Shor Lines: My Response to David Shor's Analysis of the 2024 Election

When I was making final revisions for Compact on an article entitled "The Emerging Democratic Minority," my editor suggested I add a comment on Ezra Klein's interview with polling analyst David Shor about the 2024 election. I read the interview and decided that I didn't have anything I could say in a sentence or two. Here are my longer reflections.

Shor is one of the best analysts of American politics. I like what he says about the turn to the Republicans of young voters. I had written about it myself ("Where Have All the Young Democrats Gone?"), but he has more extensive polling at hand, and makes a useful distinction between the young and very young (18-24), who have moved even more dramatically away from the Democrats.

He also has interesting observations about immigrant backing of Donald Trump. I had encountered this in 2017 when I was the journalist/moderator for a panel at Montgomery College about the election outcome. The representative of the county Republicans was an immigrant from India and that of the student Republicans was a Filipino immigrant. Something was clearly happening, and as Shor demonstrates, that trend has continued.

I want to confine my comments to areas where I disagree with Shor or where I believe something is missing from his analysis of 2024.

Climate Change: Shor finds in his polling that voters thought that Democrats were much more trustworthy on dealing with climate change, but that voters didn't attach that much importance to the issue in choosing either Trump or Kamala Harris. If this is all you want to know about voters' opinion of climate change, you're misreading its salience.

Instead of asking how respondents rate the importance of climate change compared to other issues, or whether respondents support policy X or Y, or whether they think Republicans or Democrats will successfully reduce the rate of climate change, pollsters should be asking questions like this: would you support a candidate who favors reducing or eliminating the production (or use) of fossil fuels to combat climate change?

I suspect that pollsters would discover that in many states whose economies depend on fossil fuel extraction either directly or indirectly (as in the fertilizer in farming) that a large group of voters would reject a candidate who embraced the kind of program on climate that many Democrats have favored -- a program that entails reducing the use of fossil fuels to net zero. I have not seen polling on a question like this, but recent political history supports my view.

You have to look at opinion in states. Winning states is what counts for the presidency and for control of the Senate. West Virginia was one of the mostly solidly Democratic states until the Clinton administration, led in this case by Vice President Al Gore, signed the Kyoto treaty. That was the end of Democrats' winning the state in presidential contests. Republicans now hold all the state offices that are elected by party and its Senators and House members are Republicans. Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, North Dakota and South Dakota used to be swing states until after Kyoto and until Democrats started backing measures to discourage fossil fuel production.

In addition, polls show voters overwhelmingly favor producing more fossil fuels. My illustrious co-author Ruy Teixeira cites a New York Times/Siena poll from last September showing that two-thirds of likely voters support a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.” Trump understood this when he made "Drill, baby, drill" one of his campaign slogans. Harris tried to backtrack on her opposition to fracking -- an issue that was important to Pennsylvania voters -- but for many voters, the damage was already done. The Democrats' history on this issue had already put a number of states out of reach, and it had made winning a state like Pennsylvania much more difficult.

I suspect Democratic consultants don't dwell on this issue because they see no obvious political solution to the problem that doesn't undercut the urgency of the actual problem. But as Ruy and I have argued, if one wants to pass any measures that will reduce the rate of climate change, one has to back down from proposals that clearly require sacrifice from workers and homeowners. What's needed is support for natural gas as a transition fuel and for nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels, as well as funding for research into new methods of curbing carbon emissions. That means taxpayer funded programs, but it doesn't mean requiring someone in Wyoming to rely on an electric car to get across the state.

Education Polarization: Shor says that the "most important political trend of the last thirty to forty years, both here and in ... Western countries with elections has been the story of education polarization." Education polarization has been a useful statistical predictor of election outcomes, but it doesn't explain why voters with college degrees vote differently from voters without them. People without college degrees don't vote Republican out of solidarity with those who also lack a college degree or in explicit opposition to those who do. It's a correlation not a cause.

The polarization is dictated partly, if not primarily, by economic geography. In states that Democrats win and that are dominated by large metro areas, Michael Podhorzer has calculated that Democrats win half or more of voters without college degrees. They break even, too, with white college educated voters. I don't have exact results but from looking, say, at the margins in the Portland and Minneapolis St. Paul greater metro area, Democrats win more than half of voters without college degrees within large post-industrial metro centers. The Republicans' big margins among non-college educated voters come from voters within rural districts, small towns, and larger towns that are not within metro regions. Republicans win between 65 and 80 percent of the vote in these areas, where voters without college degrees predominate.

Democrats used to have a hold in many of these small towns and smaller cities in the Midwest that were centers of mining and manufacturing, but as the mines and factories have closed, the unions, which buoyed and defined Democratic politics, have also disappeared. As the national Democratic Party has increasingly become centered in large post-industrial metro areas, social and cultural differences among the voters in small-town and metro America, which were once submerged, have surfaced with a vengeance.

As Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea document in The Rural Voter, many of these voters hold traditional views of family, work, and nation. They vehemently oppose illegal immigration. They see Democrats as rewarding people who don't work and are not legally in the country. They oppose gun control. They are religiously conservative and more inclined to oppose abortion and to be more exercised about trans men participating in women's sports. If they don't think climate change is a hoax, they oppose measures to arrest it by reducing the use of fossil fuels. And the Democrats' opposition to fossil fuels is toxic in farm communities and places where people have to drive long distances.

To be sure, there are people without college degrees who live in the suburbs or cities who hold some of these same views. But as Jacobs and Shea argue, these views constitute an overarching worldview that pits the "us" of rural and smalltown America against the "them" of cosmopolitan big cities. David Goodhart makes a similar argument about Brexit voters in The Road to Somewhere. And if you look at other countries where there is a correlation between education level and a turn rightward, you find a similar difference in geography. In Germany, for instance, support for the Alternative for Germany is heavily concentrated in East Germany. In France, the National Rally, which began as a small business party of the South has taken root in the small towns in the North that were once centers of manufacturing and mining.

The Woke Factor: Asked by Klein about wokeness's role in the election, Shor says Trump's transgender "they/them" ad was a "70th percentile ad," he says, "When you look at Donald Trump’s best-performing ads, it was basically the economy, gas prices, immigration and crime. There has definitely been an overemphasis on D.E.I., wokeness and trans issues."

Shor uses "woke" in a narrow way that excludes two of the issues he cities as important -- immigration and crime. Immigration is a cultural as well as economic issue and the issue of crime is interwoven with a racial radicalism that wants to defund the police, abolish prisons, and ignore or downplay shoplifting and even carjacking. Blueprint, a Democratic firm, polled voters who made their choice of candidate in the last weeks. They concluded, "Republicans’ cultural critiques stuck to Harris and to the national Democratic brand, tapping into existing anxiety about Democratic Party priorities." Swing voters who ended up backing Trump believed that Democrats "are too focused on identity politics," "have extreme ideas about race and gender," and "don't share the values that have made America special."

Greenberg Research did extensive post-election polling and came to a similar conclusion. According to their poll, inflation was a key issue, but the other top issues were "securing the border and deporting illegal immigrants" and "calling out woke policies." The third most important reason that "moderate Democrats" gave for backing Trump was that Harris "promotes transgender operations and allowed them to compete in all sports." Just as the Trump campaign understood the importance of climate change, they also understood the degree to which Harris's support for taxpayer funding of transgender operations for prisoners would infuriate many voters.

Brand Names: Asked about the Democrats' future prospects, Shor says, "How Harris did and Biden did in most of the country show that these problems won’t be fixed unless we spend the next two or four years changing the party’s brand — especially among working-class voters, who are overrepresented in the Senate." True enough, but I want to say something about the term "brand." It doesn't quite capture what the Democrats' problem is. If you like a brand of toothpaste, you are unlikely to say it tastes good, but it doesn't do a great job preventing cavities. Many people who vote Republican will continue to do so even if they agree with Democrats on specific issues like the minimum wage or Medicaid and even if they don't like the Republican nominee.

What's usually happening in this case is that there is a set of issues or concerns that a voter associates with each party that has created an image of what the party stands for that transcends a candidate's stance on some particular issues. In the older division between Democrats and Republicans, it was the perception of class loyalties: Democrats were seen as the party of common man, and Republicans as the party of business, even though in fact, Democrats were the party of big oil, big finance (at least the Jewish part of Wall Street), big real estate and Hollywood. That wasn't how some Democrats, particularly in the South, saw the division of the parties, but it was the way a core group of Democrats saw it, and they constituted a base on which the party built a majority.

Today, Republican support among voters without a college degree is translated by political analysts into "working class" support, but the perceived difference between the parties is not along economic class lines. Democrats are not seen as the party of big business. They are seen as the party of cosmopolitan elites. The difference is more socio-cultural than economic, even though some of the social and cultural differences, like that on immigration, have a significant economic component. This difference in worldview -- to use a different term from "brand" -- is at the heart of why many rural and small-town voters reject the Democrats. It is about culture in the widest sense of the term. Democrats, of course, don't accept this same difference, and some Chamber of Commerce Republicans don't either. But it's what holds together a voting bloc on which Republicans can depend on from one election to another.

Shor cites the example of Dan Osborn in Nebraska to make this case about "brand.' Running as an "Independent" rather than a Democrat, Osborn ran well ahead of Harris even though he espoused policies associated with Democrats rather than Republicans. He was even ahead in the polls until Republican donors and consultants launched a last-minute campaign to get the voters to perceive him as a closet Democrat. Osborn's success showed the extent to which the very label "Democrat" conjures up an image that in many states proves fatal to Democratic candidates. And Democratic association with a socio-cultural image and set of issues is central to that perception.

If Democrats want to reclaim the majority they once enjoyed, they have to change that perception, and that requires more than declaring you are an economic populist. It requires changing the party's image on such issues as immigration, crime, and sex and gender. And it also requires finding a way to address the genuine dangers that climate change poses that doesn't spook many voters.