Lucianne.com links to a New York Magazine interview of Democratic poll watcher David Shor who does a deep dive on the data from the 2020 election. Both interviewer and Shor favor Democrats, and yet what Shor concludes is of extreme interest to conservatives, too. Some samples:
When you look at self-reported ideology — just asking people, “Do you identify as liberal, moderate, or conservative” — you find that there aren’t very big racial divides. Roughly the same proportion of African American, Hispanic, and white voters identify as conservative. (snip) What happened in 2020 is that nonwhite conservatives voted for Republicans at higher rates; they started voting more like white conservatives.
Highly educated people tend to have more ideologically coherent and extreme views than working-class ones. We see this in issue polling and ideological self-identification. College-educated voters are way less likely to identify as moderate.
I think liberals really essentialize Hispanic voters and project views about immigration onto them that the data just doesn’t support.
The fact that education polarization declined significantly in 2018 — when Trump wasn’t on the ballot — and picked up again in 2020 suggests that Trump is personally responsible for a significant portion of America’s education polarization.
Donald Trump is unpopular. And he does pay a penalty for that relative to a generic Republican. But the voters he’s popular with happen to be extremely efficiently distributed in political-geography terms.
The Trump era has been very good for the Republican Party, even if they now, momentarily, have to accept this very, very, very thin Democratic trifecta. Because if these coalition changes are durable, the GOP has very rosy long-term prospects for dominating America’s federal institutions.
The whole interview is a worthwhile read if you can ignore that both interviewer and interviewee want Democrats to win. As you can see, Shor doesn’t paint a gloomy picture for our side.
