton of money by selling them or by investing in them and then praying that they have and gain value. This is something that is going to stretch within the meme world as well. People who are trying to own the original edition of a meme that you can then sell and trade. It's all kind of ridiculous. And to be honest, I think that this is something that

feels a little bit more like a fad. It has more of an appeal to, say, paying someone real money for World of Warcraft gold or something along those lines. Or if for our younger folks or people who had young kids, it has kind of a familiarity to the neopet economy. The idea that you would have actual money being spent on things that only have value within the digital space.

But I wanted to try it out for myself. So this week I sent some Ethereum crypto, which had the value of $69.

as a nice way to try to buy a tweet that I held in high esteem from Logan Hall, a fellow at the Daily Caller who you can follow on Twitter at Logan Clark Hall. On March 15th, 2019, he sent out this tweet in response to Speaker Pelosi's comment that it's really important to lower the voting age to 16.

He said,

At current count, it has more than 228,000 likes and 41,000 retweets. To me, this is certainly a valuable tweet, and I wanted to buy it from Logan in its original autographed form. He had to admit to me he has no idea how to use crypto, and so he didn't know how to accept the payment, though he was happy to consider printing it up, signing it, and giving it to me for free.

So I don't know if these new NFTs and the way that they're going to work are going to be around for a while or if they're just going to be another ridiculous fad. But I will say to the respect of someone like David Shore,

A progressive who argues frequently that the whole capitalist system is something that needs to be questioned in certain ways. This does seem like the kind of ridiculous thing that presages a reassessment of what we can actually achieve within a capitalist economy. It seems very, very silly to me. But then there are markets in everything and value is assigned by the consumer.

When we look at these issues going forward, whether it be economic, political, or in the sense of last week's podcast, racial and social, I want you all to appreciate that here in this conversation,

I'm trying to bring in a number of different voices who will weigh in on things from a different perspective. Maybe something that you might have heard about but never have gotten the ability to see in an in-depth way. We're going to continue to try to do that with this podcast going forward.

Thank you for listening to the Ben Domenech podcast on the Fox News Podcast Network. For more of this podcast series, you can go to foxnewspodcast.com and please rate and review this one wherever you download your podcasts. We'll be back next week with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.

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