Cassandra usually turned out to be right. So has David Shor, the Democratic Cassandra who was fired last June from his job as a poll analyst for the Joe Biden polling firm Civis Analytics for tweeting, after rioting broke out from a Minneapolis suspect’s death in police custody May 25, that violent rioting in 1968 cost Democrats enough votes to lose that year’s presidential election.
That was a message the woke Twitteratti didn’t want to hear; they wanted to cheer on the “mostly peaceful” (i.e., often violent) riots in cities across the country. But it turns out Shor’s point was well taken. Democrats’ cheers for last summer’s violent riots and their support of “defunding the police” cost Biden precious votes, nearly enough to defeat him despite his 7 million popular vote plurality, especially among non-white voters.
That’s the conclusion of Shor, who turns 30 this year and is now with the left-wing nonprofit group OpenLabs, based on close study of election returns down to the precinct level and special post-election polling, as relayed in two interviews with New York magazine’s Eric Levitz. And his analysis applies not only to the 2020 election and the particular persona of Donald Trump, but also to elections in years ahead.
Shor’s analysis of precinct returns has him revising the exit poll slightly. Comparing Biden’s performance with Hillary Clinton’s, he tells Levitz, “Democrats gained somewhere between half a percent to 1 percent among non-college whites and roughly 7 percent among white college graduates (which is kind of crazy). Our support among African Americans declined by something like 1 to 2 percent. And then Hispanic support dropped by 8 to 10 percent. The jury is still out on Asian Americans.”
“The [strikingly large] decline in Hispanic support for Democrats,” he says, “was pretty broad based. This isn’t just about Cubans in south Florida. It happened in New York and California and Arizona and Texas.”
Democratic declines were particularly sharp among those with backgrounds in Venezuela and Colombia, who dislike the “socialism” which Republicans charged that Democrats favor. But more generally, unlike in the past, “non-white conservatives voted for Republicans at higher rates; they started voting more like white conservatives.”
This matches my own observations that white liberals have become a much larger part of the Democratic coalition, and they have blandly assumed that “People of Color” voters share their views on every issue. That’s not so, Shor argues. “White liberals are more left-wing than black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various forms of ‘racial resentment.’ So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off non-white conservative Democrats and push them against us.”
Among white liberals, Shor says, “racism has been defined in highly ideological terms. And this theoretical perspective” has become “a big part” of white college-credentialed Democrats’ “group identity.” But blacks and Hispanics have a different perspective. “If you look at the concrete questions, white liberals are to the left of Hispanic Democrats, but also of Black Democrats, on defunding the police and those ideological questions about the source of racial inequity.”
I would put this more concretely. White college Democrats tend to live in neighborhoods, high-income suburbs, gentrified parts of central cities, where issues of violent crime and rioting are theoretical. They have security guards and doormen and sympathetic police officers to assure them they won’t be bothered. Hispanics and blacks, including the minorities of these groups who have conservative views, are seldom similarly protected. Rioting is not theoretical to them, it’s a real threat.
White gentry liberals are happy to believe assurances of the New York Times and CNN that the post-May 25 demonstrations were “mostly peaceful” and justified by “systemic racism,” which, the Times assures us, goes back to 1619. For Hispanics and black homeowners, who live in bungalows without doormen and work and shop in neighborhoods without private security guards, those reassurances ring hollow.
White liberals have been happy to assume that “People of Color” all have similar perspectives and similar views on issues. Such thinking goes back to the creation of the term “Hispanic” by the Nixon administration Census Bureau and the assumption that Hispanics and Asians, as non-whites, would be subject to the same kind of discrimination and bad treatment that black people experienced for many years.
That assumption is simply factually wrong, as Shor’s analysis inferentially recognizes. Most Hispanics these days, or their parents or grandparents, came to the at least a decade after passage of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. And most of these people did not move into heavily black neighborhoods, but rather headed for parts of metropolitan areas or small communities inhabited largely by blue-collar whites.
A cursory look at the patterns revealed in the brilliant New York Times interactive graphic Mapping the Census, proves my point. In the one heavily black area where Hispanic immigrants did move, South Central Los Angeles, Hispanics now outnumber blacks.
Similarly, if you map the sites of murders, and we have seen a vast increase in murders, the largest yearly percentage increase ever recorded, since last May 25, you find the biggest clusters in majority black areas, with much smaller numbers in majority Hispanic areas. The sad fact is that violent crime rates among blacks are about eight times those among whites and probably at least double those among Hispanics (FBI crime statistics, unlike most government statistics, don’t tabulate Hispanic numbers separately).
Many white college-credentialed liberals kind of like the idea of “defunding the police.” After all, cutting police budgets may free up money for holders of social work or teaching degrees. But for many Hispanic and black voters, defunding the police means immediately putting their and their family’s lives at risk and, in the long term, probably destroying neighborhood institutions and amenities. Drive around my hometown of Detroit and you can see what years of high rates of violent crime can do to a city. Detroit attracted few Hispanic immigrants and has been experiencing black flight since 1990. Toleration of violent crime and fostering of welfare dependency, as I argued in my most recent Washington Examiner column, have done horrifying damage in my lifetime and now, alas, threaten to do so again.
The Democratic Party, as I wrote in my book How America’s Political Parties Change (and How They Don’t), has always been a coalition of out-groups — people not seen as typical Americans but who, taken together, can form a majority. Historically, it has always had problems when there’s been disagreement on major issues among its different constituencies. Shor has identified what many Democrats, including those who got him fired last summer, haven’t wanted to face. The liberalism on racial issues of the whites who increasingly dominate Democratic messaging, a liberalism based on theoretical rather than concrete concerns, is a political liability among many of the “People of Color” whose large Democratic percentages the party has come to depend on. Shor’s thesis gets support from Nate Silver, and, in hedged wording, from none less than Barack Obama.
My sense is that Democrats’ problem here is not just on the 2020 issues that Shor identifies. White college-credentialed liberals are a constituency inevitably because of their affluence and their freedom from imposed constraints, focused on ideas that are theoretical for them.
College-credentialed conservatives have always had a concrete interest in at least one issue (taxes), but their increasingly numerous liberal counterparts have been willing since the 1990s to pay higher taxes in return for legally available abortions (which they seldom avail themselves of) and restrictions on police conduct (from whose consequences they believe themselves safely insulated).
A politics centered on differences on economic issues is one susceptible to compromise and adjustment: you just argue about how to split the differences. A politics centered on moral values and personal concerns is one in which differences can’t be so readily accommodated. This is especially true when one group, white gentry liberals, has near-total control over primary communications media and is unwilling to settle for anything less than total dominance of the public dialogue.
The lesson from David Shor, the Democratic Cassandra, is that such a group can easily overplay its hand and hurt its own cause.
