David Shor’s 2020 Postmortem

November 15, 2020 Hunter Wallace 2020 Election, donald trump, Politics, Populists 19

David Shor is a data scientist who was run out of the Democratic Party earlier this year during the George Floyd protests for having the audacity to suggest that violent protests were hurting the Democrats.

NY Mag:

“I think it’s important for us to be clear-eyed about what happened in 2020. We’re not going to know exactly what happened until there’s more analysis of precinct results. But I think that the county-level data we have tells a pretty clear big-picture story. Which is that we won the presidency because, one, while we lost non-college-educated white voters, we kept those defections to a relatively low level, and two, a bunch of moderate Republicans who had voted for Trump in 2016 decided to vote for Biden this time. …”

Whexit determined the 2020 election.

It came down to two things – White college educated voters, moderates and Independents moving away from Trump and Donald Trump’s diminished margin with White working class voters.

“Yes. If you look at county-level returns in Georgia, it’s pretty clear that nonwhite voters, as a share of the electorate, decreased at a time when the nonwhite share of the state’s population probably increased. Relative to the electorate as a whole, nonwhite turnout fell. And then, among nonwhite voters who turned out, support for the Democratic nominee fell. That’s just not consistent with nonwhite turnout being the decisive factor. The only reason we won is that there were these very large swings toward us among college-educated white people in the Atlanta suburbs. …”

In Georgia, it was White college educated voters in the Atlanta suburbs. The upper middle class flipped to Joe Biden. He also lost support with Independents and the White working class.

“Finally, if you look at 2016, I think people want to tell this story about values. But ultimately, if you look at what the biggest predictors of voter preferences were … there were just a lot of voters who agreed with us about health care but not about immigration. Obama got something like 60 percent of those voters; Clinton got roughly 40. And I think the reason why that happened was that both parties talked about immigration. So I think it does actually matter. …”

In the 2016 election, the Hard-Pressed Skeptics tipped from Obama to Trump. These are voters who agree with the Democrats on health care, but not necessarily Obamacare, but strongly disagree with them on immigration. In the 2020 election, the focus was taken off immigration and that worked in favor of the Democrats who won back more of them in the Center of the electorate.

“The best example though might be Donald Trump. His approval rating rested in a very narrow band, for basically this entire election, particularly among non-college-educated whites. There was only one time that shifted, in the course of his entire presidency, and that was when they tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. His approval rating among non-college whites specifically plummeted. We were tracking Obama-Trump voters; this was the only time when they came home in large numbers. And the reason is that a lot of these voters agree with Democrats on Obamacare, and they were very angry about attempts to repeal it. (And then they stopped being angry because it failed and everyone in politics has a short memory.) …”

Donald Trump’s unpopular position on health care, his failure to deliver on immigration combined with the economic collapse in this already financially strapped group cost him support with Hard-Pressed Skeptics. I strongly suspect that they swung to Joe Biden.

Politico:

“Yeah, I think there are two separate questions: What actually happened, and why were the polls wrong? We’ll have to see what the final popular vote margin is, but it looks like Biden is going to end up something like 1.5-2 percentage points better than Hillary Clinton in kind of a uniform swing. College-educated white people, in relative terms, swung toward Democrats by a lot, and non-college-educated white people swung, in relative terms, against us. Education polarization ended up being larger than it was in 2016. Hispanic voters swung against us by large margins — though how large and the exact geographic and demographic distribution is going to be unclear until we get more precinct results. That’s the big picture for what happened. …”

It is easy to see why White college educated voters grew so tired of Donald Trump. BTW, Ann Coulter is right about Trumpism without Trump being a winning strategy.

“So, I think the Republicans’ position [in the next four years] has to be: This is the new Republican Party. It will be Trumpism, but we’re getting rid of the eight-year-old,” Coulter proposed.

Republicans should remain focused on populist issues, she advised, “But we’re going to have someone who speaks well, who is articulate, who hates the media, hates political correctness.”

“It’ll be a lot easier to push Trumpism without Trump,” Coulter predicted.

“I’m glad he lost,” she continued. “I’m glad it was very, very narrow. And I’m glad we seem to have held the Senate. … And we have definitely held the House [of Representatives]. That means they [Democrats] couldn’t do anything terrible.”

“My friends in California were warning me when I was totally, totally on the Trump bandwagon, actually in 2015, after he announced [his candidacy for president]. In California they were all saying, ‘Ann, he’s gonna be like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He talks a good game, he’ll get in, he’ll become a liberal,’” Coulter recalled.

She speculated that a Trump second term would have been “even worse” than the former California governor’s.

“This would’ve been Arnold Schwarzenegger’s second term, except even worse,” she said. “Jared Kushner would be out releasing criminals, passing the amnesty … It would have been an unmitigated disaster, and we’d never be able to get the MAGA agenda back.”

“Trumpism without Trump — that is the winning formula,” she concluded.”

“In 2016, we didn’t lose because our get-out-the-vote lists were not sorted well enough. And it wasn’t that we had the wrong kind of digital targeting. We lost because, big picture, we ran a campaign that increased the salience of immigration at a time when marginal voters in swing states in the Midwest disagreed with us on immigration. That’s why we lost. Obviously, it was a close election, and maybe you could have done something different and gotten 0.4 points more in Wisconsin. But big picture, that is what happened. And I think it’s important to not miss the forest for the trees. There are reasonable debates people have about the cost-effectiveness of canvassing or how much we should be spending on digital ads, but ultimately, that’s not what determines elections.”

Trump used immigration as a wedge issue in 2016 to win the election with the Hard-Pressed Skeptics in states like Wisconsin and Michigan. That’s why he won the election.

A winning candidate for Republicans would be a smart, articulate social conservative who isn’t a lightning rod who can win back college-educated White voters and who is moderate on economics and health care. The wildly unpopular True Cons Republican agenda and Trump being an incompetent, blustering idiot are the two albatrosses that have to be dumped by the Right.

19 Comments

    • please please let it go with Tucker the cucker. He will flip to being a rank and file RETARDican in a New York minute, after selling national conservative populism to the rubes.

      Once bitten. Twice shy. There’s a lesson to be learned in those words.

  3. The Republicans will just block the reinstatement of Obamacare then. Biden’s millenials are hoping for decent health insurance.

  4. Health care is Communism, as are college scholarships and Social Security. Hello? SOCIAL Security, get it? It’s SOCIALIST Security, am I right or what?

    We must stop AOC and Ilhan Omar and save American from Islamo-Fascism. I mean Islamo-Socialism.

  5. There was fraud in 2016, too. Obama’s DHS tried to get access to state’s computers, to make sure vote totals were “accurate” and “secure,” for just one example. But Trump had enough votes to squeak past the Dim crooks.

    All the Orange Egomaniac had to do not ignore his base, and no matter the shenanigans pulled by his opponents, he would’ve won going away. He had taken us for granted for 4 years, breaking all promises (including “draining the swamp,” which he could’ve done after the gov’t shutdown lasted 30 days, by letting go of legions of entrenched bureaucrats, shutting down departments opposed to him, etc.), and he STILL could’ve won after the Summer of Peaceful Joggers. The deceptively-rosy economic picture he thought would keep him in office was shattered by giving into corona-chan shutdown idiocy, but the Dims and their critical race theorists that burned down cities gave him another chance to win. What a f-in’ moron Blompf is, to have been handed multiple golden opportunities to stay in office after disasters, but to have thoroughly blown them all.

    Remember this basic fact, Trump fans: He only had to not sh!t on the people that got him into office in the first place, and he would have been assured of another term.

  6. Not only are you and you supporters spreading rumors about Trump supporters / mocking Trump supporters as they got assaulted, they are also liars too.

    One of your supporters claimed I was the one being uncivil. Since I’ve been posting here I have received nothing but trolling and 99% of the time I have ignored it. Fact. Only somewhat recently have I started to refer to them as unemployed incels in retaliation. I guess I hit a soft spot with that retaliation.

    Your mythical 5% was real clever at first but the 5% were really just low information voter cucks out in the Midwest.

    Get a job, Brad.

  7. It’s takes a lot of honesty for progressives like this to admit that Trump lost because he failed White moderates, instead of trying to turn Trump’s defeat into an libtard morality play about overcoming racism and fascism.

    • Joe’s narrative is that as a centrist pragmatic neocon warmonger he’s going to defeat nazis.

  8. The Democratic and Republican Parties must be destroyed.

    A plurality of the states can fire the national legislature and president. Disolve the general government.

    In the European parliamentary systems, they have the vote of no confidence. The founders left us with a similar power. Although, to my knowledge, they never defined and layed out procedures for exercising it.

    ” it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government,”

    The problem is in getting all of the people on the same page, and in getting a plurality of states to agree, and to cooperate with one another. A seemingly impossible task, given the very real and serious divisions among us.

  9. I’m glad you have a Democrat explaining how Trump lost when he actually won… Maybe you should join the Democratic Party, you’ll get you beloved lockdowns, and soon you’ll not be able to own a car, eat meat, or have any privacy. They will force inject you with a chip to scan your brain. “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better” https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-really-remember-what-that-is/ THIS IS OPENLY STATED BY THE WEF/UN as THEIR GOAL, its not a theory, its in Klaus Schwab’s book, and UN/WEF white papers. Glad you stood down, accept a massive steal using electronic and unsolicited mail in ballot fraud. Dominion voting was set up by the State/CIA to steal foreign election, it stole 2020. Senior executives were bragging to anti-fa they will ensure Trump loses no matter what. Soros and the Globalists also said openly they were stealing it, then mathematically impossible things happened, Dominion “glitches” converted Trump votes to Biden, etc. Even if you hate Trump, will you not at least complain that Globalist Oligarchs are now openly stealing elections? You ready to eat bugs, live in a government assigned pod, trade you car in for a peddle bike, and have zero privacy and all news given to you being pre-approved social engineering? Essentially this is what you wanted, just to show spite at Trump for not being a perfect candidate. What do you expect? There is no such thing as the perfect candidate for us, they don’t exist because we are not allowed to elect them, and because of your stand down we won’t even be able to talk about our politics online. You stood down to a Globalist coup and are gloating, not even entertaining the open fact they stole the election. This website is acting in bad faith.

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