Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won

Summary

Summary of "Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won"
The Ezra Klein Show
Release Date: March 18, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of The Ezra Klein Show, host Ezra Klein engages in a profound conversation with David Shore, the head of data science at Bluerose Research, a prominent Democratic consulting firm. The discussion centers around the Democratic Party's surprising loss in the 2024 elections, analyzing the underlying factors that contributed to Donald Trump's victory and the Democratic Party's weakening among key voter demographics.

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Understanding the 2024 Election Loss

Ezra Klein begins by highlighting the confusion within the Democratic Party regarding their identity and the reasons behind their electoral defeat. He introduces David Shore, whose expertise in data science and political surveying provides invaluable insights into the election dynamics.

Notable Quote:

"In the 20 some years I've been covering politics, I have never heard them so confused."
— Ezra Klein [00:38]

Shore emphasizes the substantial survey data collected, asserting confidence in the findings despite inherent challenges in survey research. He notes that their detailed analysis helps narrate a coherent story behind the election outcomes.

Notable Quote:

"There's enough data to tell a coherent story."
— David Shore [04:48]

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Racial and Ideological Shifts Among Voters

A significant portion of the discussion delves into the racial depolarization observed during the Trump campaign. Shore presents data showing a decline in Democratic support among Hispanic and Asian moderates, aligning closely with white moderates.

Notable Quote:

"Throughout the entire Trump campaign we've seen this racial depolarization."
— Ezra Klein [07:27]

Shore argues that educational polarization has become the central fault line in American democracy, with highly educated individuals gravitating left and working-class voters moving right. This trend, he suggests, is a global phenomenon affecting many Western democracies.

Notable Quote:

"Education polarization was becoming the central fault line for American democracy."
— David Shore [09:37]

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Voter Turnout and Its Impact

Shore presents compelling data indicating that lower voter turnout precincts significantly favored Trump, while higher turnout areas leaned Democratic. This reversal challenges the traditional Democratic belief that increased turnout universally benefits their party.

Notable Quote:

"This is the first cycle where that definitively became the opposite of true."
— David Shore [13:00]

He further explains that the declining turnout among politically disengaged and lower socioeconomic groups disproportionately benefited Trump, undermining the Democratic strategy that higher turnout equates to greater Democratic success.

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Media Consumption and Its Effects

The conversation shifts to the evolving media landscape, particularly the rise of TikTok as a news source among young voters. Shore highlights a dramatic increase in TikTok's influence, correlating with a shift towards Republican support within this demographic.

Notable Quote:

"The share of voters who get their news from TikTok more than quadrupled in the last four years."
— David Shore [59:09]

Klein and Shore discuss the challenges this presents for Democrats, who struggle to create content that resonates with TikTok's predominantly young and politically disengaged audience.

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Future Strategies for Democrats

Addressing the need for strategic recalibration, Shore suggests that Democrats must focus on delivering tangible economic solutions rather than solely defending institutions. He criticizes the Harris campaign for not prioritizing economic messaging sufficiently, which he believes was crucial given voters' preoccupation with the cost of living and inflation.

Notable Quote:

"Democratic messaging last cycle was not economically focused enough."
— David Shore [44:20]

Shore advocates for a dual approach: combating social welfare cuts and addressing high-profile issues like Elon Musk's influence, which have proven effective in changing voter perceptions.

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Vulnerabilities of Trump

Despite Trump's current polling strength, Shore argues that Trump remains vulnerable due to his administration's unpopular policies and overreach. He draws parallels to historical presidencies where significant policy missteps led to declining approval ratings and electoral setbacks.

Notable Quote:

"Trump is wrecking havoc in the federal government."
— David Shore [66:58]

Shore emphasizes that while Trump's strategies might appear effective, they also sow significant disapproval, presenting opportunities for Democratic counter-campaigns focused on substantive policy critiques.

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Senate Outlook

Looking ahead to Senate races, Shore expresses concern over the Democratic Party's ability to regain lost ground. He notes that unless Democrats can effectively realign their brand to appeal to working-class voters and overcome the trust deficit, future Senate elections may remain unfavorable.

Notable Quote:

"These problems won't be fixed unless we spend the next two years or four years changing the party's brand."
— David Shore [73:28]

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Recommendations and Conclusions

In closing, David Shore recommends three insightful books for listeners wanting to delve deeper into political analytics and party dynamics:

1. "Hollow Parties" by Danny Shazman
2. "The Origin and Nature of Mass Opinion" by Zoller
3. "Victory Lab" by Sasha Eisenberg

These works offer comprehensive perspectives on party strategies, mass opinion formation, and the evolution of Democratic analytics.

Notable Quote:

"Victory Lab... talks a lot about the history of the Democratic analytics industry."
— David Shore [78:00]

Klein and Shore conclude by acknowledging the necessity for the Democratic Party to adapt and evolve its strategies to address the shifting voter landscape and media consumption patterns effectively.

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Key Takeaways

• Racial Depolarization: A significant shift in Democratic support among Hispanic and Asian moderates, aligning closely with white moderates, undermines traditional coalition strengths.

• Voter Turnout Dynamics: Lower turnout precincts increasingly favor Trump, challenging the Democratic strategy that higher turnout universally benefits their party.

• Media Evolution: The rise of TikTok as a primary news source for young voters presents new challenges for Democratic outreach and messaging.

• Strategic Realignment: Democrats must refocus on economic issues and develop strategies to engage with working-class and politically disengaged voters.

• Trump's Vulnerability: Despite current polling advantages, Trump's administration faces vulnerabilities due to unpopular policies and overreach that could be leveraged by Democratic counter-campaigns.

• Future Elections: Without addressing the trust deficit and realigning party strategies, Democrats may continue to struggle in future Senate and presidential elections.

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Contact Information:
For further insights or to share your thoughts, you can reach out to Ezra Klein at [e-mail].

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This summary aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the key discussions and insights from the episode for those who have not listened to it.

Transcript

[David Shore]

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[Ezra Klein]

From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. I've been spending some time recently with top Democrats as they think about how to rebuild after the 2024 loss. And I'll say that in the 20 some years I've been covering politics, I have never heard them so confused. Confused about who they are, aside from the opposition to Donald Trump, but confused also about how and why they lost. How could they have possibly lost this election to this person? But also how is the Democratic Party weakening so much among groups whose strength, whose support it once took for granted? They're losing working class voters. They're seeing their margins among non white voters erode and vanish. They're losing young voters. Something is wrong in the Democratic Party. And so I think it's important as this conversation begins to roll forward that it is grounded on a pretty real understanding of what happened in 2024. Someone whose analysis on this have come to respect over the years is David Shore. David Shore is the head of data science at Blue Ears Research, which is a big Democratic consulting firm. It does a huge amount of political surveying and interpretation of data and testing of messaging. He works with campaigns and progressive, and so he has a sort of perspective from the inside there. But also over the years, I think he's just a very skilled interpreter of data. It's a very different skill, I should say. And over years where he's been making some of these arguments, he's gotten a lot of things right before other people did, including that educational polarization was becoming the central fault line for American democracy, and frankly, not just American democracy, but other countries too. And so when I saw Shor recently and he began walking me through some of his slides, some of the ways he was interpreting the 20 election and trying to help people see what had happened, my first thought was this would be worth doing in public rather than this being a thing that Democrats are debating in back rooms with each other. What if we did this in public. Shor was kind enough to come on the show and present this for us. And so this episode is a bit of an experiment. He's walking me through his presentation and I am interrogating. Is worth watching if you can. This works in audio, you can listen to it. We describe these charts and graphs and tables, but in video, which you can see if go to YouTube and search Ezra Klein show and go to our channel. It has a different flavor. You can follow along visually and I think it's worth trying to do so if you can. But I found this really, really helpful and it helped ground some of my thinking in the data. I don't necessarily have every conclusion David does, but I think it is a good place to begin and there's then a lot that can follow from having this conversation. As always, my email Ezra kleinshowytimes.com David Schorr welcome to the show.

[David Shore]

Excited to be here.

[Ezra Klein]

So what do you do and why should I trust the data you're about to show us here?

[David Shore]

I'm glad you asked. I'm the co founder of a research firm called Bluerose research. We did 26 million interviews last year. We have a team of about 45 people, machine learning engineers, software engineers from companies like Google, and we've done a lot of work to try to figure out what actually happened last year.

[Ezra Klein]

A lot of liberals I know feel really burnt by survey data. There's a sense that nobody picks up the phone. How are you surveying these older people if you're doing it online? Putting aside the fact that you conducted a lot of surveys, why are you confident those surveys reflect reality?

[David Shore]

The fundamental problem with survey research is just that people who answer surveys are really weird. There's kind of two ways that you can try to fix that. You know, one is that you could try to get a normal representative set of people. That's just impossible in today's day and age. And the other is that you can just try to collect a lot of information so that you can adjust for how weird they are. The reason I feel fairly confident about this is just in our work, every time we make any change to any part of our system, we go back and back test and see how it affects accuracy across every other election that we've ever surveyed. We can't be fully confident about any particular thing that we say. A lot of the data isn't back yet. But I think that there's enough data to tell a coherent story. And there's the 26 million survey respondents of 8 million unique people, there's precinct and county level election results. We're also going to try to tie together all of the external data that other people have done. And what I'll say about this election is that our forecasts this cycle were very accurate. Our overall error was about a third of a percent nationally. And I think that most of the things that we thought would happen did bear out. And just I do want to spend a second to answer something that you'd asked a second ago, which is just like, why look at survey data? But I think that super politically engaged people are overrepresented at every single step of the political process. And I think that the only point other than Election Day when regular people get a say is in polls.

[Ezra Klein]

So I take that point. I always think it is good to remind me and everybody who listens to the show that they are weird. And if their intuitions about politics were shared, politics would not look the way it does at all.

[David Shore]

Right, right.

[Ezra Klein]

If the voting population were Ezra Colangel listeners and people they know, then elections end up very differently. So I take a point on survey data. So where do we begin?

[David Shore]

All right, so first I'm just going to start with this slide over here that just looks at support for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, in 2020 and 2024 by race and ideology. In 2016, Democrats got 81% of Hispanic moderates. And in 2024, Democrats got 58% of Hispanic moderates. That's only about 7% more than the 52% that they got of white moderates. I think the main story with respect to this is just a continuation of the that we saw four years ago that basically throughout the entire Trump campaign we've seen this racial depolarization.

[Ezra Klein]

The thing I find most surprising here is you look at white voters, liberal, moderate and conservative. And at least in this data from 2016 to 2024, there is a 0% swing in any of them. Because there are all these things that if you go back to the debates we were having about Donald Trump, then it is the return and resurgence of a coalition trying to protect white power in this country. And I wrote things about this. I think there's good reason to believe that even if that was part of the intention, then that does not appear in the results. Democrats lose modest amount of support among black voters in those years. They lose a huge amount of support among Hispanic voters and a kind of significant amount among Asian voters voters. Why do you think that is?

[David Shore]

I think that a lot of political analysis in America has been really centered around viewing everything through a very America centric lens. Because there's this story in American politics, like if you want to understand 20th century American politics, then the big story is that there was this giant Southern realignment in 1964 and then driven by.

[Ezra Klein]

The Civil Rights Act.

[David Shore]

Yeah, driven by the Civil Rights Act. And that carried forward a really long time for that to really work its way through down ballot. And so I think it was really tempting for American political scientists and kind of a lot of the more detail oriented American political pundits to just kind of see everything.

[Ezra Klein]

People who write books like why were polarized, for instance.

[David Shore]

Yeah, exactly. Just to see everything through this transformation. But I think the most important trend politically of the last 30 to 40 years, both here and in every other country in the world, at least western country that has elections, has been the story of education polarization. Basically everywhere we've seen highly educated people move to the left and working class people move to the right. I think a lot of people's analytical error when looking at Trump is that they saw Trump as this kind of reincarnation of the 1960s of George Wallace or something, when really I think he was representing this global trend.

[Ezra Klein]

The other thing that I find interesting here is the shift in voters who self describe as conservative. There's no shift in white self described conservative voters between 2016 and 2024. But Democrats are winning 85% of black conservatives in 2016, but only 77% in 2024. They're winning 34% of conservative Hispanics in 2016. That falls by half to 17% in 2024. They're winning 28% of conservative Asians in 2016. That falls to 20% in 2024. So it's always a little bit weird for somebody who is self described conservative to be voting for Democrats who are quite a liberal party now. But what we're seeing among non white voters is people voting more their ideology and less their ethnic group.

[David Shore]

That's exactly right. And I would just say I think this shouldn't be that surprising. I think now, you know, we identify the Democratic Party as straightforwardly liberal. You know, the Democratic Party used to be a coalition between liberals and moderates and conservatives. And as liberals kind of became the dominant coalition partner, it makes sense that the conservatives and moderates in our coalition who were disproportionately non white, given that this ideological polarization happened among whites 20 years ago or 30 years ago, that you would start to see this.

[Ezra Klein]

All right, let's move to slide two here.

[David Shore]

All right, this slide over here has what I think is probably the most important story of this cycle. So I have two graphs over here. The first just kind of breaks down 2024 support by whether or not you had voted in 2020. And so this is New York Times data from Nate Cohn's Upshot Polling, probably the highest quality public pollster in America. And what you can see here is just that in 2020 and their data, people who didn't vote, if they had voted, would have been a little bit more Democratic than the country overall. But over the next four years, people who didn't vote went from being somewhat Democratic leaning group to a group that Trump won by double digits. So the second graph here we have for every precinct, we look at what percentage of people voted in 2022. And then we just look at what was the change in Democratic vote share from 2020 to 2024. And so what you could see here is that for the lowest turnout precincts, Trump increased his vote share by something like 6%, while for the highest turnout precincts, Harris actually increased her support. And that's really the story of this. You know, people who follow news really closely, who get their news from traditional media, who like, say that politics is an important part of their identity, they became more Democratic in absolute terms. But for people who don't follow politics closely at all, they just became a lot more Republican.

[Ezra Klein]

It's interesting because I obviously get a lot of incoming from people who would like the New York Times to cover Donald Trump differently. And some of those arguments I agree with, some of them I don't. Right. The what I always think about with that, though, is that if your lever is New York Times headlines, you're not affecting the voters. You are losing. The question Democrats are facing when you look at how badly they lost less politically engaged voters, is how do you change the views of voters you don't really have a good way to reach?

[David Shore]

Yeah. And I mean, that's 100%. Right. And I just want to stress that this is a new problem. This problem didn't exist four years ago. And it's not just that New York Times readers are more liberal than the overall population. That's definitely true. It's that they're more liberal than they were four years ago, even though the country went the other way. And so there's this great political divergence between people who consume all the news sources that we know about and read about versus the people who don't. And so as a result of these changes, this has really reversed A decades long truism in American politics where for the longest time Democrats have said, and it's been true, that if everybody votes, we win, and that higher turnout is good for Democrats. And this is the first cycle where that definitively became the opposite of true. Here I just have some numbers. If only people who had voted in 2022 had voted, Harris would have won the popular vote and also the Electoral College fairly easily. While if everyone had voted, Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly 5 points. And generally what you see now is that every measure of socioeconomic status and political engagement is just monotonically related to your chance of liking Trump.

[Ezra Klein]

What is monotonically related?

[David Shore]

Oh, yeah, sorry.

[Ezra Klein]

Just that this is why Democrats can't win.

[David Shore]

That's exactly right. I'm the problem. But and it's basically just that even the lowest political engagement categories, the lowest education categories, the poorer, the lower socioeconomic status, the less engaged you are in politics now, the more Trumpy you are. And that just wasn't true four years ago.

[Ezra Klein]

So here's something that I've heard from a lot of Democrats and very good election analysts, which seems to be in some tension here. There is an argument that what happened to Democrats between 2020 and 2024 is their voters stayed home. And so what happened here was a shrinking of the electorate that disproportionately sliced off what Democrats for a while were calling the anti maga coalition. How does that idea that Democrats didn't lose to Trump, they lost to the couch?

[David Shore]

It's just not empirically correct. I would say generally, turnout and support go in the same direction for the basic reason that there are a lot of people who didn't feel ready to vote for a Republican, but were still mad at the Democratic Party, and so they stayed home in response. And if you just look at the demographics of who these people are who voted for Biden last time and stayed home this time, they're generally low education, they're fairly politically disengaged, they're much less likely to watch shows like MSNBC and more likely to watch shows like Fox. And they frankly just look a lot like the voters who trended away from us.

[Ezra Klein]

So if you had forced them out to vote, they may have just voted for Donald Trump.

[David Shore]

Right, exactly. And that does show up. If you look at African Americans, for example, African Americans who didn't vote were much more likely to say that they supported Trump than the ones that did this cycle. It's true that overall turnout fell in a lot of the country, but in the battleground states that actually decided the presidential election turnout was roughly where it was from four years ago. And it just is clear as day that a bunch of people changed their mind.

[Ezra Klein]

How much is this just inflation? You are dealing with people who, they're not paying a lot of attention to politics. They do pay attention and feel prices and the state of the country. You had a massive inflationary period and they're pissed. And being pissed about inflation moved them against the incumbent party, which they held responsible in this country, as in other countries, for inflation.

[David Shore]

I think that that's a very reasonable explanation. It makes sense that the people who care the least about politics are going to be the most mad about prices going up. And there's a lot of academic reasons to think that makes sense. And so I don't think it's necessarily true that it's impossible for us to win those voters back. But I'll talk about this later. There have been dramatic shifts in the media consumption habits of these people in the last four years. And so it may be a harder problem.

[Ezra Klein]

Before I discuss it, I think it's worth talking about the next chart too, because it's getting at the same question in a different way.

[David Shore]

Yeah. So here we have a plot that we just took from the Economist. And in the bottom we just have foreign born population. And on the top we just have increase in Republican vote share. And what you could see is there's a very clear correlation. This is by county, this is by county. And what you could see is just there's a very clear correlation between how many immigrants there were in a county and how much it increased by Donald Trump towards Trump. You can see in counties like Queens, New York or Miami Dade in Florida, Trump increased his vote share percentage by 10 percentage points, which is just crazy. And so when we go and we look at the precinct election results, what we see is that in immigrant communities of all races, particularly Hispanic and Asian communities, but Trump even increased his vote share in Haitian precincts in Florida. When we do that, our best guess is that immigrants went from being a Biden plus 27 group in 2020 to a group that Trump narrowly won in 2024. This group of naturalized citizens is roughly 10% of the electorate.

[Ezra Klein]

So that means that immigrants swung much, much, much more than the median of the electorate.

[David Shore]

That's exactly right. Our estimates, and it's really hard to know exactly what happened. It turns out that working class immigrants do not answer a ton of surveys. But guess is that they swung 23 percentage points against the Democratic Party and so the crazy thing is, if you believe this, and there's some uncertainty, but I think some version of this is probably true, then something like half of the net votes that Trump received came from immigrants, and this wasn't efficient for him. It's one of the big reasons why the bias of the Electoral College went down by so much this cycle. Because if you look in the battleground states, things swung toward Trump maybe by like half a percentage point, and that was enough for him to win or 1 percentage point. But if you look at the four biggest states where immigrants are concentrated, New York, California, Texas, Trump did extremely well. And so it wasn't very efficient for him. But in terms of people changing their mind, it was a massive percentage of the story.

[Ezra Klein]

So this gets to another way that I think the data has proven conventional wisdom from at least 2020 wrong. So 2020, you have an election that Joe Biden wins. He wins by less than the polling says he will win by. And one reason he wins by less than the polling says he won by is that Donald Trump does much better with Hispanic and Asian voters than he was expected to. And I remember seeing pretty strong research afterwards and talking to people who study the Hispanic vote who are saying, well, in 2020, the pandemic really scrambled what the election was about. So in 2016, the election was about immigration. In 2020, it was about the pandemic, it was about lockdowns. It was me. And so Hispanic voters who were driven off of Trump by his border talk in 2016 were more likely to vote for him in 2020. But that was weird, right? It was the pandemic, in a way, moderating Donald Trump's appeal. 2024, Trump runs, I would say, to the right of where he was on the border in 2016.

[David Shore]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

We're talking mass deportations, we're talking more than a wall, and Trump does better among immigrant groups than he really ever has before. So the Democratic belief that when the topic turned back to immigration, you would see some of that polarization around Trump return and that he would be harmed in immigrant communities did not occur.

[David Shore]

No. Inflation probably played some kind of role here, though. The flip side is, if you look in the UK again, it happened the same year. It's just that the incumbent was right wing instead of left wing, and their labor did also drop with black and Asian and Hindu voters. And so I think that there's some kind of globalized right wing phenomena that's happening. It's hard to know exactly what, but I agree completely. So now I just move on to the next slide. Here we have Harris support by single age, year by race and gender. And one of the things you can see here is if you just look at 18 year olds, 18 year old women of color are the only of the four that Harris won. Trump narrowly won non white men.

[Ezra Klein]

So I do find this part of this chart shocking. I sometimes talk about narrative violations and I think if we knew anything about Donald Trump eight years ago, it's that young people did not like him. And Republicans are maybe throwing away young people for generations in order to run up their margins among seniors. But if you look at this chart, among white men, white men who were 75 years old supported Kamala Harris at a significantly higher rate than white men who are 20 years old.

[David Shore]

That's exactly right.

[Ezra Klein]

That's a real shift.

[David Shore]

It is a real shift. This is the thing I am the most shocked by, I think, in the last four years is that young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the baby boomers and maybe in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we've experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years. And so the next chart, just to.

[Ezra Klein]

Describe it, this chart in some ways convinced me to do this podcast.

[David Shore]

Oh, thank you.

[Ezra Klein]

This chart shocks me.

[David Shore]

I agree. This is to me the scariest chart in this entire presentation. And again, something I'm very surprised by. So on the bottom we have age, and at the top we have the gender gap in support between women and men for support for Kamala Harris. And so what you can see is that for voters over 30, the gender gap was fairly stable at around 10%, which is roughly where it's been in American politics.

[Ezra Klein]

And voters over 75, it's even lower.

[David Shore]

That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

It's a fairly low gender gap among older voters.

[David Shore]

Yeah. I think that a lot of people underestimate how recent the gender gap is. Historically, Republicans did better with women than men, and this was true across most of the west, that center left parties did better with men than women. And that's changed in the United States in the Clinton era, but it's been stable since then. But what's crazy is if you look at people who are under the age of 30, the gender gap has exploded. If you look at 18 year olds, 18 year old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support Donald Trump than 18 year old women, which is just completely unprecedented in American politics.

[Ezra Klein]

Is that abortion?

[David Shore]

You know, I think it's too early to say exactly what the cause is. What's interesting is that this is happening in other countries as well. Obviously different countries have different political systems, but I've seen similar patterns in Canada, in the uk, in Norway. There's a lot of research to do here, but it's still very striking. A lot of people talk about the Democratic young men problem, and I think it's still somehow underrated because the actual numbers are just a lot worse than.

[Ezra Klein]

People think the huge gender gap implies. To me, it's not just inflation. Women pay high prices for eggs too.

[David Shore]

Right. And I'll say if you look at the UK election last year, the Labour Party did a lot better because the incumbent party was unpopular. But I think what's interesting is that if you look at it by age, the Conservatives actually increased their vote share among 18 to 24 year old voters, I think by 2 or 3%, even though they did 8 or 9% worse overall. And so I do think it's not just inflation, it's not just backlash to the incumbent governments, though I'm sure that's part of the story too.

[Ezra Klein]

I feel like the story you're implying that you believe here is that this is polarization among young men and women driven by men who are in high school, who are young, who are online, particularly online During COVID as MeToo is cresting, as Jordan Peterson is a big figure, Andrew Tate is rising. You have what now gets called the manosphere. But there is a sense the Democratic Party's becoming much more pro women party and in some ways sort of anti young men, and that that just had a huge effect on young men's political opinions.

[David Shore]

Well, you know, I do want to just stress that this seems to be a global phenomena. And, you know, I don't want to over center the particular things the Democratic Party has done rather than, you know, the broader.

[Ezra Klein]

Peterson and Tate are global figures.

[David Shore]

No, exactly. What I'll say is I just think that we're in the midst of a big cultural change that I think that people are really underestimating. If you look at zoomers, there's just a lot of really interesting ways that they're very different in the data. They're much more likely than previous generations to say that making money is extremely important to them. They are a lot more, if you look at their psychographic data, they have a lot higher levels of psychometric neuroticism and anxiety than the people before them. If I was gonna speculate, I think that phones and social media have a lot to do with this. How that translates into partisan politics depends on what the parties do. But I think It's a big shift.

[Ezra Klein]

It seems plausible to me that social media, online culture are splitting the media that young men and women get. That if you are young and online and a 23 year old man who is interested in UFC, you're being driven into a very intensely male online world. Whereas if you are 23 years old and female and you are interested in things that the YouTube algorithm codes, that way you are not entering that world, you're actually entering the opposite world. You're seeing Brene Brown. Right. You're seeing these other things. The capacity to be in highly gendered media worlds is really different in 2024 than it was in 2004. And that's true worldwide.

[David Shore]

Yeah, I agree with that entirely. Online communities are way more gender segregated than offline communities are. And so in that respect, it should be unsurprising that suddenly shifting a bunch of young people's social worlds to be entirely online all at once caused the political situation to change.

[Ezra Klein]

So Democrats are getting destroyed now among young voters. I do think there was, even as the idea of the rising Democratic majority had become a little discredited in 2016 and 2020, I do think Democrats believed that these young voters were eventually gonna save them. That this was a last gasp of something. That if Donald Trump couldn't run these numbers up among seniors and you had millennials really coming into their voting power, Gen Z coming in, that was gonna be the end of this Republican Party. And that just completely false.

[David Shore]

Yeah, I mean, it might be the.

[Ezra Klein]

Beginning of this Republican Party.

[David Shore]

I have to admit, I was one of those liberals four years ago, and it seems like I was wrong. The future has a way of surprising us. The flip side of this is that Democrats made a bunch of gains among old voters. And I'm sure that they'll be happy that they did two years from now in the midterms. But if we don't do anything about this, then this problem could become very bad. And so now I'm just going to move over to a little less descriptive and just kind of talking about how this happened. So right here I have this slide. This is very simple. This is just showing exit poll favorability for the Democratic and Republican presidential candidate in 2020 and 2024. And I think it's just really important to ground any discussion of the election with the simple fact that Donald Trump was just as unpopular on election Day last year as he was in 2020, and maybe even a little bit more unpopular. But what changed is that Biden had a net favorability rating of plus 6. And Harris had a net favorability rating of minus 6.

[Ezra Klein]

So I want to play. Mike Donilon, who is chief strategist to Joe Biden, was recently at a forum, and he made an argument that I think you at least could read this chart as backing up, which is that Biden was more popular in 2020 than Harris was in 2024. Maybe the Biden. Harris switch was a mistake. Here's Donilon. I think folks who had this view.

[David Shore]

Believe that, you know, that Biden was going to lose. He didn't have it anymore.

[Ezra Klein]

He had to get out. That was the best thing for the party.

[David Shore]

I understand that's their view. Okay.

[Ezra Klein]

You know, I have a view, too. Right. And my view is they're really. I think.

[David Shore]

I think was insane. I think the party lost its mind.

[Ezra Klein]

Did the party lose its mind? And that's why we see this chart.

[David Shore]

I think the best explanation for why Kamala Harris was unpopular is in this next slide, which is just that the Biden administration was extremely unpopular for most of its term. They saw their approval fall off a cliff after Afghanistan, and then it dropped further as inflation and immigration and the budget fights all happened in the fall, and then it never recovered. And so, yeah, I don't know. I mean, you can never tell a counterfactual world, but I think that Biden would have had an even harder time distinguishing himself from his record.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, it'd be even harder for Joe Biden to run away from Joe Biden, I guess. Yeah. Looking at this chart, it looks like there is a by January, a plus 20 net disapproval. Maybe that was a little bit smaller in November, but it had been widening. I mean, you go back to beginning of 2023, it was narrower. People were really pissed at the Biden administration by the time we hit the election.

[David Shore]

Yeah, I think that that's the big salient fact about this election. And I don't think it was impossible for Kamala to do better. This was a winnable election. At the end of the day, it was very close, but this was the big thing that was weighing Democrats down. And so I just want to move forward just in terms of why in our polling, the way that we measure issue importance is we show people two random issues, and we just ask which of these problems is more important to the problems facing the country today. And people pick. And when you model it out, whenever you have cost of living or inflation put up against something else, 8 or 9 out of 10 people picked that cost of living, and inflation was more important.

[Ezra Klein]

What I find Notable here. I mean, yeah, cost of living was bigger than student debt. Fair, but. But you tested against immigration and border security. And the share of voters saying cost of living or inflation was more important was about 70%.

[David Shore]

That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

You tested it against abortion. Their cost of living or inflation was more important to about 80% of voters. Against environment and climate change. 84% of voters picked cost of living, inflation. One thing that the Biden people always believed was that this election would be very heavily about democracy itself. I mean, this was something that I was told by top Biden strategists going way back. I don't see democracies, Democracy on here. January 6, the stability of the system. Did you test that, too?

[David Shore]

No, we did, but we did a survey where we just asked people what's more important right now? Preserving America's institutions or delivering change that improves people's lives. And it was 78 to 18. Delivering change that improves people's lives. But what's really hard, I think this has been one of the hardest things about being a political consultant in the last eight years is that every day Trump does terrible things that I think are objectively awful and scary and that piss me off. You know, I'm gonna prosecute my enemies or, you know, whatever, and then we do a bunch of tests and voters really don't wanna hear about it, you know, from us. I think that Trump would do better if he didn't do that stuff for sure. But I think that, you know, voters want us to talk about, you know, concrete ways that they're gonna improve people's lives.

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[David Shore]

The New York Times app has all.

[Ezra Klein]

This stuff that you may not have seen.

[David Shore]

The way the tabs are at the.

[Ezra Klein]

Top with all of the different sections.

[David Shore]

I can immediately navigate to something that matches what I'm feeling, Play wordle or.

[Ezra Klein]

Connections, and then swipe over to read today's headlines.

[David Shore]

There's an article next to a recipe next to, next to games. And it's just easy to get everything in one place. This app is essential.

[Ezra Klein]

The New York Times app. All of the times, all in one place. Download it [e-mail] app there is an argument you hear from many Democrats there was no problem here except for inflation. That in fact, if you compare Democratic Vote outcomes with incumbent parties in many other countries, Democrats did better than incumbent parties in other countries did. So you look at the Conservatives in the uk, they had a much worse election result. You look at what happened to the ruling coalition in France, some ways, like Democrats were doing fine. They had a fairly modest drop in support. And it's just a shame for them that inflation happened on their watch, that if Donald Trump had won the 2020 election, inflation would have happened on his watch, completely discrediting him and his administration, and that would have been the end of them. How do you distinguish between. There is a broad structural problem the Democratic Party is facing that it needs to think about for 2028. And there's actually no problem here.

[David Shore]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's when we measure issues, we measure how important voters find it and then we just measure, do you trust Democrats or Republicans more on this issue? And what you see here is if you look at the top issues that voters care the most about, cost of living, the economy, taxes and government spending, the deficit, foreign policy, health care. Other than health care, where Democrats have a narrow lead, Republicans have massive trust advantages. 15 points on all of the issues that voters care the most about. And so the story that I would tell in response to your question is that in this election, voters trusted Republicans way more than Democrats on all of the most important issues, but also bought into this idea that Donald Trump was a terrible person who couldn't be trusted with power. That made the election be close. But four years from now, Donald Trump will not be the nominee, and maybe they'll nominate somebody who's just as terrible and just as unlikable. But if we don't get out of this trust deficit, I think that we'll have a lot of problems.

[Ezra Klein]

So this is, for people listening along. This is a chart broken into quadrants.

[David Shore]

That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

And the top right quadrant is issues that are very important and issues where Democrats are more trusted. And it's an untilled bit of farmland up there.

[David Shore]

That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

So there's mental health, which voters don't rate that important, but they do trust Democrats quite a bit more. They rate it higher than they rate, though. Climate change and the environment and abortion, which struck me as surprising. Their one bright spot is really healthcare. That's kind of it in terms of issues where it is quite important and they have a genuinely noticeable advantage.

[David Shore]

Yeah. I think it's just worth saying that four years ago, the number one issue was Covid and healthcare, and those also were the issues that people trusted Democrats the most on. And so the strategy was really obvious. Just talk a lot about COVID and healthcare. But you know, this time we had a much harder problem, which was that the issues that people cared the most about, for the most part, voters didn't trust us on. And the issues that people did trust us on, climate change and reproductive rights, probably the big ones voters just didn't care very much about. And so that was just a very difficult strategic position. And it's also one that was just very different than it was four years ago.

[Ezra Klein]

I just want to tick off some issues voters ranked as important that they trusted Republicans on and then ask you a question about it. So they thought cost of living, the economy and inflation were very important. Had a lot more trust in Republicans. They thought national security and foreign policy were important. Trusted Republicans. Taxes, government spending, government debt. Trusted Republicans. Crime, immigration. Trusted Republicans. Social Security. Trusted Republicans. That seems like a bad one for Democrats. Political division they thought was important. They trusted Republicans a bit more on that. In this data, if I looked over time, if I looked at 2016 and I looked at 2020, would I see on all of these that Republicans had advantages and Democrats were just winning on healthcare? How much of this is something flipping around as an incumbent penalty and sort of reaction to conditions in the country at that moment? And how much of it is a durable situation where Republicans have a trust advantage, where Democrats would have to act in a spectacular way over time to change voters impressions of them on that issue?

[David Shore]

You know, what we saw in our data was that as the Biden administration became a lot more unpopular, all of these things dropped a lot. So some of it was uniform shift. But I think that the last four years there were some things that structurally changed a lot in every center left party in the world. Generally the left has its issues that it owns and the right has its issues that it owns. But usually the economy is pretty neutral. During the Trump administration, the economy was fairly neutral. Another really big shift was just that education has gone from being basically one of the best issues for democracy Democrats to being something that's basically neutral now. And we saw that in the Virginia gubernatorial election in 2021. We even saw it be an advantage for Republicans. And then the other big shift on the other side was that reproductive rights used to be a fairly neutral issue for Democrats. And immediately after Dobbs, we saw party trusts on reproductive rights shoot up. And so I think these numbers, they do change. And this is one of the big messages I want to get through is just that the world that's changed A lot in the last four years. It's going to keep changing and we have to kind of adjust in response to what happens.

[Ezra Klein]

Tell me what's going on in this next slide because also, as I understand this is really very connected to the work you do specifically. So what are you doing here?

[David Shore]

One of the big things that my firm does, it's probably our biggest product, is that we do randomized controlled trials on ads. The idea is that for a given ad, you take 1,000 people, you split them into a treatment and control group. 500 people see the ad, 500 people don't. And then you, you survey them after and you ask them who they're voting for. And then the difference between treatment and control can be described as the causal effect. And so, you know, we tested on the order of, I'd say probably like 4 or 5,000 Harris ads last cycle. And I just wanted to call out these two ads that were in the top 1% of ads that we tested. One is from Kamala Harris.

[D]

I get it. The cost of rent, groceries and utilities is too high. So here's what we're going to do about it. We will lower housing costs by building more homes and crack down on landlords who are charging too much. We will lower your food and grocery bills by going after price gougers who are keeping the cost of everyday goods too high. I'm Kamala Harris and I approve this message because you work hard for your paycheck, you should get to keep more of it. As president, I'll make that my top priority.

[David Shore]

Obviously there's a lot for several parts of the Democratic coalition there. And then on the another ad by Future Forward just shows attacks him for a national sales tax for the idea that Trump tax.

[Ezra Klein]

Him being Trump.

[David Shore]

Yeah, attacks Trump.

[D]

He fights for himself and his billionaire friends. He intends to enact a national sales tax, the Trump tax, that would raise prices on middle class families by $4,000 a year. Instead of a tax hike, we will pass a middle class tax cut that will benefit more than 100 million Americans.

[Ezra Klein]

FFPAC is responsible for the content of this ad.

[David Shore]

These were obviously the best ads in the campaign. And the point I just want to say is I think this reinforces the point that what voters cared the most about was the cost of living and that voters were really mad about the actual situation. And I think that Harris being able to in this ad acknowledging, oh, things are actually very bad, I don't like this, I have a plan to fix this and is part of what made it so effective.

[Ezra Klein]

There is a view out there. Asad Jacobin had just done some research on this, which is a socialist publication, that at the beginning of the Harris campaign sprint, I mean, she was only the head of the Democratic ticket for three months. She was talking a lot about the economy and that by the end she was talking a lot about democracy. There was sort of phases of the Harris campaign and the first one was more populist and the last one was more institutional. From what you saw, was that true?

[David Shore]

I think that there was this big strategic question that Democrats faced. And it wasn't just the Harris campaign, which is polling would tell them you should talk about the economy or voters care a lot about the cost of living. But it's very hard, one, to get media attention on those things. And two, I think that Trump has done a good job of baiting us. I think what's really interesting about a lot of the democracy and authoritarian stuff is just that how concerned you are by it really varies a lot by political engagement and by education and the kind of people who set media decisions at CNN or who work in Baltics are the kinds of people who are going to be much more concerned about it than working class folks are.

[Ezra Klein]

But look, there is a difference between the Harris campaign was running the optimal David Shore strategy in late October of 2024, and they were not. The Harris campaign had access. Future Forward had access to all of this issue by issue polling. They had access to all this randomized ad testing. Did they run a heavily economic campaign and it didn't work? Or did they not run a heavily economic campaign at the end and it didn't work? Because look, if they did the thing and it didn't work, then maybe it just didn't work. Did they not do it?

[David Shore]

Asking the hard questions? Yeah, obviously I think that Democratic messaging last cycle was not economically focused enough. I think that it focused too much on narratives of defending institutions, defending democracy. And I think it's just very easy for folks to fall into that trap.

[Ezra Klein]

But why? Right. If they did that, and I heard this from different people, like, you know, David Plouffe is a smart guy. I'm not telling you to, I'm not asking you to critique David Plouffe. I can watch you getting physically uncomfortable as I harm your business here.

[David Shore]

Right, right, right.

[Ezra Klein]

But these people all wanted to win. They really did. Like every single one of them. And they had a lot of data. So I think this has been a thing on my mind. If they weren't running the optimal strategy, why, for instance, it's very Easy to get media attention for anti price gouging policies because there's a lot of controversy over them about whether or not they worked. But they did make people talk about whether or not you were gonn an anti price gouging policy. This is a Donald Trump move. Constantly announce a policy that probably doesn't work or is in some way outrageous or beyond the bounds of political possibility. Maybe it's even all that popular when you poll. But you get people talking about you having a very strong view. You're going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Everybody knows Mexico isn't going to pay for it. But you are talking about how Donald Trump hates immigration and it breaks through. It is not rocket science to get people to pay attention. If Bernie Sanders had been running in the campaign, people would have paid attention to his economic messaging because he does economic messaging that creates conflict. If it was really this big delta between the economic push and the institution's push, and the institution's push is what got made, or at least got made more than one, it should have. Why?

[David Shore]

The thing I'll say in terms of why I'm sympathetic to the people who actually had these jobs and had to make these decisions is it just feels wrong. I have a situation, I mentioned this before, where donors will email me and they'll be like, oh, look at this crazy, absolutely terrible thing, this evil thing that Trump is doing. We need to test it. We need to tell the voters, you test it, and it really doesn't work. People want to hear about eggs. And it's easy for me to say that because I don't really. I'm not directly in charge, but I just think it just feels really wrong when you're in the moment. It's just very hard to totally shift direction just because data tells you one thing.

[Ezra Klein]

I do think the campaign photo ops that we all remember at the end are telling, which is it was an extraordinary visual. Harris at the Ellipse. And then there were the visuals of Donald Trump at a garbage truck and Donald Trump at McDonald's. And there was a ridiculousness to those visuals. I saw a lot of liberals making fun of them on. On various social media platforms. But there was something about which visuals are being chosen by the two candidates. I mean, of the two of them, only Kamala Harris had actually worked at a McDonald's.

[David Shore]

Sure.

[Ezra Klein]

But she wasn't the one who ended up putting on the apron and getting photographed at McDonald's. And there's a thing about what the candidates end up wanting to do. That is meaningful, too. And I do think there's a way in which I wonder if that explains part of what we ended up seeing.

[David Shore]

Each coalition's campaigns are ultimately gonna reflect the aesthetic and cultural choices of the people who staff them. And it makes sense. Like if you had just said two years ago, oh, Trump's gonna end by showing up at a McDonald's, it just wouldn't have been surprising, I think. And so it's just hard to escape that kind of demographic poll. But we have to try because we have to actually win these people over. Okay. And so now I just have a couple more slides I want to go through. I talked about this before, but voters cared a lot more about delivering change than preserving institutions. And then we have this other polling question here, which I think is interesting, which is just asking people to pick between the statements. Things could be going better in America, but what we need is a return to basic stability. And the other is things in America are going poorly, and what's needed is a major change and a shock to the system. And when you have those Two things, it's 53, 37, which is a lot wider than the election result ended up being.

[Ezra Klein]

What really strikes me about this is that sometimes I read polls and the wording is pretty clearly there to make something sound better than the other thing. Things could be going better in America, and what is needed is return to basic stability from whoever becomes president, and things in America are going poorly, and what is needed is a major change and a shock to the system from whoever becomes president. I would in some ways say the second there is worded to turn people off a little bit, it sounds disruptive. Crisis, a shock. Right. It's not just major change. It is something beyond that, and it dominates. I guess I have a question about this, which is, on the one hand, we see lines like that out polling the incremental change everywhere. On the other hand, if you look at the new split ticket ratings for who overperformed in the election, very moderate House Democrats did very well. There does seem to me to be a tension between two forms of political wisdom that both have data behind them right now, which is that voters want huge, massive change. And like the optimal political strategy is Joe Manchin or Jared Goldin or Ruben Gallego, Susan Collins, who are not people who promise unbelievably shocking change. They are moderates who kind of tack between the parties a little bit and try to represent a center that wants something a little bit less dramatic than either side is offering. How do you reconcile them there's an.

[David Shore]

Enormous amount of status quo bias in politics. Campaigning on big policy changes can be pretty unpopular. But I think, you know, the way to thread the needle is that what this is really saying is that voters were very angry about the state of things. And what they wanted tonally was someone who acknowledged that anger because, you know, Ruben and Gallego did a lot of criticism of the status quo and was able to outperform.

[Ezra Klein]

So people on an angry moderate.

[David Shore]

That's right. I think that's exactly right.

[Ezra Klein]

I always think of temperament and ideology as being separate axes in American politics, that we connect too much. So we think about people who are moderates often have the moderate temperament. What this is implying is what people want are moderate policies in a more revolutionary or certainly more upset temperament. Yeah, we're pissed. But not ideologically extreme about it. It's like a funny chant. But.

[David Shore]

Yeah, no, I think that's right. When people think about moderates, they think of somebody like Joe Manchin, someone who's just like down the line on everything and the reality. I think that's an accurate description of what highly educ. Moderates are alike. But most low socioeconomic status moderates, they're very extreme on some issues, they're very conservative on other issues. When you think of that, it's maybe less surprising that a lot of them like Donald Trump.

[Ezra Klein]

Back in 2016, I wrote a piece about Donald Trump that has one of these headlines that now people will sometimes screenshot and be mad at me about. But it's called something like, Donald Trump is a perfect moderate. And the point of the piece was not that he's not extreme, because I think he is extremely. But that the way his politics worked, particularly on the campaign trail in things he said was it was internally disorganized. So he'd be extremely far right on immigration, but compared to other Republicans, much more centrist on things like Medicare and Social Security. He would talk about giving healthcare to everybody, even though Republicans wouldn't like that. He talked about raising taxes on people like him, not how he governed. But there's a lot of research that actual moderates like people in the elected who are moderate. It's not that they have a in between the two parties view on everything. It's that they might believe in completely legalized weed on the one hand and mass deportations on the other, that they. It's like if you imagine positions as like being they can be very liberal or very conservative, they average out to moderate as opposed to being consistently moderate.

[David Shore]

That's exactly right. And the way I like to put that, in math terms, the issue correlations for highly educated people are just a lot higher than they are their eyebrows.

[Ezra Klein]

Get excited when you do math terms.

[David Shore]

Yeah, no, I'm sorry. All right. But I'm glad we started talking about ideology, because that dovetails to the next slide. Here we just ask for each of the candidates, do you think this candidate was more liberal than me, more conservative than me, or close to my views? 49% of voters said that. That Kamala Harris was more liberal than me, while only 39% of voters said that Donald Trump was more conservative than me. And so there was this big ideological perception gap where a lot of voters saw Donald Trump as more moderate than Kamala Harris.

[Ezra Klein]

What did this look like in 2016 and 2020?

[David Shore]

So in 2016, it looked fairly similar to this. In 2020, perceptions of Donald Trump being too extreme went up relative to 2016, and perceptions of the Democratic candidate being too extreme went down from 2016 to 2020. Now, that, I think wasn't a property of Joe Biden, per se. Obviously, him being moderate was a big part of his brand at that time. But in our polling, we would ask, do you think that Joe Biden is too liberal or too conservative or whatever? And we saw that over the course of 2021, as his approval ratings dipped, the perception that he was too liberal also went up.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, it's also true that. That Joe Biden became more liberal, like in terms of how he governed and in terms of what he ran on. So you're saying that in the 2020 election, you actually did see people say that they were ideologically closer to Biden than to Trump.

[David Shore]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

And then over time, that eroded.

[David Shore]

That eroded. But the thing I want to say here before I move on is I'm really not trying to beat up on Kamala Harris here. I think if you just step back, if you have a situation where only 42% of Americans trust the Democratic Party on the economy relative to 50 for Republicans, obviously the standard bearer of the Democratic Party is going to be perceived as too left wing unless they do a lot of stuff to try to counterbalance that.

[Ezra Klein]

I mean, people were living under the Biden Harris administration, whatever they thought of it. The line Trump would sometimes deliver on Harris, which in many ways is unfair. If you're a super politically engaged voter and you have a lot of thoughts about the powers of the vice presidency. But to most people, if you have all these great ideas, why don't you do them in the last four years while you're vice president was a pretty strong argument.

[David Shore]

I think there's a good argument that given that, you know, it's amazing that we did as well as we did, but it was a close election and so I don't, you know, who knows what the counterfactual could have been. Foreign.

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[Ezra Klein]

What's my subscription to the New York Times have me doing this week? Preparing a strawberry pretzel pie solving spelling bee with no hints. Planning a trip to one of the 52 best places to go, Getting to the bottom of the big pants trend. And I'm finally replacing my vacuum with a recommendation I can trust. What will your subscription to the Times have you do? Why not find out with our best offer? Go to nytimes.com I want to note something as a dog that is not barking across this presentation. Yeah, if you look at punditry about the election that if everybody agrees on anything, it's that the election was a huge verdict on wokeness. Famously one of Trump's higher testing ads was this. Kamala Harris is for they them. Donald Trump is for you. As you're sort of running through this, I'm not saying you're saying DEI programs are popular, but I'm not seeing it emerge as a major explanation for 2024 here. I'm curious how you both think about it in the election and think about the role that's playing in the post election narrative.

[David Shore]

I just want to say the they them ad that everybody talks about, it was a good ad but it was like a 70th percentile ad in our testing. If you look at all of the best testing ads from Donald Trump, it was basically the economy, it was gas prices, it was immigration crime. And so I think that there's definitely been an over focus on dei, on wokeness, on trans issues. I think it definitely played a role on the elite discourse and why so many tech CEOs have become more right wing and all of that. But I think the Republicans are making a mistake honestly to focus on these things so much relative to concrete issues that people actually care about. I think that there's this bigger picture point I want to make where I think that a lot of people see the Trump administration as kind of a break that shows that all of the traditional rules of politics no longer apply. And I think that to some extent that's wrong, that a lot of what's happening is really very easy to understand. Donald Trump, to go back to the ideological thing, he broke with his party, he might have been dishonest about it, but he disavowed Project 2025. He said that he wouldn't cut social programs. He ruled out a national abortion ban. And I think that that kind of thing just plays a big role in his success. And I think that a lot of these newer things that we talk about might be less important than we think. So now I just have the last slide of the retrospective. What I have here is we have the share of voters who get their news from TikTok. By year, the share of voters, of young voters who get their news from TikTok more than quadrupled in the last four years. This is the biggest and probably fastest change in media consumption that has happened in my lifetime. And it was quite correlated with support change. Now, obviously, obviously, TikTok users are younger, they're less politically engaged. It's not surprising that we dropped among this group. You'd expect that from demographics. But if you go and you do the regressions, I think there was definitely a causal element there. And when you zoom in, particularly to people who get their news from TikTok who don't care very much about politics, this is a group that's 8 percentage points more Republican than they were four years ago. And that's a lot.

[Ezra Klein]

So by the end of the election, Donald Trump is promising to save TikTok. One possible explanation then for TikTok users shifting towards Trump is that they like TikTok and they didn't want it to be taken away from them. Another, which people have worried about quite a bit, is that the company behind TikTok could very easily have been turning dials just softly. Right. It's not that nothing that is liberal does well on TikTok. I've seen videos of me get posted there and do very well on TikTok, but that it would not be hard to turn up the dial a little bit on issues that are tricky for Democrats. When you look at this data, do you think it is something about TikTok? Do you think it is something about TikTok's audience just being young people who are seeing this movement, or does it make you suspect dial turning?

[David Shore]

I don't know the answer to that. It's totally possible. We know that they do dial turning on some topics like stuff like Ukraine or Tiananmen Square or whatever. But what I'll say is I think that TikTok represents something fairly radically different than social networks that came before it. And I'm sure that there could be some malfeasance on the part of people who work there. But the thing that I think about sometimes is just that I think TikTok is really the first social media platform that is really truly decentralized. And what I mean by that is just it's not based on follower graphs. Like if you look at Reels or Twitter or whatever, how many people see a video or a piece of content is highly correlated with how many followers that person has. TikTok's a lot more random and there's very interesting machine learning reasons for why, but I think that it really allowed a lot of content that never would have gotten a lot of views on Twitter or on television to suddenly escape containment and get directly into the eyes of people who don't care that much about politics. And I don't know, you could tell a story that maybe just anti incumbent stuff is going to do really well on TikTok and Democrats are going to do great now. I don't really know, but I think that for whatever reason, this big change I think really did help Republicans and it's just an example of how the world has really changed a lot.

[Ezra Klein]

So I know that you're near Democratic, both freakout and funding world. I hear a lot, lot from Democrats about how to fix what they now call their media problem. Or sometimes you hear the TikTok problem. When you look at this, do you think this is something that an established political party and a bunch of donors can do something about? Or do you think this is a TikTok is a vibes machine and basically for reasons of inflation, for reasons of incumbency, for reasons of a censorious Democratic party that people gotten tired of, the vibes are bad for Democrats in 2024. And vibes machines like TikTok, like some of the other social media things, they're going to be an amplifier of bad vibes. So it's not really a thing to do in the sense of strategy. What you're trying to do is be culturally, both in terms of the candidates you have and the actual things you say and believe culturally a better product. And then the things that pick up good cultural products and amplify them are going to be friendlier to.

[David Shore]

I think there's a lot of truth in that. I think that TikTok is genuinely strange relative to platforms before it, in that its audience is more politically disengaged and more working class and I think it's just been very hard for us as a party to find creators and content that appeals to people like that, because all of the people who work in Democratic politics are not like that. And I think that in the old traditional media world, we were a lot like the media gatekeepers. And so it was kind of clear how to win that war. Democrats did a good job of doing it, but now we have a totally different fight. So just to move on and talk a little bit about the present, as opposed to the long, long time ago of four or five months ago. So you've talked a lot in your previous episodes about Trump's flood the zone strategy. And what we've done here is we've pulled all his executive orders and stuff that he's campaigned on. I think we have something like 60 dots here. Every one of these dots is a policy that we've polled. And what you can see is that there's a lot of variance. A lot of the things that he campaigned on, no taxes, on tips, deploying the military to the border, voter ID laws, ending remote work for federal employees, a lot of that stuff is very popular. While the flip side is a lot of stuff that he's actually doing, he talks about this stuff less. But Medicaid cuts, repealing the aca, extending tax cuts to billionaires, a lot of that stuff is really unpopular. I mean, just to say something a little controversial, I think a lot of the challenge of the Trump era is that they're going to try to bait us, and we should do everything we can to actually meaningfully resist and protect populations that we care about and everything. But I think we need to make sure that we're preserving a considerable amount of time to attacking Trump on the most effective things that voters are concerned about.

[Ezra Klein]

You've used the term bait a few times. They're gonna try to bait us. I think of a political party baiting you as dangling something in front of you that they know is going to make you mad. But it isn't that big of a deal. They're doing mass firings around critical functions. They're destroying usaid, they're arrogating huge amount of executive power. The set of things that I find Democrats are really worried about at the moment, on the one hand, I suspect they're not the things that the public cares about, wants to hear that much about, you know, making a podcaster, the deputy director of the FBI. But at the same time, they're not baiting. They're real. They're important. Like, what is the Point of a party that will not fight those. There's sometimes, I think this thought of the party that's just gonna, I mean, James Carville's been playing saying Democrats should basically play dead for a while and wait until the Trump administration's unpopular actions destroy the Trump administration but don't get in the way. Or there's this version of a party that various things Hakeem Jeffries has said at different points have sounded like this to people. I thinking is a little bit more complicated than this. But we're not going to run after all these things. We're going to focus on the price of eggs, price of goods. You can really lose your own base if you're not defending democracy when they care about democracy because you're waiting for an opportunity to attack prices. Am I getting what you're saying right? Is there a way of threading the needle? How do you think about that?

[David Shore]

You could imagine a theoretical world where we would have really hard and unpleasant trade offs, but I think the world we actually live in is that a bunch of the things that we're extremely concerned about are actually really unpopular and just kind of going forward to the next slide. Here's some randomized controlled trial data that we did like I was talking about earlier with the ads where we just kind of went through and we looked at 58 different things that Trump's going to do and then we kind of rank ordered them by how persuasive they were at actually changing people's votes and making people disapprove of Trump. And I think, I think that a lot of the things that we're most concerned about Elon causing chaos in the federal government, cuts to Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security, extending tax breaks for the rich. Obviously, this list of things is not exactly the same as my top five things that I am personally most concerned about with the Trump administration. But I think that the Republicans are making a lot of unforced errors that make it easier to thread the needle needle on these things than I think it otherwise would be.

[Ezra Klein]

True. But these are also pretty small changes in Trump disapproval. If I'm reading what this chart is right, if Democrats attack Trump for cutting Medicare and Social Security or wanting to cut Medicare and Social Security, that increases Trump disapproval by 2.5 points. If they attack him for letting Elon slash budgets, hurting Americans and putting privacy at risk, that hurts him by 2.2 points. Going down, passing a one party power grab to cut government services without compromise, that's 2.1 points. These kind of all look the same and none of them are very big.

[David Shore]

Can you just think for a second? Can you imagine 70 words? You stop a Trump voter on the street and you say the 70 words to him and then there's a 2.5% chance he changed his mind. I think that's incredible. I think it is a big deal. I just think that these two pieces of data tell a story of how we should try to shape the campaign against Trump in the next couple months, which is that he is wrecking havoc in the federal government. I think that is consistent with our principles and also something that voters are very concerned about. And I think that a lot of this critique of Trump is really very similar to the campaign that we ran against Mitt Romney. And I think that this kind of gets back to what I was saying before of I feel like we were so shocked by Trump that we kind of forgot that the old rules of politics.

[Ezra Klein]

I want to read two of these because I think something you just said is important when we're talking about these old laws of politics. So here's the these are all high polling, high testing messages, but this is the lowest one on the chart. So Trump is working to repeal a law that lowers the cost of healthcare and prescription drug costs and caps insulin costs at 35amonth for seniors. By repealing this law, Trump will increase the cost of life saving medicine for millions and create more financial strain when costs are already too high. So that increases Trump disapproval by 1.9 points. I think that is as like right down the middle a Democratic message as you could possibly imagine. That does not test as well as Trump is letting Elon Musk slash federal budgets with no oversight, checks or balances. Musk gave $250 million to Trump's campaign, and now Trump is letting Musk reshape the government in ways that advance Musk's interests, even if they hurt working Americans by cutting the basics like Medicaid and public schools. I am actually surprised that the Elon Musk attack is out polling the insulin attack. And it's interesting because I see this in Trump voters in my own life. Some of the ones I know, they're actually not happy with what's going on in the Trump administration. There's a lot they don't like. There's a lot going on, but too much. But Musk creeps him out.

[David Shore]

I think it's really telling that Elon stuff floats to the top here because it's really very hard for something to be competitive with. Protect Social Security and Medicare and the fact that. That there are multiple Elon things up at the top I think really does tell a story, that there's something really unusual about what he's doing. It's very easy to tie what he's doing to harming individual people in ads. One of the clearest patterns in ads is that getting a real person and just having them stare at a camera and talk about the ways that Republicans have personally hurt them, it's the best content. It's funny. If you hire actors, it doesn't work as well. People have tried. That's why, in some ways, I am optimistic that Democrats will be able to thread the coalitional needle here, because the two things that we should do is fight against social welfare cuts and also attack Elon Musk for the chaos he's creating. And I think that that's something that basically every wing of the party should be on board with.

[Ezra Klein]

Donald Trump is polling better than he was at this point in his first term. And the vibes have really shifted in a pro Trump direction. And look at how much he and Elon Musk are doing. And I've certainly talked to Republicans who have this feeling that Trump has unlocked a sort of political juggernaut here, that he has cracked the code of American politics. But this slide is titled Trump is Vulnerable. So why is he vulnerable?

[David Shore]

The most predictable thing in American politics, and we get surprised every single time it happens, is a president comes in, he wins a trifecta, and then he does a bunch of unpopular stuff, he overreaches, and then he becomes very unpopular and loses big in the midterm terms. That doesn't mean you can't avoid the cycle, but I think that in order to avoid it, when you look at the people who did the best job, Clinton in 1998 or Kennedy in 1962, they did it by engaging in an enormous amount of policy restraint. And that is just not what Trump has been doing at all. And I think that you can just see in the data that his approval rating is dropping pretty quickly, and you can see that he's just pissing off lots of people and that a lot of the stuff that he's doing and drawing attention toward is really quite unpopular.

[Ezra Klein]

There is this reality of the coalitional realignment you were talking about at the beginning, which is Democrats now have this higher information, higher engagement coalition. Those are the people who turn out in midterms disproportionately. If I were a moderate Republican right now, now, or a Republican in any way vulnerable, I know they're all afraid of Elon Musk and they're afraid of primaries. I'd be pretty afraid of losing. As you showed earlier, if only 2022 voters had come out in 2024, Harris would have won. You gotta be pretty confident in Donald Trump's political skills to think that he is gonna shift that dynamic.

[David Shore]

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. But that said, it gets to this tension in all of these Democratic soul searching conversations, which is if Democrats do nothing really, they'll probably be okay in 2026 because all of these voters who get their news from TikTok, who don't care about politics, these voters under 25, they just really are not going to vote very much in the midterms. But if we don't fix this problem, then four years from now we could be in the same trust deficit on all of these core issues. And these voters that didn't turn out in 2026 will come back and except we'll be running against a candidate who's a lot less unpopular potentially than Trump. And we'd be in a real problem, a real pickle.

[Ezra Klein]

How about the Senate? So you and I did a big piece on kind of debates about populism a couple years ago. It involved a model that you had and that model was predicting in 2022, but specifically 2024, Democratic Senate annihilation.

[David Shore]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

And Democrats are down a couple seats in the Senate. It's, what is it, 53, 47. It's not a good map for them in 2026. And they did lose some seats that were really important to them, like Tester in Montana and Brown in Ohio. How do you see the Democratic Senate future?

[David Shore]

If you had told me in 2019, when I started worrying about the 2024 Senate election that we would have 47 seats, I would have jumped for Joe. The really big factors there is Republicans ran a bunch of really terrible candidates in a bunch of swing races. And it turns out those Democratic candidates did a good job of distancing themselves from the party. I don't want to spend too much time speculating about the 2026 map, but I think that even though the bias in the electoral College has gone down quite a bit because of this swing among immigrants, that doesn't really change that the Senate. It's very hard for Democrats to take the Senate unless they can consistently outperform how Harris did and how Biden did in most of the country. These problems won't be fixed unless we spend the next two years or four years changing the party's brand. Among Working class voters who are overrepresented in the Senate. Okay. The one exception to this, I think, and this is just controversial and might get me in trouble, is I think that if you look in Nebraska, the single biggest over performance that we had was Osborne running as an independent. He outperformed the top of the ticket by 7.1%. Now, obviously, Nebraska is an extremely red state, and I think that we've only ever tried this strategy of running people who are literally formally not tied to the Democratic Party in extremely red states. But I think the argument for doing that kind of thing in merely red states in places like Florida or places like Ohio or Iowa, those are hard questions. And it's not up to me what we end up doing, but I think it's something that we have to really seriously consider. And then that also just brings up the really awkward point of, well, what do we do with the reality that by land area in most parts of the country, it's almost impossible for a Democrat or someone with a Democrat on their ticket to win?

[Ezra Klein]

What do you do about the reality the Democratic brand is toxic in, yeah, most of the land area in the country. You always have to be careful at which conversation you're having is the conversation, can Democrats win in 2026 or 2028? And the answer there is yes. If the conversation is, how do you get back to a place where you're putting states in play that Democrats have just kind of given up on? Mitch McConnell's retiring in Kentucky. There's a Democratic governor in Kentucky. It's not literally true that no Democrat can ever win there. I don't think anybody seriously thinks so that a Democrat is going to win Mitch McConnell's seat. Because the Democratic brand nationally, which is different than its kind of state party brand, is pretty bad. And people understand when they're voting for Senate, they're voting for the national brand. So you've been thinking about this for a long time. If you were trying to think about reversing these much deeper trends, these educational trends, if your whole point in life was to make Democrats competitive again in Florida, in Missouri, in Kansas. Right. Not the reddest states, but states that they were competitive in a couple of years ago, what would you advise Democrats to do?

[David Shore]

Democrats are not in power right now, and so we don't have agenda control. And I think a lot of this just depends on what Trump does and then who replaces Trump. Something I'll say going back to the first time that Trump was president, is that when we were looking at polling of non college whites and these Obama Trump voters, their approval rating for Trump was really very stable for most of his term. And the only time that it declined was when Trump tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But once that was out of the news, they switched back. At this moment, given that there is no party leader, I think it's mostly a question of if Trump does successfully push a bunch of welfare state cuts, then that might change the realignment. But I think realistically, at least until 2026, it's mostly a function of what Republicans do. But when we pick a new presidential candidate, that will be a reset. And I think it's, I don't think it's too early to talk about that, but I think that you could imagine us picking candidates who would do a much better job.

[Ezra Klein]

I think that is a good place to end, always. Our final question, what are three books you recommend to the audience?

[David Shore]

I want to just call out Hollow Parties by Danny Shazman. He's a good friend of mine. And I think it's. And Samros and Sam Rosenfeld, of course, my old colleague. Yes. I think it's hard to talk about a lot of these questions that I was kind of dodging about why parties were doing what they did without kind of reading that. The other thing I want to call out is something that was usually influential for how I think about politics. This is a really nerdy pick. But the Origin and Nature of Mass Opinion by Zoller kind of gets at this question of how much does what people say in surveys matter, matter versus how much of it is downstream of what people are saying, what elites are saying? And I think his answer is mostly elites, but both. And then the last thing I just wanted to call out was Victory Lab by Sasha Eisenberg. It kind of talks a lot about the history of the Democratic analytics industry. A lot of the stuff that these numbers that I've shared here come out of that machine. And so if you're just interested in the history of the Democratic Party's internal analytics and research structure, it's the only book, really that's ever been written about it.

[Ezra Klein]

David Shore, thank you very much.

[David Shore]

Thank you.

[Ezra Klein]

This episode of the Ezra Klein show is Produced by Jack McCordick, Fact Checking by Michelle Harris, Mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Amin Sohota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, and Kristin Lin. We have original Music by Pat McCusker, Audience Strategy by Christina Simulewski, and Shannon Busta, the executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

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