Sleepwalking into disaster

Ezra devotes a great deal of this very interesting political analysis of pollster-strategist David Shor to bemoaning the fact that Democrats are pushing policies that voters should love but in fact hate, and to evaluating competing strategies for finding a way of talking about unpopular policies so that voters see the light and fall in line.  Failing that, to hiding the Dems views on toxic subjects.  Sadly, voters sometimes resist falling in line and even, horrifyingly, find out what Dems really are like to do and therefore vote for the bad people on the right.

Shor’s critics [including Michael Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.] argue that he’s too focused on the popularity of what Democrats say, rather than the enthusiasm it can unleash. When pressed, Podhorzer called this theory “viralism” and pointed to Trump as an example of what it can see that popularism cannot. “A lot of things Trump did were grossly unpopular but got him enormous turnout and support from the evangelical community,” Podhorzer said. “Polling is blind to that. Politics isn’t just saying a thing at people who’re evaluating it rationally. It’s about creating energy. Policy positions don’t create energy.”

Podhorzer also pointed to Biden: “He’s done much more than I thought he’d be able to do. All the things he’s doing are popular. And yet he’s underwater.”

I'm not sure how to account for Podhorzer's belief that "all the things Biden's doing are popular," unless he means that they're popular with his buddies. The polls have been brutal lately across the entire board, from COVID strategy to Afghanistan to taxing and spending to the border to Biden's character and mental decline. In any case, Dem strategists betray a strange disconnect from the idea that they are accountable to voters, tending instead to view themselves as doctors who need to slip us a mickey so they can undertake massive reconstructive surgery that we'll thank them for later.

What does create energy, Podhorzer thinks, is fear of the other side. His view is that Democrats’ best chance, even now, is to mobilize their base against Trump and everything he represents. “The challenge in 2022 is to convince people that they’re again voting on whether or not the country is going in a Trumpist direction,” he said.

What he doesn't see, presumably, is the kind of fear his own party creates in its opponents, though he and his friends will speak casually about how much conservative Hispanics turn from blue to red because they fear job destruction, border chaos, and socialism.

This is an argument Shor is happy to have. “I think the conventional wisdom has swung too far toward believing policy isn’t important,” he said. He agrees that enthusiasm matters, but it has to be enthusiasm for a message that doesn’t alienate the undecided. “A lot of politics is about what you talk about,” he told me. You should sort your ideas, he said, by popularity. “Start at the top, and work your way down to find something that excites people. But I think that what actually happens is people sort by excitement first. And the problem is the things that are most exciting to activists and journalists are politically toxic.”

This can read as an affront to those who want to use politics to change Americans’ positions on those issues. “The job of a good message isn’t to say what’s popular but to make popular what needs to be said,” Shenker-Osorio told me.