Episode 222: The Empire Strikes First Part I — Party Elites Who Lost to Trump (Twice) Blame Everyone But Themselves
Citations Needed | June 4, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener-funded.
Adam: Yes, if you listen to the show and you like it and you haven’t yet, please support us on Patreon. It keeps the episodes themselves free and the show sustainable,
Nima: “Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won,” states the Ezra Klein Show. “Democratic strategist issues ‘hard truth’ to party members after losing election,” CNN tells viewers. “This Is Why Kamala Harris Really Lost,” writes Eric Levitz for Vox.
Adam: Since the 2024 presidential election, elite Democrats and the pundits in their orbits have taken to newspapers, podcasts, and cable channels in an attempt to explain why Kamala Harris lost and Donald Trump won. Chief among the explanations: Democrats became controlled and overtaken by the wokes. Becoming overly fussy with pronouns and political correctness, they became too soft on immigration and crime, while the electorate drifted further to the right. And to win the future, Democrats have to, alas, with a putative heavy heart, go right with them.
Nima: Instead of contending with how the Democratic Party has abandoned a working class composed of all races and gender identities, chased big money and been overtaken by venal PR flacks and lawyers, Democratic Party officials, big-donor-funded pollsters and strategists. and elite media have done what they’ve always done whenever there’s an alleged soul-searching moment in the Democratic Party. They’ve scapegoated vulnerable people; insisted on a fixed, intrinsically conservative voting base; and repackaged what is simply a newer version of corporate-friendly, status-quo liberalism.
Adam: On today’s show, part I of a two-part series we’re calling the Empire Strikes First, we’ll examine how party elites sought, before the election was even called on the night of November 5, 2024, to control the narrative and maintain their status and power within the party, blaming everyone but themselves, relying on tortured data and transparently self-serving conclusions, which permit them to continue their long standing tradition of justifying elite-serving center-right policy, all while feigning deep concern for the alleged preferences of Joe Six-Pack while making sure their consultant gravy train chugs along unabated.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be speaking with Jake Grumbach, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.
[Begin clip]
Jake Grumbach: How do we know what non-voters would have done if they voted? That’s a really tough question. It’s really hard to poll and survey these people because they are, by definition, not very into voting. They’re not also into answering phone calls or opting in to web surveys about politics. They’re disengaged for a reason, one being they don’t really care, or they’re not into it or not informed, and another is that they really hate the establishment and they’re not trying to get into polling discussions.
[End clip]
Adam: As we’re required to say, this is a spiritual successor to previous episodes we’ve discussed. It’s combining Episode 209: Popularism and the ‘Poll-Driven Democrat’ as Cover for Conservative Policy Preferences, where we discuss David Shor and Matt Yglesias, this whole disingenuous shtick of acting like we need to do what’s popular, while only focusing on things that are, again, if you torture the data a certain way, are broadly popular, that are conservative, and things that are broadly popular that are progressive, like universal healthcare or expanding childcare or ending the genocide in Gaza. These are just kind of not mentioned at all. This idea that, We don’t have preferences. We’re not conservative or funded by conservative forces. We are just the weather vane going where the public is telling us to go and pointing in the direction of popularism, is their alleged prescriptive multimillion-dollar grift. And we obviously think that’s horseshit. That’s a cover. Again, that’s the way you sort of launder your conservative preferences. You say, Well, I don’t want to do this. This other person wants to do it. And also a News Brief immediately after the election called Elite Media, Dems Blame ‘Woke’, ‘Headwinds’ — Everyone But Themselves — for Trump Win, where we ran down the various reasons why Harris lost to Trump that are being offered by elite pundits and people like David Shor, and you’ll be shocked to learn that they don’t involve anything fundamental with the party, that the party is actually great. The people in charge are doing a bang-up job.
Nima: They just don’t know how to talk to regular people, Adam, they don’t know how to talk to them. [Laughs] They’re not policy issues. It’s not about what they’re doing or not doing.
Adam: Well, no, it’s because the party’s gone too left, it’s too woke-coded, and that If only we went further right, again, conveniently enough, for our large donors and for their own grift, then they would win this time. So trust us. And immediately, the second the election was over, David Shor was doing the media rounds, which we’ll get into, undisclosed, not mentioning the fact that he actually worked for the largest super PAC of the campaign, which is to say he worked for the campaign, and presenting himself as some independent third-party analyst, just giving sort of frank feedback. And every one of his self-serving media tours is framed as, like, hard truths, or We need to get real. I’m imagining him sort of putting on a backwards cap and turning his chair around and sitting in front of a bunch of, like, at-risk youths.
Nima: Come on, guys. [Laughs]
Adam: Yeah, I’m gonna give it to you straight. And it’s like, okay, cool. Now this is, of course, a posture that has been popular for a very long time amongst corporate Democrats, specifically the DLC wing that emerged after Dukakis’s loss in 1988 to George H.W. Bush and then personified with Bill Clinton. For the purposes of giving a little history on this, how any time there is a conservative or Republican win post-Clinton, there is a chorus of pundits who insist that the party has gone too far left.
Nima: Yeah, the notion of a Democratic Party that is too soft, that there’s this kind of soft squishiness that dovetails with this accusation of being too left, sort of had its earlier manifestations in criticisms of President Jimmy Carter back in the late ’70s, being, say, too soft on the Soviet Union, right? Or being too squishy when it came to communism, allowing the, you know, Russians and Cubans to be in Ethiopia, or the Soviets to invade Afghanistan and to let Iran slip away, to Islamists, right? These arguments during the Carter administration led, as we have discussed on Citations Needed before, to the notion of a Third Way Democratic Party position, this moving to the right to out-militarize, out-racist, out-poor-bash the Right and somehow win that quote-unquote “movable middle” or the persuadable audiences who don’t really have any fixed ideology and maybe can be swayed by some of the better social democratic ideals, as long as we still assume that the culture war is won by the Right. And so we see this kind of manifesting in the early ’80s and, Adam, as you said, up through Reagan’s two wins, through the win of George H.W. Bush over Dukakis, and then into the Clinton era.
Adam: Now, of course, there’s been a million autopsies and handwringing articles about capital W, capital W, capital W, What Went Wrong. And that has invited its own kind of power-serving narrative. Because, of course, the people doing the autopsy are to some extent the killer, and if I’m responsible for doing an autopsy for my own murder, which was the plot of the recent Jake Gyllenhaal reboot of Presumed Innocent–
Nima: Or like Tim Robinson wearing a hotdog suit.
Adam: Yeah, exactly. You go back to the scene of the crime and you sort of act as the person who’s gonna, I’m gonna tell you what went wrong. This has been central to the entire Empire Strikes First approach, and we are gonna get into that, more of that, later. But one such prominent example in the New York Times, was published in late May, featured heavily Democratic donors and party officials engaging in the most superficial and token tweaking of party, specifically, of course, as always, party messaging, because, again, they are both ideologically and financially prevented from having any deeper conversation about the nature of the supposed Left party in the country.
Nima: Written by Shane Goldmacher for the New York Times, published on May 25, 2025, and headlined, quote, headlined, “Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward,” end quote, the piece has the subheadline, quote, “The party’s standing is startlingly low after a defeat that felt like a cultural rejection. What comes next?” End quote. And in the article is this all-too-common revelation, published again by the New York Times. Quote,
The stark reality is that the downward trend for Democrats stretches back further than a single election. Republicans have been gaining ground in voter registration for years. Working-class voters of every race have been steadily drifting toward the G.O.P. And Democrats are increasingly perceived as the party of college-educated elites, the defenders of a political and economic system that most Americans feel is failing them.
End quote. And in the article, it notes what, with that assessment, party officials are apparently doing about all this. And it says this, quote,
For now, Democratic donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.
The prospectus for one new $20 million effort, obtained by The Times, aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online. It is code-named SAM — short for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” — and promises investment to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” It recommends buying advertisements in video games, among other things.
End quote.
Adam: Right. So the key takeaway here is that it’s not something fundamental with the orientation of the party or the fact that the perception of Democrats as out-of-touch elites is because, well, they’re out-of-touch deletes, and therefore need to reassess and try to regrow their actual relationships with the working class and working-class institutions like unions or community activists, or what sort of whatever–
Nima: It still takes for granted that the base is people of color, is working-class people, is poor people, without actually addressing any of the policies. It all becomes about messaging.
Adam: Yeah, there’s no sense of their full embrace of these disastrous free-trade policies, their full embrace of militarism and war, just as in terms of branding. Obviously, Republicans have as well, but their branding is a little different on that. There’s no sense that there’s anything existentially corrupt or venal or bad about the Democratic Party or the Democratic Party’s brand over the last 23 years based on substance. It’s all based on how we need to sort of tweak and messaging it better, which, again, if I’m paid, we’re gonna be seeing people who are running these studies and doing these getaways and expensive hotels, they’re all funded by the same billionaire donors that have backed the Democratic Party. Who does this sort of key theme here, I’m sure you’ll pick up on. So naturally, they’re not going to come back and say, Well, actually, we need to fundamentally reorient our position with respect to labor and radical union organizing, and we need to speak in the language of class and class conflict. We need to talk about radically redistributing wealth. We need to talk about not necessarily being the party associated with bombing toddlers in Gaza for 15 months, as Biden was, that these things maybe need to radically change, and we need to reboot ourselves, and more in the style of a Bernie Sanders. That’s not an option. So your only other option is we need to micro-target white men in video games and talk about rise-and-grinds.
Nima: Talk less about race, talk less about immigration, talk less about labor, talk less about war.
Adam: Because what’s important is not what is being prescribed for them to say and to recommend. What’s really important to understand is that what is anathema, what is not even discussed as part of the suite of options. And that is self-evidently true, because the second you do propose something that addresses the substance and the ideology at work, well, then you’re just not going to be paid by these outside organizations.
Nima: Now one of the main architects of the narrative of the Democrats always need to move right, and therefore can never be blamed themselves when they lose elections, and only their lefty, hippie-dippite base, and any appeals to keep those folks happy, are to blame. Now, a key Clinton official, Larry Summers, who was treasury secretary under the Bill Clinton administration, really helped lay the groundwork for this broader narrative to take hold and still hold sway over the party today, following the Clinton administration, this is now shortly after 9/11. Larry Summers cautioned that, quote-unquote, “coastal elites” in the Democratic Party were at odds with most Americans. He implied that any questioning of US militarism was an exclusive trait of wealthy liberals. By November of 2001, after Summers had been appointed president of Harvard University, Summers stated this, quote,
The post-Vietnam cleavage between coastal elites and certain mainstream values is a matter of great concern and has some real costs.
End quote. So what were these mainstream values, you ask? Reverence of the US military, of course, particularly at the dawn of a new era of war. The George Bush global War on, or of, Terror. And this was connected directly to supporting Bush-era tax cuts.
Adam: Yeah. Now this is an early example of a storied tradition, which is the multimillionaire coastal elite claiming to speak for the put-upon everyman whose ideology happens to align with their own. This is a trope discussed in the show many, many, many times. We call it the Bill Maher, where rich media elites or pundits cannot simply have rightwing opinions because that’s considered gauche. So they launder their rightwing opinions through the supposed conservative preferences of this alleged everyman, the average or ordinary or swing voter, these sort of generic, hard-hat caricatures that they present. Because it’s not that I believe, it’s that they believe it. Therefore we have to represent those ideas. Again, these concepts are never backed up by polling. There’s never any sense that, Wow, that’s going to come off super artificial. These are all people that went to Ivy League schools themselves, or multi-, multi-, multimillionaires who live in Manhattan. They themselves are close to elites, but whenever they want to push a conservative policy preference, typically and aligned with their own wealthy interests, and oftentimes their own ideological conservative interests, like they want to blow up Muslims, or they want tax cuts, name it, again, it’s sort of seen as tacky or self-serving to say that.
So what they do is they simply say, We have to support these things because that’s where the average American is. The idea is that Joe Six-Pack is intrinsically and axiomatically conservative. They’re unmovable. Their opinions don’t change, and the goal of politics is to simply pander to these preferences in a very superficial way. Now, of course, when the vast majority of Americans oppose a war, oppose a genocide, support increasing taxes on the wealthy, support universal healthcare, support funding early childhood development, all these things that are broadly popular with the American public, those aren’t really mentioned, but when they happen to align with superficial cultural preferences, or they want to bash trans people, or they want to lock up immigrants, then suddenly we must enter the needs of the everyman.
Nima: That’s right. And when they then lose elections, it is not because they were centering the needs of the everyman as they determine them. It was because they still were pandering too hard left.
Adam: Well, the elites, the rich Left, the George Soros-funded eggheads and hippies who somehow direct sinisterly, behind the scenes, the Democratic Party. They wield all the power. So let’s skip ahead to the first Trump win in 2016 which, of course, was a cataclysmic event in the world of media. At the time, many in the Democratic Party and party elites and media blamed, as they often do, identity politics, for Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Again, it can’t be the fact that the Democrats had abandoned the working class and had moved to the right wing on economics, and had an icy relationship with unions and workers, and that labor unions had been gutted, and that they had supported the TPP, which was deeply unpopular, the Trans Pacific Partnership, which was kind of NAFTA on steroids. No, no, no. It was because of, sort of, I guess ‘woke’ wasn’t the term at the time. It was ‘political correctness,’ had sort of gone too far, or trans bathrooms was the kind of catchall that they had moved away from, kind of the real Joe Six-Pack.
Now, I wrote about, at the time, that several elite pundits from Mark Lilla to David Brooks to Bill Maher all blamed the supposed trans issue and hyper-political-correctness with Trump’s victory, not the economic abandonment of the working class. Bill Maher, who’s a popular practitioner of this, on November of 2016 in a broadcast for his show, Real Time, again, this is someone who has a show funded and produced by AT&T, who presents himself as an edgy truthteller. He kind of pontificated about liberal political correctness as the reason for Trump’s win. So let’s listen to that clip here. Now, the first voice you’ll hear is that of Maher’s. The second is that of guest Ana Marie Cox of MTV News at the time, turned popular Biden dead-ender. So let’s listen to that clip right now.
[Begin clip]
Bill Maher: But also the Democratic Party–back me up, on this, guys–sort of lost the white working man. That’s what they used to have, and they made the white working man feel like, Your problems aren’t real, because you’re mansplaining. And, you know, Check your privilege. But you know what, if your life sucks, your problems are real. And you know, what should I do, cut my dick off and check my privilege?
[Laughter]
Ana Marie Cox: Now, do you really think that’s, like, liberals’ fault?
Bill Maher: Oh, I do.
Ana Marie Cox: You know, there’s that saying like, to a white person, equality feels like oppression?
Bill Maher: I mean, if there’s a silver lining, this for me personally, it’s the two issues I have been on the case of liberals for, and they’ve been booing me about this for years, and maybe they’ll listen. One is political correctness. I think I did a show about that for nine years.
[Laughter]
You’re outrageous with your political correct bullshit, and it does drive people away. And 2) Islam. You know, Islam, they don’t, Democrats, there’s a terrorist attack and Democrats’ reaction is, Don’t be mean to Muslims instead of, How can we solve the problem of shit blowing up in America?
[End clip]
Adam: Okay, so this is a perfect distillation of the two branches of our political discourse. So here he sets up a problem, which is that the Democrats are losing white men, which is objectively true. And instead of saying, and frankly, the working class in general, more so in 2024, right? Latinos, Blacks all drifted towards Trump. So instead of making the analysis of like, How do we economically improve their lives, which would have been the logical follow up, right? But that’s not how you get a show on AT&T/HBO. You don’t get a show by making that analysis. You get a show by diagnosing the problem, which is, Democrats are shedding the working class, specifically in 2016, the white working class, but in 2024, working class of every ethnicity and race.
And instead of saying, Wow, the solution would be for to have a Democratic Party that actually represents working class interests and speaks in the language of class conflict, what does he say? Political correctness and Muslims. I mean, that’s the perfect distillation of, and then Ana Marie Cox comes in and says, Oh, we don’t pander to white, she sort of plays into this kind of superficial, We need to be mean to whitey thing, right? Again, this is the sandbox with which the wealthy elites want people to play in, this kind of superficial cultural jockeying which has no bearing on their power and their money, and that’s why this is the argument we get, and it’s why people scapegoat so-called political correctness, because it’s a way of gesturing towards some populism without offending elites who are themselves almost all fucking racist and transphobic anyway.
In November of 2016, I wrote a piece for FAIR called “Lashing Out at ‘Identity Politics,’ Pundits Blame Trump on Those Most Vulnerable to Trump,” where I document how this was so widespread, because, again, it’s the way you sort of look like you care about the class realignment issue without actually addressing the substance of why people feel abandoned by the Democratic Party. It has to be, Oh, they’re too antiracist, or they’re too soft on Muslims. And then Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU, had a puff interview with Vox where he claimed that the reason why we have Trump is because multiculturalism had sort of gone too far and was eroding our body politic. He wrote, quote,
As multiculturalism is emphasized more and more, there emerges a reaction against it on the right, which is attractive to the authoritarian mind and also appeals to other conservatives. And this, I think, is what has happened, this is what Trump is about — not entirely, of course, but certainly this is a big factor.
Multiculturalism and diversity have many benefits, including creativity and economic dynamism, but they also have major drawbacks, which is that they generally reduce social capital and trust and they amplify tribal tendencies.
Unquote. Again, this is total pseudoscience. It is not that the Democrats went too rightwing on issues of selling out labor and trying to promote these disastrous free-trade deals. No, it’s that we have too many Black people and too many Latinos here, and therefore we sort of have a lack of social trust or some woo-y horseshit. The Washington Post and New York Times ran several similar pieces in 2016, one headlined “The End of Identity Liberalism,” by historian Mark Lilla, insisted that, quote, “the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end,” unquote, an he asserted that Hillary Clinton made a, quote, “strategic mistake,” unquote, by “slip[ping] into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop,” unquote.
Lilla wrote that this made the white working class feel, quote, “left out,” a claim which he provided no evidence. Now, of course, the white working class is not left out because they’ve been abandoned, and their towns and many rural places have been completely overrun by prisons and casinos and have lost their industrial base. No, no, no. It’s because they said the word ‘gay’ too much.
Nima: Yeah, exactly. There’s nothing of substance here. It’s all about a particular kind of messaging and trying to assess the, you know, feelings of the white working class or white rural Americans, without ever really addressing the material aspects of people’s lives. I mean, like Bill Maher kind of nods to that, as you mentioned, Adam, he kind of says, Well, if your life sucks, then dot, dot, dot. But the diagnosis and then what to do about it is completely off. It is always about blaming wokeism and whatever kind of terminology is popular at the time, ‘political correctness’ to ‘woke’ to whatever, but again, never actually addressing anything at a substantive policy level, unless those policies are aimed at hurting those other identities or other populations or other communities that are deemed to be taking power away from this allegedly very, very upset white working class.
So let’s talk about this recent presidential election. Since November of 2024, we’ve seen many reheated versions of the same 2016 post-election analysis with a few additional scapegoats thrown in this time. Right after the election, in early November 2024, Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky appeared on CNN not to blame elite Democratic politicians and party officials for the loss, but instead to blame liberal and identity-affirming rhetoric and anti-genocide protesters. Let’s listen to a clip of Julie Roginsky on CNN.
[Begin clip]
Julie Roginsky: When we address Latina and language, listen, language has meaning. We address Latino voters as Latinx, for instance, because that’s the politically correct thing to do, it makes them think that we don’t even live in the same planet as they do. When we are too afraid to say that, Hey, college kids, if you’re trashing a campus at Columbia University because you’re unhappy about some sort of policy, and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning, that that is unacceptable. But we’re so worried about alienating one or another cohort in our coalition that we don’t know what to say. When normal people look at that and say, Wait a second, I send my kids to college so they can learn, not so that they can burn buildings and trash lawns, right? And so on and so forth. When we put pronouns after names and say ‘she/her,’ as opposed to saying, You know what, if I call you by the wrong pronoun, call me out. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. But stop with the virtue-signaling, and just speak to people like they’re normal.
[End clip]
Adam: So this is pretty standard for people like Roginsky, who is, of course, a political consultant. What she’s doing in this clip is advertising her services to rich donors to hire her so that she can shape the party to be more conservative, specifically, in this case, pro-Israel donors. Again, it’s a total non sequitur. The idea that Harris was, like, too soft on Columbia students was not a real thing anyone said in any polling.
Nima: Or that anti-genocide protesters were quote-unquote “trashing” campuses and burning buildings, making life hard for the normals.
Adam: Yeah, this is not something, like the average Joe Six-Pack’s kid goes to Columbia and he’s like, I need to make sure he gets to–
Nima: Econ 203. [Laughs]
Adam: Yeah. I mean, that’s not really what was going on. I mean, it’s absurd. So what’s important to understand is, again, if you can scapegoat vulnerable communities, blame pronouns, just sort of typical punching bags who have no real institutional power to defend themselves, if you’re constantly blaming these somewhat obscure, powerless people and causes, all the better, because that’s how you get jobs. That’s how you get jobs as pollsters and consultants. Because, again, the job of a pollster and a consultant is not to win elections. The job of a pollster and a consultant is to soak up money from rich donors vis-a-vis super PACs or campaigns, and shape the agenda that the rich donors want, which is almost always going to be far to the right of the base itself.
Now the New York Times provided similar analysis in its March 2025 editorial, “The Democrats Are In Denial About 2024.” The editorial board offered a few diagnoses including, quote, “The party moved too far left on social issues after Barack Obama left office in 2017,” end quote. Which social issues? The editorial board doesn’t specify, but it did imply that, quote, “decriminalizing the border,” unquote, and, quote, “government-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners,” unquote, were among them. The piece would go on to praise senators Ruben Gallego and Elisa Slotkin for being, quote, “hawkish about border security and law enforcement,” unquote.
And again, this is the typical way you approach it. Again, if you’re the New York Times and you’ve been promoting free trade and corporate policies as they have for decades, the editorial board, you’re not going to turn around and say, Actually, maybe the party needs to be more populist and be more class-aware and engage in class conflict, because that’s not what you represent and who you serve. So again, you have to keep playing in the sandbox of trivial punching down and so-called messaging problems.
So in addition to the people we’ve just spoken about, prominent data scientists, primarily David Shor, who’s the number one person going around doing this. He is the most high-profile, he works for and founded the Blue Rose Research firm, which had millions in contracts from the Harris super PAC and the 2024 election. He’s the face of popularism, which holds that polling results should shape policy. But again, that’s selective and in bad faith, as we discussed in Episode 209, the basic long and short is that if polls show people want universal healthcare and expanding Social Security, you just ignore that.
[Laughter]
But if polls show they want more police and more Border Security, you, of course, openly embrace that.
In March and April 2025, Shor began a media tour, doing interviews about the so-called 2024 autopsy that his firm Blue Rose Research had drafted, asking questions and answering those questions that fit their narrative. Now, repeatedly, Shor did media appearances discussing capital W, capital W, capital W, What Went Wrong with the Harris campaign without either he or his puff interviewers bothering to disclose the fact that Shor was paid millions by the Harris campaign super PAC to shape the messaging.
Nima: Right. So being responsible for the messaging, one could say, then you’re responsible in part for the loss. But no, no, no, that kind of self-reflection and analysis is not what Blue Rose Research was doing. Rather, it was the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris’s campaign going too far left. Now one puff piece by Eric Levitz entitled “This is why Kamala Harris really lost,” which was published in Vox on March 18, 2025, involves a fawning interview with Shor about how voters, namely younger voters, increasingly, are axiomatically racist and rightwing, and this is why Democrats have to veer right all the time. Now, actually, it wasn’t until Adam, you yourself pointed out this glaring, undisclosed conflict of interest that you’ve been mentioning between Shor basically being a paid pollster and messenger for the Harris campaign itself. You pointed that out to Levitz on social media, and so he slightly updated the Vox piece accordingly to include a brief mention of Shor’s work.
Adam: Yeah, they updated it to reflect the fact that Shor was paid by the campaign. If I was responsible for shaping the messaging of a campaign, which he was, I mean, his polls and his messaging drove much of this. Again, the super PAC was the vast, vast majority of spending on shaping the messaging, which, again, you openly align with the campaign. We know legally you’re not supposed to, but everyone does it. And the TV commercials. If I was responsible for that in some significant capacity, which Shor was. Again, he tried to do some last-minute ass-covering, where he was like, Oh, they weren’t listening to me. Leaks to the media. But he was, I mean, again, everyone’s, everyone’s looking after themselves, because they knew, they assumed they were going to lose. And by the way, I had the ideal Matt Yglesias, David Shor campaign, right? Sort of no mention of any identity stuff. A lot of mention of border security, how much we love cops, a lot of flag-humping, a lot of the sort of things that they want, they got, and they lost. And they lost fairly decisively, and they had very low Democratic turnout comparative to 2020. We can discuss why. We’ll discuss that with our guest. That would seem important. When the guy comes on and says, I’m doing an analysis of why Harris lost. Like, you weren’t a passive, neutral observer. You’re someone who was a participant in the thing that you’re commenting on. And that’s just not mentioned. This was not mentioned when he went on Ezra Klein’s very popular New York Times podcast, the Ezra Klein Show, the exact same day, on March 18. Klein and the New York Times make no disclosure that Shor worked for the campaign, that he is now supposedly an objective, neutral observer on.
Nima: Exactly. Just an independent voice, Adam.
Adam: Yeah, just a very, very deeply concerned citizen. The idea that he would have a conflict of interest, that he would be promoting an agenda that aligns with his finances and his ideology, is not entertained or mentioned at all. He’s just a neutral guy trying to do what’s best for defeating Republicans. Now, on both Levitz and Klein’s interviews, he proposed, which he has done on CNN and MSNBC and elsewhere, that Democrats would not have actually benefited from higher voter turnout, that it would have actually been worse for them, because most non-voters, he argues, leaned right politically and would have voted for Trump. Shor called this, quote, “the story of the election.” So the huge takeaway at first was, Wow, 5 to 7 million less Democrats voted in 2024. That’s bad. You typically want to have more Democrats vote. And sure comes in and says, No, no, no. Actually, the problem was too many people voted, which undermines the narrative of alienating the base, alienating people who care about things like Gaza and healthcare, and maybe we shouldn’t have a border-security policy that’s premised entirely on punishment and taking photo ops with cops. No, no, no. Those voters don’t count. Centrist voters count 5x. Leftwing voters count .001 vote. For some reason, they have less voting power. So let’s listen to a clip from this Klein interview with Shor on March 18. The first voice you hear is that of Klein’s. The second will be Shor. So let’s listen to that clip right here.
[Begin clip]
Ezra Klein: 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, sit with you?
David Shor: 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 Shor: Right. Exactly.
[End clip]
Adam: Now early in the interview, Shor touted the trustworthiness of his data that he contrived. But as our guest, Jake Grumbach, and his colleagues have shown, Shor’s conclusions are not reliable at all.
Nima: Now, one of Shor’s key sources, for example, was a chart from a New York Times/Siena poll from May 2024. At that time, Joe Biden was still in the race, and Kamala Harris thus was not yet the 2024 Democratic candidate. Now as Grumbach and his colleagues ask, quote, “If robust private datasets clearly showed non-voters swinging Republican, why elevate this specific, arguably less reliable, May snapshot as key evidence?” End quote. Now, Grumbach and his colleagues examined data from voter files and the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, an academic study partially funded by the National Science Foundation that surveys tens of thousands of Americans shortly before elections and validates their voting status against official records to minimize self-reporting errors. Grumbach and his colleagues found this, quote,
Registered Democrats made up a much larger share of non-voters (15.2 million or 38.8%) than registered Republicans (7.7 million or 19.6%), with Independents/Other affiliations constituting the largest group (16.3 million or 41.6%). This means that nearly twice as many Democrats as Republicans sat out the election — a stark contrast to claims that increased turnout would benefit Republicans.
End quote. Grumbach and his colleagues also reviewed the previous three election cycles, that is, 2018, 2020, and 2022, for any evidence of non-voters becoming more Republican-leaning over time. They found no evidence of a Republican shift, and that indeed, non-voters consistently favored Democrats. Adding, quote, “In fact, registered non-voters showed their strongest Democratic preference in the most recent 2022 midterms.” End quote.
Now David Shor, let’s get back to the interview with Ezra Klein on March 18, 2025, made a related point to this, which was that young voters had shifted to the right as well. Let’s listen to his explanation again from the Ezra Klein show.
[Begin clip]
Ezra Klein: So I do find this part of this chart shocking. I sometimes talk about narrative violations.
David Shor: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: 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 who were 75 years old supported Kamala Harris at a significantly higher rate than white men who are 20 years old.
David Shor: That’s exactly right.
Ezra Klein: That’s a real shift.
David Shor: 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, you know, generation that we’ve experienced maybe, maybe in 50 to 60 years.
[End clip]
Adam: Now, it’s true that young white men specifically leaned more right in 2024, but young white men don’t represent all young voters, despite statements like Shor’s that young people as a whole are, quote, “potentially the most conservative members of the electorate,” unquote. Notably, Klein and Shor also don’t entertain the idea that some members of the youth demographic, typically those 18 to 29 years old, oppose Harris not from the right, but from the left, something that campus anti-genocide protests and the issue of Gaza more broadly, brought into sharp relief. In fact, Klein and Shor never consider Israel’s genocide in Gaza as being a factor at all, even though there’s tons of evidence that it was a major reason why many young voters stayed home and did not vote for Harris. A January 2025 YouGov poll, backed by the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, found that of people who voted for Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Harris in 2024, 29% said, quote, “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza,” unquote, was the most important issue in deciding their vote. This was the #1 answer among respondents, above “the economy” at #2.
Nima: There’s this idea that the Democratic Party and the Harris campaign was already kind of starting as far left as possible, right? That that was where they were entrenched. And so therefore any analysis of a loss meant that there was only one way to go to pick up more votes, right? They couldn’t go further left. Clearly, they were already as far left as you could be. So there was only one direction in which to win more voters or get people off the couch, and that is to the right. A very convenient analysis, of course. So what really explains this missing context, right? This cherry-picked data that Shor often uses for his analyses? Now, these distortions, by all appearances, really are a pretext for Democrats to even more closely resemble Republicans, as we’ve been saying, at least a Republican Party that maybe could be recognized from a couple decades ago. If the narrative is that non-voters skew Republican, right, then it would follow that the best way to regain those votes is to appeal to a rightwing audience. And as I said, never do Shor or Klein suggest that the Democrats may fare better if they offer, say, single-payer healthcare, very popular, or at least universal healthcare as it’s understood, or actually broker a ceasefire in Gaza, both of which poll very, very well. Instead, they create a convenient excuse for Democrats to not only avoid publicly beneficial policy, but to continue gutting any publicly beneficial policies that were once promised by the party, right, even those promises were costing them votes that they could get if they just abandoned trying to actually improve people’s lives.
Adam: And this conservative shtick is, of course, paying off. In May of 2025, Klein and Shor were invited to consult with senators at a, quote, “issues retreat,” unquote. As Axios reported on May 5, quote,
Klein, whose podcast is a big hit on the left, will have a dialogue with senators at the Mount Vernon retreat, with an opportunity for them to ask questions, according to Klein and two people familiar with the matter.
Shor, who has been a consistent critic of his party’s ability to connect with young men, will share his polling deck on what the numbers actually say.
Unquote. I’m sure Shor will eventually be paid for this with more polling consulting. But yeah, I mean, this is the idea that somehow they were, like, picked to consult. It’s like, No, this is their entire shtick. They represent the desires and needs of big funders like Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, who funded the super PAC in question. They represent a more conservative outlook that big donors like, and therefore they will rise to the top, especially when they’re boosted nonstop by elite media. Shor is not a neutral, independent observer.
Nima: To discuss this more, we’re now going to be joined by Jake Grumbach, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and author of the book Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, which was published in 2022 by Princeton University Press. Jake will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
We are joined now by Jake Grumbach. Jake, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Jake Grumbach: Thanks for having me on the show.
Adam: So I want to begin by talking about, before we get to the kind of meta-narratives and our own lefty grievances, I want to start with the data itself, because this is a fundamentally empirical claim being made. It’s bolstered by an alleged empirical basis, namely from that of David Shor, who argues that a higher voter turnout in 2024 would have actually not only not helped Democrats, but would have actively harmed them. He says that Gen Z is, quote, “the most conservative generation in decades.” I think in another quote he says 50 years, which is a very extraordinary claim, because I guess the underlying logic is a bunch of like Covid-fueled, rightwing-turned, internet-addled such-and-such have sort of turned rightwing, especially men, especially white men.
Now, you and your co-authors note that, quote, “these estimates come from a survey from before Biden dropped out of the race and Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee,” unquote, among other problems with the methodology. So let’s begin, if you could, by talking about the problems with Shor’s analysis, which, as you know, is very sexy because it’s counterintuitive. It kind of seems superficially appealing and very conveniently, kind of gets everyone off the hook. But talk about the issues with that methodology and some of the claims being made, which, like you said, are quite bold and counterintuitive.
Jake Grumbach: Yeah. So I mean, there’s a bunch of claims in what you just summarized, and one challenge is that I’m an academic, and we both have other jobs like teaching, and we go through peer review in our research that takes a long time, where other professors try to launch missiles taking down your statistical analyses as biased in some way, and you have to really support yourself through that, and we have to post our data and our statistical analytical code publicly. So all this kind of makes it a bit of an asymmetric environment here. On the other hand, sort of data journalists and political consultants can kind of flood the zone with a bunch of different estimates. So we got to take these piece by piece. So there’s a couple big claims, and what you’re summarizing, Adam, the first is that increasing voter turnout is bad for Democrats, and that’s a huge claim.
Adam: It is.
Jake Grumbach: I mean, the real answer to that question is, it depends, because non-voters, well over one-third of eligible voters in the US, and that’s only in presidential elections, not to mention midterms or off-cycle elections when there are many more non-voters, those are many tens of millions of people, and that’s a really large, diverse, heterogeneous group. So you could increase turnout by a million voters, and they could all be super far-right, Nazis, they could be socialists, they could be anarchists, they could be all types of people, and it depends on whose turnout you increase. So this is what we call differential turnout. Are you turning out people who are more like your team than the other team? So that’s a big question. But one proxy for that question is, what would the popular vote in 2024 have looked like if everybody who was allowed to vote did turn out to vote, if voter turnout was 100%? And there we saw a big claim from David Shor saying, you know, on Ezra Klein, and then picked up in the news cycle, is that actually Trump would have won dramatically more if everybody had voted.
And well, we, myself and co-author Adam Bonica, also Ernesto Tiburcio and Rachel Funk Fordham, here at Berkeley, we calculated that this would mean non-voters would have to be just dramatically pro-Trump. That’s a very big claim to say Trump would have gained even more of a popular vote share beyond what he got if we had 100% turnout. And how do we know what non-voters would have done if they voted? That’s a really tough question. It’s really hard to poll and survey these people because they are, by definition, not very into voting. They’re not also into answering phone calls or opting into web surveys about politics. They’re disengaged for a reason, one being they don’t really care, or they’re not into it or not informed, and another is that they really hate the establishment and they’re not trying to get into polling discussions. So this is just notoriously tough.
But what we have is a lot of public, big data, survey data from the Cooperative Election Study, is kind of the flagship political science large scale survey of political attitudes and behavior among Americans. But there’s also AP VoteCast and other survey data, public exit poll data. What these data sets show is that non-voters, if you ask them, Who would you vote for? And granted, that’s a tough question for a non voter, right? They’re not voting for a reason. So Who would you vote for? is kind of a weird question. But there it’s just we cannot find any public data that would get you anywhere near to the Shor estimates that non-voters are dramatically pro-Trump.
Nima: Are you saying that David Shor’s claims might not be grounded in scientific fact?
Jake Grumbach: So it’s tough, man. So I would say I give David Shor some credit, where, you know, he has his own data and he’s inferring from it. I actually think the problem in the sort of ecosystem is actually people who uncritically pick up numbers that are just thrown out and not supported by any systematic sort of public data or specific discussion of the analytical modeling or procedures to it. That’s a lot worse. So there’s a lot of, I actually think Shor is doing his thing. He has his views. He has his interpretations. You know, he has his own takes on what the Democratic Party should do that I tend to disagree with. But it’s really that there’s a sort of network out there of Shor partisans who are not quants and don’t actually know how to adjudicate these statistical claims, but they’re hyped for this narrative, and this is one funny thing, is Shorism and popularism in general, and Matt Yglesias takes and all of this, is usually pitched as, This is the hard truth for these naive, stupid people on the Left or libs, whatever, activist-y types, highly-engaged people, they don’t want to hear the tough reality that actually centrism is best, when actually there’s just a massive market of people who don’t know anything about quantitative analysis of data who love the idea of, These stupid, naive activists, mostly young people. They are so dumb. And the hard truth is that actually you can’t have anything nice. That’s a very attractive narrative.
Nima: And if you can say that that’s backed up by the data, you sort of remove the ideological priors to that. You alleviate the perception that there’s a purpose behind this, that it is effective for a reason, because you’re sort of just relying on this idea that, Hey, we’re just following the data here. We’re just following the evidence. So therefore it lets us off the hook.
Adam: Yeah, it’s a way of laundering responsibility. We call it the Bill Maher. It’s sort of seen as gauche, as being rightwing. So what you say is, Look, otherwise I would be Trotsky, but unfortunately, we ran the numbers, and now it came out of the machine and it said we have to throw immigrants into a grave ditch. I’m sorry.
Jake Grumbach: Exactly.
Adam: That’s just what it was. Again, I hate that it’s this way. I wish it wasn’t this way, but people are axiomatic. And everyone’s kind of reluctant, like this sort of reluctant fascist interpreter.
Jake Grumbach: So true and just how attractive that is as a narrative. And there is something in American liberal culture that is so fascinating here, where only in American liberal culture is like a plurality, or majority of takes about the liberal party, about how they’re too liberal in some way, and this handwringing.
[Laughter]
There’s an entire industry around this. It sells huge clicks. So that’s the first thing. And I also say, through this process and work in general, academia has its issues. The American academy has its issues. But the incentives to get the right answer, your independence and academic freedom, that we all have our ideological beliefs and values, but we try to agree on the rules of hard evidence empirically, and you are promoted based on how well you put forward evidence and creativity in building new forms of evidence on claims. That rigor is really the currency, so I’m just thankful for the incentives there, which are just very different from punditry and consulting and things like that.
Non-voters, it’s a very uncertain claim. It’s just, there’s not strong evidence that they lean heavily Trump-ish. And there’s a lot of reasons for this. The most likely to be non-voters are young people. Young people stayed home for all types of reasons. And these types of analyses that mostly consultants, and to some extent, sort of data journalists, Nate Cohen in the New York Times and others are doing, really have a tough time distinguishing why young people stayed home. And the young people who don’t answer surveys and don’t vote, we really have little information on them, and you’re making strong assumptions that none of them stayed home for reasons of Gaza, or anything sort of coded Left, or disengagement with the Democratic Party. Essentially, the assumption is, if they’re staying home, we can sort of take information from those young Trump dudes who did vote, and sort of assume young people are more Trump-ish. This is a really hard set of Americans to study.
But again, all the public data shows, first of all, let’s be real about the claim. So the short claim was that even white women and men of color voted majority Trump. All the public data shows that it’s dramatically wrong. There’s a decent chance young white men under 30 did go, in some majority, potentially small majority, for Trump. But the idea that white women voted majority Trump, statistically, there’s just absolutely nothing like that in public data. But then the gender gap among Gen Z is real, and there are mechanisms for the fact that there was, compared to recent years where actually Gen Z and younger Millennials were the most Democratic-leaning generation in history, just truly insane, from 2018 onward, insane vote margins for Democrats. Reducing that vote margin and becoming a bit more Republican is not, it’s sort of a regression to the mean. And among young men, there was a bit of a shift, especially with younger Gen Z.
Then the last thing I’ll say is this is a group that often does not have very solid political attitudes yet. They’re young. They don’t know what, like, not to hate, but I should hate. Gen Z music, I’m sorry, it’s not good.
[Laughter]
I think they deserve voting rights, though.
Adam: Reluctantly.
Jake Grumbach: This group has become, suddenly, in a few short months, the most anti-Trump generation we’ve ever seen. Trump, minus 50 support among Gen Z now. Where it’s like, even if young white men voted in a majority for Trump, right, or even if Gen Z was a little bit more Trump-ish than they were, the younger generations were in 2020, for example, that is just, this is a group that has huge openings for the Democratic Party and for the Left in general.
Adam: Wait, are you suggesting that voters are malleable and not fixe things that we should chase all the time in a fruitless effort of, okay. Well, that’s interesting. Now I’m learning that political preferences and formations are downstream from the media and from how things are covered we’re doing
Jake Grumbach: We’re doing the Trump RBG death thing. First time I’m hearing of this. Wow.
Nima: [Laughs] Yeah. To that point, let’s dig in here a bit to the purpose behind pushing this narrative, Jake. And we’ve kind of been talking about it a bit, but let’s go a little harder here. The idea that a political consultant like David Shor, who worked directly with the Harris campaign, really, through the Harris super PAC, where do you think the incentive lies for someone like Shor or others who are doing data analytics and then coming up with these kind of broader, broader ideas about where votes live, where they’re going, what the Democratic Party should do in the fallout of the 2024 election? Where do you think the incentive lies to, kind of, say, absolve the Democrats themselves by saying, Look, there isn’t much you could have done anyway, because even if you had raised voter turnout by X percent or whatever, or X millions of people, it would have been even worse. So therefore, not only what’s the incentive there, but then, what is the kind of inevitable follow-on to that for what the advice for the Democratic Party should be?
Jake Grumbach: That’s a great question. I would say there’s a lot of incentives out there, but one, it is a little funny, you’re right, to pay a billion dollars for a super PAC strategy, lose the election, then pay this organization more to tell you what’s wrong, is an interesting thing. Again, like, the independence of academia, I think is something to shout out, and that is one thing, with universities under attack, it’s just, it feels like a different world where I am just not at risk of losing contracts over any finding that is just not a thing promoted to get the right answer. And then I would say more broadly, in the popularist scene of individuals who say centrism and moderate or more conservative policy agendas and policy positions or ideological self-presentation in the Democratic Party would help them in general elections, that’s the broader claim, and that’s even different from this, How would non voters have voted? question, How did Gen Z vote? Those are even separate questions.
Now we’re onto the question of, Do moderate candidates do better in general elections? That’s actually a question with a lot of political science research on it. The latest research, there’s a set of papers that prominently said 10 or 20 years ago that moderate candidates did do better in elections, and those ended up having very serious data and other sort of errors built into them, so they’ve been issued corrections, and they don’t find that moderate candidates do better. So that’s a big thing that happened over the last year in political science. That’s actually a very massive deal in poli sci. But the key thing is that this is a really tough question, Do moderate candidates do better? Why? Because candidates are different in all sorts of ways. Right? They run in different districts. More moderate candidates run in more purple districts. It’s really hard to disentangle, What is the effect of your candidate’s policy positions versus all this other stuff going on? The popularists really like putting out little graphs saying, Blue Dog candidates and Susan Collins in Maine, they do better than you’d expect. Joe Manchin in one of the reddest states in the country, was winning for a while, and even when he was not, he did better than other Democrats in West Virginia, for example. Those are arguments in favor of moderates doing better in general elections.
But when you actually do a quality research designed to isolate this causally, okay, Joe Manchin and his incumbent for many, many years, has generated a crazy name recognition and is also a moderate. There’s a lot of things going on. Kyrsten Sinema, very different type of moderate, doesn’t do as well. And then at the presidential level, this is different, but we do research designs that try to isolate causally, through regression discontinuity designs that leverage close primary elections as, like, a coin-flip election to study the effect of policy positions in general elections, panel analysis, where you track the same voters over time and you see if they turned out or not when their House candidate was more or less moderate over time. Those try to isolate causally, the effect of moderation, and the cutting-edge research is that there probably was a little moderation benefit back in the less polarized era when the parties were not two national teams, but in recent years, there is absolutely no effect either way. And this, sometimes people on the Left get mad at me by saying, Yeah, it also doesn’t do anything to move more left either. It’s just, we’re in a different era where people are not voting based on, Oh, this guy’s policy positions are a little more moderate. These are a little more left. We’re in an era where a lot of people think Bernie Sanders is more moderate than Kamala Harris.
Adam: Yeah, and obviously that can become racially and gender coded pretty quickly.
Jake Grumbach: Race and gender. There’s different issue positions where economic populism is not seen as left. There’s a sort of establishment/anti-establishment cleavage that most people care about. This is just we’re in a different world where Donald Trump is, like, the most extreme candidate in existence, but voters perceive him has quite moderate on some things.
Adam: Right. I remember everyone saying, Harris has to go right. Harris has to go right. Polls show 42% of voters think she’s too liberal. And if you look at the exact same poll from 2012, it showed 38% of Obama voters in 2012 thought he was too liberal. It’s like, is that four percentage points really the thing that has to fundamentally alter, I mean, again, it’s, if a bunch of DSA guys and Citations Needed podcasters were like, Here’s all this data showing why Harris has to go left, people would say, like, Oh, they just wanted to go left because they agree that’s good. But if a bunch of, like, rich, well-paid consultants, again, who cycle in and out of the consulting world, who are worth millions of dollars, who own $4 million homes in DC, say she has to go center, it’s, Oh, well, they’re actually just sort of the aliens from Star Trek, or just perceiving humanity separate from ideology. They’re kind of just in the ether, separate from ideology. And it’s this kind of faux-punditry from nowhere that I find quite grating.
And this really gets to the issue of, to formulate this in a question of, again, the 15 different Shor profile pieces where he’s at these cool Manhattan parties notwithstanding, it seems like the basic theory of like, well, they ran the perfect Matt Yglesias campaign in 2024, they completely deprioritized anything involving identity, to some extent threw trans people under the bus, totally threw immigrants under the bus, talked about guns, God, whatever. Again, even the concept of moderation assumes a kind of two-dimensional space when it’s really 15 different dimensions, as you know. And then they get the campaign they want, and they say, Oh, actually, polls show she was still kind of woke-coded. And it’s like, again, that’s informed by race and gender, but also, like, ultimately, then this is an unfalsifiable theory. It’s not a very scientific theory, because invariably, they can just copy and paste the 2004 RNC platform and they could still lose and say, Oh, actually that there was this percent who thought, and it’s like, how do you falsify this? Because there’s always going to be some woke stink that the Democrats can’t get rid of unless they, I don’t know, just become Archie Bunker categorically as a party.
Jake Grumbach: So now we’re getting away from, like, the data in empirics, which have a lot of uncertainty, but I’m pointing you towards evidence that shows Gen Z is not that rightwing a generation, despite the rightward shift of some young men, non-voters, how they vote. But now we’re getting into theory, which really is important, and this is social science theory we’re talking about right now, and falsifiability, and that’s exactly right. Essentially, if perceived moderation is what matters here, and voters think moderation as a word sounds good, then it is a circular logic where any loss will always be due to not being sufficiently moderate. The other thing is, the ultimate sort of theory of popularism is that you don’t raise the salience of issues that are losers for your party. So immigration in general, polls suggest that people trust Trump more on immigration than the Democratic Party. In the popularist logic, that means don’t ever talk about immigration, and if you do, basically just compromise on it. But we saw this bright spot in the Democratic Party when actually voters don’t have deep thoughts about immigration always. And when you disaggregate and you say, Okay, well, here’s Trump’s actual immigration pattern, it’s not just like crack down on the border. It’s actually like an authoritarian Gestapo state. You know, people don’t like that. People do like due process. Joe Rogan starts talking about, Oh, actually, due process seems cool.
Adam: Well, also, people’s perceptions are totally contradictory. 1/3 of voters in polls, this New York Times poll that they did on the eve of Trump taking office, 1/3 of the people who said they supported mass deportation supported a pathway to citizenship.
Jake Grumbach: Exactly. And that last thing is just, Trump has a higher approval than the Democratic Party as a brand, which means they should just be Trump. I guess you just gotta be Trump then.
Nima: Right. If you just have to kind of follow those numbers, then, exactly, it kind of leads you to the place where you’re assuming that an electorate has fixed views and that, based on polling, you should go to where they are, rather than the idea of politics as a way of persuasion based on what you think are beneficial policies for what you’re trying to do, how you change people’s lives, how you affect people’s lives, how, hopefully, you’re trying to materially improve people’s lives. And so like this entire popularism idea, and then the data that backs it up, that gets aired on Ezra Klein and gets all these kind of profile pieces, and then obviously the Democratic Party is following closely in terms of what kind of playbook to run next, is always going to be in service of saying, Oh, well, whatever polls show now we have to run and do that, rather than try and make an argument, rather than try and change people’s perceptions about what is possible, what narratives they actually believe in, what they understand, what feels right, and if it feels right to just wherever we are in this moment in time, then basically it’s saying you’re just abdicating any interest in actually pursuing politics as a political party.
Adam: But they don’t even do that. As we’ve talked about on the show a million times, there is tons of popular stuff, whether it’s expanding Medicaid, expanding Medicare for All, ceasefire in Gaza, those are not talked about at all. And again, it’s popularism is both profoundly immoral on its face, but also is just bullshit because it’s completely selective.
Jake Grumbach: I mean, the selective point is an important one, where it’s always worth checking when people say a general strategy, like, you should be aware of public opinion and do popular things and have a popular policy agenda in this way, you do got to make sure they’re consistent on things that the popularist-wonk community really themselves cares about, and they sometimes appear willing to trade general election votes for policy positions they really care about. And I would say one is, you know, so a classic is like, we know this socially, scientifically, but NIMBYism is pretty popular. It’s actually kind of a problem that it’s so popular. People don’t want stuff in their backyard. The popularist community sees it. YIMBYism and zoning reform and so forth has extremely important policy wise, but it’s unpopular, and you don’t hear a lot about the popularity of that issue from them. And similarly, the Democratic Party as an elite apparatus, did not want to change its Israel-Gaza position for that reason, and potentially the preferences of popularists themselves, you don’t hear much about this area, so I think selectivity, absolutely crucial stuff.
And then in general, we do have to accept that, in some areas that are simple policies that are kind of salient and straightforward. So I would say that, for example, trans participation in NCAA athletics is very unpopular, and it’s not that complicated, just the way abortion bans, very simple, very unpopular. There are some constraints. Like, public opinion is a constraint, but it’s also movable. So it’s a dynamic. Politics happens dynamically across time. And I think the two biggest things that showed moving public opinion through, like, not even leadership, the Democratic Party could have really sucked at this, but like even that minimal bit of action moved first, immigration attitudes really strongly in that, Oh, this is what they mean, not just ending asylum claims on the border. This is something immigration policy is multifaceted. And when I’m learning these parts, they don’t like it, and that’s partially by going to, you know, Van Hollen going to El Salvador and things like that. And the second is Gen Z movement to being suddenly so anti-Trump. And this is sticking even through Trump actually getting ever so slightly more tough on Israel in the recent week or two. So both of those show a huge movement, but it’s both. We should not throw out the idea that when the Republicans went too far and started banning abortion, that was a problem, too.
Adam: I mean, yeah, the issue to me is this, to me, is the core problem with this thinking, and how corrosive I think it is on kind of elite liberal pundits. And I wrote about this for The Nation about immigration back in February of 2023 when the Democrats started going hard-right, is there’s this idea, there’s two conflicting images here. Set aside the normative concerns. There’s a branding problem Democrats have, which poll after poll shows, which is they’re broadly seen as phony. They’re broadly seen as constantly triangulating and kind of believing in nothing. They don’t have courage, right? So Trump does something unpopular, and while you may disagree with that specific policy, it boosts his broader brand, in a sense, to use a marketing term, because he’s seen as having courage. He’s seen as someone who has convictions.
And there’s not a sense in, at least in the sort of Shor analysis I see that there’s any kind of tradeoff here. Forget the tradeoff of just dumping on the Left all the time, because those are supposed to be free votes. There’s also the tradeoff of, like, what does it mean for the broader party brand to constantly be perceived as being phony, triangulating and changing your positions every five seconds? You look fake. And this is the number one criticism from the kind of Joe Rogan set again, whereas Obama, like, I remember, is one of the first things he did, is he was like, Yeah, they wanted me to say I didn’t like Dijon mustard, but I said, No, I like Dijon mustard and I like arugula. And it was like, Yeah, people think that’s effete and liberal, but it seems authentic, right? Even if something is superficial as that. And then you get to this broader issue of, like, is there short-term political gain for throwing trans people under the bus? And they say, yes. Okay, immigrants? Yes.
And I don’t know if you’ve ever worked at a job where people start losing their jobs or are fired capriciously, but what’s the first thing you do? You start polishing your resume, looking for a way out, right? And there’s this sense that nothing is sacred, that no one’s sort of worth fighting for. And I do think over time, that kind of erodes the brand. Because if we’re gonna we’re going to be dog-eat-dog and we’re going to be Machiavellian, then fuck it, I’m going to be a Trump voter, and the Shors of the world never kind of address the broader, again, set the normative issues aside, the broader brand of having a party that is axiomatically fake, triangulating and saying one thing in 2020 and saying one thing in 2024.
Jake Grumbach: That’s why, I mean, you’re bringing up in 2023, the Biden-Harris going tough on the border in immigration policy is a great example, because they did get tough on the border, that actually made policy much closer to this, you know, media and moderate voter in this way, and voters did not update their beliefs or attitudes about Biden and Harris immigration policy. They could have done that earlier in 2021 or something like that. Maybe there’s some argument to be made. But this is tough stuff to move your sort of general reputation of being credible in your policy commitments. So this is just classic, across the board.
The first thing, I mean, I’ll take the last point first, which is, I think the most important is, we don’t have a good way of testing this empirically, but it seems pretty qualitatively clear. Look at that dril tweet where he says, I’m like on The Price Is Right, turning this dial called racism up and down, and looking back at the crowd’s reaction. That is so the Democratic Party in recent years, and it is so off-putting, treating voters like lab rats, that you are selling something to, rather than trying to build a coalition with, on things you care about. That does not signal credibility. So when Kamala Harris does run a moderate campaign as this gun-toting, prosecuting, strongest military, saying, If you break in, I will shoot you dead–
Nima: Most lethal military, not even just the strongest. The most lethal military.
Jake Grumbach: Most lethal military. She’s fun, the police, you know, it’s fun. It’s all of this. But this is exactly, this is something that’s just hard to test, but that comes off as really fake, because there’s all sorts of video over many years of, to different constituencies emphasizing different messaging as opposed to somebody with messaging consistency for decades, literally being repetitive.
Adam: You seem to be hinting at a certain politician who may or may not have been iced out of the primaries.
[Laughter]
Jake Grumbach: Exactly. It’s just, it hurts too bad, so I’m not even trying to get into it. But this optimization in front of an audience really turns people off. That’s so, so clear. Then when you think about some sort of, like, believing in something in leadership, a lot of the way public opinion works is the appearance of consensus. So when the Democratic Party runs away at the elite level from an issue, it has a reverberating effect. And somebody who’s not into politics sees an emerging consensus of, some people are enthusiastic and think they’re really right about an issue. And then some people in the other coalition, the leaders are always hedging and sort of disagreeing with each other and giving credit to the other side. And this is part of like old-school political science game theory and theory is that, if you endorse a policy position for the other party, you are maybe making yourself seem more moderate, which, in theory, could help you get re-elected or elected. But you’re also improving the other party’s brand and harming your party’s brand. That’s a tradeoff issue there, and you need to think about that tradeoff when you’re taking positions, how much you endorse the other party as, Oh, they have a great point.
Nima: Yeah.
Jake Grumbach: Like, these are not easy answers.
Nima: Our new soda tastes just like Coca-Cola. You’d never even know! People would just go buy Coke.
Jake Grumbach: Why not buy Coca-Cola? [Laughs]
Nima: Well, before we let you go, Jake, this has been so great, tell us a little bit about the work that we can maybe look forward to from you and your colleagues over at On Data and Democracy and where folks can find your excellent work.
Jake Grumbach: That’s great. So I have a website, just my name, JakeGrumbach.com. You guys mentioned my book. Thank you so much. But then I do just a ton of media, but you know, these academic papers and spin-off papers, but I do a lot of research on the labor movement and labor unions and political economy and politics. Really focus with my co-author, Adam Bonica, I mentioned on why young people have so little influence in American politics, and we think the answer really is the campaign finance system.
Also, we haven’t mentioned it in this, but in debates about what the Democratic Party should do, there’s a huge debate around how it should fundraise. The Democratic Party, in 2016, super PACs and billionaires favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. And this led the Democratic Party to infer that they should double down on big money at the expense of small donors who appeared to be more highly engaged, woke libs, you know, or far-right small donors for Trump. So they thought we should get more billionaires and push out small donors, and we should support campaign-finance regulations that help that process. And we should no longer really oppose Citizens United, that Obama, if you remember, strongly did in the State of the Union and elsewhere.
That was a huge, myopic decision that has bitten the Democratic Party in the ass now, where, in the era of Musk and the oligarchs, this has dwarfed any type of political spending we’ve ever seen. These are the richest people in human civilizational history. They are, in part, aligned with Trump and also scared due to Trump’s authoritarianism. They have bent the knee to him, because Trump and the executive branch can violate the constitution through DOGE or do any sort of authoritarian regulatory move, shut down their platforms, whatever he wants. This has led to a really concerning authoritarian coalition of oligarchs and an authoritarian in office. What that means is the Democratic Party really shot itself in the foot there, and then it really nicely circles back to this point about credibility, populism, and being anti-establishment, where the Democratic Party could do well by saying, We don’t like people buying everything.
Adam: But then they couldn’t give $2 billion to the super PAC and pay a bunch of consultants. I mean, you take $50 million from Reid Hoffman and $50 million from Bill Gates, and then you have, really, anyone who’s been on Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane, to make it more streamlined.
[Laughter]
But make no mistake, that won’t stop them from sending the most frantic, paranoid emails and text messages to get $15 from Grandma.
Jake Grumbach: That shit is just killing us. You know, Bonica himself read a blog post. He actually did some stats analysis on the fucking text messages. But the point there is, there’s a lot of debate in campaign finance regulation and in money in politics, but money in politics is a reason old people dominate. We find through stats and record linkage and deep analysis, the median dollar from an individual donor comes from a 66-year-old. That is half of all individual money and politics in the US political system federally come from people 66 and above. That is the dominant reason for the US gerontocracy. But this is true across the board when it comes to threats to democracy, when it comes to Musk and DOGE, when it comes to corruption and all these kickbacks and memecoins and things like that. We’re in a new era of money in politics, and the people who are really concerned about it for the last 20 years were exactly right.
Nima: We’re gonna need to have you back on at some point to talk about the contradiction of virality online and the kind of focus on certain narratives that animate and motivate young people, and yet the powerlessness of that entire cohort of potential voters, so kind of like where the narrative energy is going, and yet where the donor energy is going and where the power really lies. But until then, I just want to thank you for joining us today. We’ve been speaking with Jake Grumbach, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and author of the book Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, which was published in 2022 by Princeton University Press. Jake, thank you so much again for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Jake Grumbach: Great to speak with you guys.
[Music]
Adam: Yeah, I think the sort of posture, it’s kind of amazing that it’s managed to live on as a media convention for this long, but the posture of the sort of post-ideological numbers guy still lives in Vox and New York Times. Sort of this idea that, I remember the second the election was called, on the night of the election last year, immediately everyone says, Oh, you’re just confirming your priors. And it’s like, yeah, we’re all confirming our priors, because they’re our priors for a reason, because you believe they’re correct. And there’s sort of this above-the-fray, post-ideological, now you have to sort of confirm your priors with evidence and reasoning and logic. Obviously you’re not sort of, you can’t just assert it, but everybody does that. And there’s this posture of this kind of wonkish, insider guy who’s sort of above that. And again, his priors are, the priors of David Shor, is that he made millions of fucking dollars and wants to do it again and doesn’t want to be discredited. So, like, that’s his priors, so what about his data just confirming his priors. I mean, we could do this all day.
Nima: Because that somehow becomes more authentic than what is deemed to be, quote-unquote, “ideological” on, say, the left, right?
Adam: Yeah, it’s like, everyone’s, everybody’s just doing political Moneyball, and we’re just sort of gaming things out. And it’s like, I can’t believe we’re still doing this. I mean, we’re on basically year 12, 13 of this as like a media trope, and it’s been wholly discredited in 2016. It should have been discredited, obviously, in 2024, but we’re still kind of doing this post-ideological guy just calling balls and strikes. And then, of course, as again, as Jacob points out, the thing that they claim they support, which we’re talking about in part II, right, which is this abundance agenda, which is tethered to in many ways, they are aligned with the so-called YIMBY movement, the kind of corporate wing of the YIMBY movement, such as it is, and those policies are deeply unpopular, but they never talk about that, because, again, the popular track or sort of doing what’s popular is entirely selective in pretextual. It is not a real thing you’re doing, because, again, as we’ve listed the dozens of different examples of things you would support if you actually were doing things that were sort of just objectively popular.
Nima: [Laughs] Right. Because it really comes down to wanting to say things that are popular rather than do things that are popular.
Adam: A good way to look at it is this. If I’m someone who has conservative tendencies, pro-corporate tendencies, I more or less think the status quo is working, and to the extent to which it’s not, I want to actually give more corporate giveaways. And I need to enter the kind of Democratic Party space, right? This is the same again, it’s the exact same playbook with charter schools. I can’t just come in and say, I’m a libertarian who supports deregulation. That sort of sounds bad. So what I need to do is present myself as someone who’s a bold, truth-telling, savvy realist who simply just cannot ignore the overwhelming empirical data, and then he’s reluctantly a messenger telling you, the purist, ideological, wingbat fucking Left, the reality of the situation. But I’m here to help, right? It’s always kind of with a heavy heart.
Nima: It gets back to our kind of, you know, handwringing Republican best friend.
Adam: Exactly. I wish the data showed that Gaza cost Harris the election. I wish the data showed that campaigning with Liz Cheney cost her the election. Trust me, I’m on your side. I support your cause. But I just, the facts came in, the data came in, and it’s just a feature of reality. I can’t argue with it. It’s like, Well, okay, but how come the facts that always come in always confirm your conservative priors? I mean, the whole premise is insulting to everyone’s intelligence, and this constant above-the-fray, fart-sniffing, sort of just calling balls and strikes posture, it just never goes away. It’s attractive to a certain subset of overly-educated dope who thinks that you can occupy this post-ideological space, and it’s simply, again, ignoring, that’s why they have to ignore the conflicts of interests. That’s why they never mention David Shor worked for the fucking campaign. Because the second you mentioned you worked for the campaign, a little neuron fires off in your brain going, Well, wait a second, if you work for the campaign, wouldn’t he have every incentive to say that they just didn’t do Shorism enough? That’s why they have to ignore the conflicts of interest, because that gives away the game. These are not people who exist outside of politics. They are very much being paid lots of money to ostensibly win elections, and they don’t.
Nima: In the current autopsy, it appears that the new mantra of the Democratic Party, pushed by people like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which is really being adopted by donors and party officials, strategists, etc., is the quote-unquote, “abundance agenda.” Now, this is a co-optation of abundance messaging and the idea that there isn’t just one pie, and if you get something, that someone gets less when it comes to rights, when it comes to justice, there’s been this co-opting of that message by more kind of party elites in a new book that Klein and Thompson just put out, and that is going to be the subject of our next episode.
Adam: It’s not enough to say that, We weren’t responsible and when also, by the way, we didn’t do Liz Cheneyism hard enough. Trust me. You have to have some kind of alternate vision in the next four years with respect to the kind of AOC wing, for want of a better term. And there has to be some articulating logic that isn’t simply just rebranded neoliberalism or the weird kind of Frankenstein Biden politics that were kind of unique to Biden himself.
Nima: Yeah. So stay tuned for next week’s episode, part II of the Empire Strikes First. We will be back then and discuss this quote-unquote, “abundance agenda” rhetoric that is taking hold of the Democratic Party these days. But until then, you can follow Citations Needed on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded.
I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again for listening, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
[Music]
This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.
