Here are some terrific and dead on nuggets from David Shor in a recent interview with British journalist Freddie Sayers:
"College educated people have taken over the branding and issue prioritisation of the Democratic Party, at the expense of working class white people who were in the party and working class non-white people who are in the party, and that’s driving people away. That’s really dangerous. Because in the Democratic Party, if you don’t have non-white conservatives, and you’re just a party of educated, white liberals, that gets you to 25%-30% of the vote....
White people with a college degree who are under the age of 34 are less than 5% of the electorate, but they are literally a majority of people who work in politics…so I think it’s very easy for us to develop an inflated sense of how progressive the electorate is or how much people share our values....
If you look at how Bill Clinton or how Barack Obama talked, they spoke very differently compared to Democratic politicians. They use smaller words; they talked about different topics. We should go back to that. Because at the end of the day, the median voter is a 50-year-old without a college degree. And that means that every time you open your mouth, you should say, ‘is this something that a 50-year-old without a college degree will find compelling? Is it something that they’ll understand?’ And if not, you shouldn’t say it....
For a lot of the Democratic Party, persuasion has become a dirty word…But the reality of the numbers is if you go and you ask a series of issue-questions on things like abortion, or taxes or whatever, only about 15% of the population agrees down the line with Democrats on every issue. The vast majority of people who vote for Democrats hold at least one major conservative policy position, whether it’s on taxes, whether it’s on social issues…It’s essential that we reverse education, polarisation, and win back a lot of these Obama-Trump voters who have turned against the party...
What’s funny about defund the police is that almost every black elected official in the country did not support defunding the police because younger African Americans and especially Hispanics do not support defunding the police. But it still went up to the highest levels of journalism and advocacy discourse, because it was something that young, very affluent, white Leftists liked. And I think that’s cultural imperialism. We can’t let 1% of the population dictate what one of the major parties in the US thinks...
Our [liberal] values are actually strange and foreign to swing voters. If they shared our values, they wouldn’t be swing voters — they would be liberals. So the only reason people ever supported us is because we talked about non-polarising issues that appealed to normal people who didn’t share the commitments to solidarity and egalitarianism that activists had. We’ve lost that thread and…that’s turning a lot of people off."
In wish to, in Axios-speak, "go deeper", I strongly recommend Matt Yglesias' recent interview with Shor on The Weeds. Really excellent.
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