The Daily Beast Podcast - Eric Adams Is The Kind of Democrat That Liberals Ignore w/ David Shorr

Episode Date: July 4, 2021

New York City mayoral candidate Eric Adams, Black anti-racist, pro-cop former cop, is a walking anomaly. “There's an entire group of voters who aren't being represented here. And I think Eric Adams kind of represents what they want,” data scientist David Shor tells Molly Jong-Fast on this episode of The New Abnormal. Plus, the two also discuss how Dems can keep their majority in the House, and why this state election may actually be a good indicator if they’ll be able to pull it off. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another special bonus episode of the new abnormal. We thank you so much for being here. Today we're lucky enough to be joined by David Shore, who is the head of data science at Open Labs R&D and an Obama campaign veteran. And he's going to talk to us all about what he's been seeing for the upcoming elections. One thing before we get started, if you want an alert when each bonus episode from the new abnormal drops, you could subscribe in your member dashboard. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash newsletters to sign a

for email alerts. Welcome back to the new abnormal, David Chor. Hey. Since you've been here last time, you've become incredibly famous. Oh, thank you. That's very nice. Or is it? It seems to me, even though we're like still a year plus away from the midterms, that we have like Steve Bannon steering the ship on this sort of insane critical race theory

is going to win Republicans the midterms. What do you say? My personal take on politics is that the way that you win elections is to talk about popular issues that people care about using language that people can understand. And I'm personally pretty skeptical that critical race theory matches that. Something that I think is interesting, you know, there are these long debates, you know, between self-described moderates and self-describe liberals about, you know, what's controversial and what's not. And I think that a lot of times we look at things that are controversial. among highly educated liberals to be the same as the things

that are highly controversial among the working class. So one example is in left-wing circles, people talk a lot about trans rights. And a lot of people are really afraid that trans rights could be this new wedge issue that Republicans could use to mobilize people. But the best data we have on that is that there is a Democratic governor

in North Carolina right now because of who won in a state that Trump won. because of what McGorry did. You know, I think Republicans, when they, you know, look at wedge issues, it's important to focus on issues that people actually care about. I don't think that there's this actual, like, I think people have concerns about crime. I think people had concerns or have concerns about immigration, at a really deep fundamental level, but when you start talking about these highly intellectual issues,

you know, like cancel culture, like critical race theory, and you get into these abstract discussions about what it is, freedom of speech really means, I'm skeptical. And, you know, I think on top of that, I think that when you look at what parties people trust, you know, what issues people trust the different parties on, Democrats have a huge advantage in education. You know, one of the reasons that I've always been, you know, really cautious, I think, about immigration is that generally speaking, if you ask people, you know, what parties, what do you trust people on? People trust the center left. They trust Democrats on issues like education and on health care, and they trust Republicans on issues like crime and immigration.

And so I think that pivoting the conversation to education puts us on a really favorable terrain. I think that there's a lot of examples of Republican governors, you know, trying to interfere with the school system and even very conservative people, you know, pushing back. So I'm, you know, I could be surprised. I'm not, I'm not super confident in this. But I'm personally happy that the Republican Party is spending all of this time. talking about things that I don't think that anyone really cares about. Me too. Like, there definitely seems to be a lot of tea leave reading going on from this mayoral election, too. And I'm curious to know what your take on this is. The conventional wisdom is that, and I mean conventional wisdom, I don't necessarily agree with it, is that Eric Adams has won or is probably going to win the

mayororship because he is less progressive and because he is, you know, sort of, I don't even know how to explain what he is. Similar to what David just said, though, is a former Republican that's a cop and they trust that side on crime. But do you think that's why he got elected or do you think that it's other things that got him elected? Because I'm curious. Yeah. I mean, obviously, primary is very complicated. There's a lot of randomness. You could easily imagine a world where folks had coalesced around Wiley and she won or something like that. I think that something that comes out of the New York Democratic primary is, you know, the New York Democratic primary electorate, very different than a general electorate. But something that comes through very clearly is just the

influence of black voters, you know, that Adams won because of an extremely strong showing among black voters. And something that, you know, I like to talk about in the context of American politics, is that ideology doesn't vary very much by race. If you ask people, do you identify as liberal, moderate, or conservative, roughly the same proportions of white, black, and Hispanic voters answer, liberal, moderate, or conservative. It's about 20% liberal, 40% conservative, 40% moderate. And the reason that works numerically, given that obviously partisanship varies quite a bit by race,

is that most black and Hispanic voters identify as moderate or conservative. And I think that when you look at national democratic politics, you know, there's this large mass of non-liberal black and Hispanic voters who don't really have a voice. You know, the Democratic Party is largely defined by the priorities of highly educated white liberals. But in New York, there's enough non-white voters that they actually can go through and have a voice. And I think that, you know, what they want is something like Eric Adams, you know, where I think it's really interesting because the one take that everyone says about Eric Adams is that he's weird,

that he's hard to put into ideological buckets. But, you know, he believes that there should be extensive police reform and that policing is racist in a lot of ways. And he also believes that there should be more police officers in the street and that crime is a big concern. And I think what's interesting is that that view that we should have police reform, but also that we should hire more police officers, is held by probably nearly a majority of this country. Yes. And it's popular with African Americans, too. It's popular with African Americans, which is, you know, why you did so well.

But it's popular with Americans overall, too. And I think the fact that it seems so strange and born to us is because our political discourse has been really captured by people like us on both sides. That, like, the conservative position is what educated white conservatives believe in the liberal position is what, you know, liberal white people believe, but there's a whole group of people who, like most of the country, is not college educated, median voters, 50 years old, doesn't have a college degree, and doesn't strongly identify with either left or right-wing politics. And so I think you get something like Eric Adams, though, of course, Eric Adams, much more, you know, much more progressive. I mean, I was joking when I listened to him in the debates, just lovingly talking about

how he brings guns to churches, I was just thinking, man, I wish he was a congressperson running and, you know, swing district. It's a little wasted on New York City. But I think it's a real reminder that our base isn't exactly like what we think. You know, national democratic politicians, in order to get ahead, you basically have to raise a lot of money and the donor base is extremely white and extremely educated. And then you have to get a lot of buzz. And buzz is defined by what, you know, highly liberal young people on social media or bookers on

TV like. It's not the same thing you need to win. Well, it's not ideal for for picking who's going to win. But I just, it shows a real, there's a real missing, I don't want to say middle, but there's an entire group of voters who aren't being represented here. You know, I think Eric Adams kind of represents, you know, what they, what, what they want. It's interesting to me, because it's like after Trump won, there were tons and tons and tons and tons of interviews of, you know, men in diners who were white Republicans who voted for Trump, who we had sort of neglected in the media. But there haven't been tons and tons and tons of interviews of like Eric Adams voters, right, of African American Democrats who are more conservative than this kind of than the Twitter world,

for lack of a better metaphor. And so I think that is something that needs to happen more, is there needs to be more coverage of that, because that really is a big base in the Democratic Party. But I also had a question which was, in my mind, as soon as this election started, I sort of, once it seemed like Andrew Yang wasn't going to win, I sort of always thought Eric Adams was going to win because he has this real constituency. I mean, I think that's right. You know, for all to talk about RCB, if you have an 11-way race and you can get a third of the population behind you, that's just like a real win. And I just think it reminds me a lot of the Democratic primary, where you had all of these different people fighting to be the progressive candidate.

You know, I think Eric Adams had a great quote. You know, people on Social Security win elections. And I think this is the biggest cognitive bias. It's just people who write about politics for a living. People who work in politics for a living, they're incredibly young. And again, you know, the median voter in a general election context is 50 years old. And in the context of the New York Democratic primary, the median voter was probably like 60, something like, you know, probably something like 35, 40% of people who are over the age of 65.

And so politics, for better or for worse, is about catering to the views of people who vote. Right. So let's talk about the midterms now. We're careening into the midterms. You know, we have this redistricting, which means that it's going to be very hard for Democrats to keep the House. What's your take when it comes to Congress? It's a very interesting question, the most important question of our era, which is that you kind of have these two competing, models of the world. The first is that historically, over the last 30 years, whatever party

controls the presidency just experiences big losses. On average, they average about 46, 47% of the boat. Even how our lines, I mean, obviously, you just lose the 46% of the vote. It's not even gerrymandering issue. But, you know, given the max, we need to get something like 51.5 to 52% of the boat in order for us to maintain our trifecta. And so, you know, that's a really powerful model of the world. Historically, you could really do very well, even if you're a very well, even ignoring the polls and just saying, you know, whatever party's out of power is going to get about 47%. And there's a lot of research on this. But politics has changed a lot, you know, in the last four years or in the last eight years. And another really powerful model of the world is that

everything is just going to stay the same and nothing changes. I think that's like the big paradox of the Trump era in a lot of ways. Even though politics was really crazy and unpredictable, be the fascists in the White House, the pandemic, all of this stuff, the polling was all extremely stable. You know, Trump's, the Trump versus Biden horse race, really for the two years before the election, stayed within a half a percent range, basically for the entirety of the election. I think that that's the alternative model, and that's the one that's really rosy for Democrats. If you look at the public polling, Democrats are polling at, you know, roughly 53 percent in the generic ballot. And if they stay at that current level, then Democrats are going to be in a

pretty strong position to maintain their majority. And so the question is, obviously, Biden's group of numbers have gone down, you know, since the inauguration. But really, they've been pretty stable for the last month or two. And so that's just one of the big questions. Are things just going to continue to stay stable between now and election day? Or are these historical forces going to force some inexorable decline? And, you know, that's like almost a metaphysical question. It's one that's really, did politics fundamentally change in 2016 and did polarization really increase? And I don't know the answer to that. I think the big thing to watch is we're going to have a lot more information about this in a couple months after Virginia.

Basically, we're going to learn two things. One, we're just going to see. We're talking about the Virginia governor's race, which is Terry McCallif. McColliffe versus Youngkin. Who? Young Ken is the Republican. And is he very, I don't know anything about the race. Can you get us up to speed here? I mean, it's interesting because he has the kind of bio you would want for a Republican in Virginia. I think he was an executive at Ernst & Young or one of those white shoe places.

But also, he's like pretty Trump. You know, the base likes him, so he's kind of in the center of the Republican Party. You know, when the election result comes, we'll see, you know, how he did relative to some partisan baseline. You know, I would expect McColleth to do worse than Biden just because, you know, Virginia swung so far to the left in 2020 that I'd expect some level of mean reversion. But the other big thing we're going to learn. And this is like the big question mark is turnout.

Historically, whatever party is in power does worse when it comes to turnout just because, you know, they get complacent. And Democrats historically have done even worse. because their base kind of represented, you know, younger people, like people without college degrees. But one upside of education polarization is that our base is now substantially more educated than it used to be. And so this is, you know, one of the questions is how are those two factors going to balance out? You know, so far in special elections that have happened, it has been a lot of variance, but Democrats have actually held up okay. But the concern is that these are very low

turnout elections. And so maybe Democrats have this really big advantage and these low turnout specials. But once we get to, once we get to Virginia, that's going to be a pretty high salient selection. And so the relative turnout of Democrats versus Republicans in that race is just going to be really informative. So it's kind of an awkward, you know, how are things going to go in 2022?

It's an important question. It's too far out to know. But in December, we'll actually, so talk to me in December, and I think we'll actually have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen. Oh, interesting. Well, this was really helpful. Thank you so much, David.

It was great to have you. Yeah, I know. Thank you. Always a pleasure. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studied

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