"Democrats did worse in the 2024 election than you think. They completely failed to win over less engaged voters..."

"... who are becoming much more Republican. The higher the turnout, the more these voters show up and the worse it is for Democrats.... Low turnout is now the Democrats’ BFF!... Shor’s analysis... suggests that Trump outright won voters under 30. ... He also finds that Gen Z voters under 25 regardless of race or gender are now more conservative than the corresponding Millennial voters. So much for the Democrats’ generational tsunami. The issue landscape in 2024 was worse than most Democrats thought. The only really important issue Democrats had an advantage on was health care and that advantage was tiny by historical standards. The Democrats did have a large advantage on climate change—but voters don’t really care about the issue.... The way out is not with a feel-good Democratic playbook that leaves Democratic shibboleths intact. That hasn’t worked and it won’t work."

Writes Ruy Teixeira, in "How Deep Is the Hole Democrats Are In? Pretty deep" (Substack).

Shor = David Shor, who explained his findings here:

"In deadly assaults and harmless bursts of celebratory explosives, a divided nation demonstrated this holiday weekend just how anxious and jittery it has become..."

"... as the perennial flare of fireworks saluting American freedom reminded all too many people instead of the anger, violence and social isolation of the past few years."

Marc Fisher writes, in "‘Nothing feels safe:’ Americans are divided, anxious and quick to panic" (WaPo).

Fisher quotes:

Thane Rosenbaum, a lawyer and novelist who runs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society at Touro University in New York: "There is a fundamental national insecurity now, after a perfect storm of social chaos where covid forced us to stay apart and the killing of George Floyd unleashed a movement that broke trust in the people who protect us... We’re in a moral panic: ‘Will anyone pick up the phone if I call for help?' Women feel more vulnerable because of the Supreme Court decision on abortion. Everyone feels more vulnerable because of soaring gas prices. People don’t see a way out."

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum and a former Boston police official: "[W]e’re in uncharted territory in terms of anxiety... With the George Floyd murder, war in Ukraine, the questioning of elections, people don’t know who to trust. Who would think that in an iconic place like Highland Park, you would need to post snipers on rooftops on the Fourth of July? But that’s what we’ve come to. Nothing feels safe anymore."

Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist: "We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth... We are cut off from one another and from the past."

"Hyper-educated?! Who's hyper-educated?"

 

Here's the column: "What happens if the progressive vanguard talks mostly to itself?" (WaPo, Megan McArdle). 

McArdle is reacting to the Ezra Klein piece about the progressive election analyst David Shor that we talked about back here. She writes: 

Shor thinks the left has a major problem with its youthful and well-educated activist base, which staffs left-leaning newsrooms and runs campaigns. They focus, naturally, on issues that excite them, and Shor told Klein “the things that are most exciting to activists and journalists are politically toxic.”... 

As Matt Yglesias pointed out on Twitter, “A closed circle of young, college educated staffers is likely to end up further off-center the more they talk to themselves.”... 

Democrats cannot afford to cater only to that hyper-educated class — not in a country where only a third of the population has a bachelor’s degree.

I don't even know if I'd call people who've gone to college educated. Especially these days. But hyper-educated? What the hell is that? Is it like hyperventilating — it goes to your head, makes you dizzy?

Hey, I looked it up in the OED. Not only is the prefix "hyper-" defined — it means beyond/over — but there's a separate entry for "hypereducated" and the one historical quote is from James Joyce, from "Dubliners" (1914): 

Had she really any life of her own behind all her propagandism? There had never been any ill-feeling between them until that night. It unnerved him to think that she would be at the supper-table, looking up at him while he spoke with her critical quizzing eyes. Perhaps she would not be sorry to see him fail in his speech. An idea came into his mind and gave him courage. He would say, alluding to Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the generation which is now on the wane among us may have had its faults but for my part I think it had certain qualities of hospitality, of humour, of humanity, which the new and very serious and hypereducated generation that is growing up around us seems to me to lack.” 

"Democrats are winning more college-educated white voters and fewer non-college white voters, as pollster shorthand puts it, and Donald Trump supercharged this trend...."

"[T]he sorting that educational polarization is picking up... puts Democrats at a particular disadvantage in the Senate, as college-educated voters cluster in and around cities while non-college voters are heavily rural.... This is why Shor believes Trump was good for the Republican Party, despite its losing the popular vote in 2016, the House in 2018 and the Senate and the presidency in 2020. ... Shor has built an increasingly influential theory of what the Democrats must do to avoid congressional calamity.... To avoid it... they need to internalize that they are not like and do not understand the voters they need to win over.... Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.... [O]ne difference between 2016 and 2012 is that Romney was complicit in making economics the center of the campaign. Like Obama, he preferred to argue over tax policy and spending cuts and was plainly uncomfortable talking about immigration or race. He ran, self-consciously, as a former management consultant who would govern on behalf of America’s makers rather than its takers. Trump descended a golden escalator to call Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists. What was Clinton supposed to do?"

From "David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don’t Want to Hear" by Ezra Klein (NYT).