The Tides of American Politics (Ep.19)

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. Today’s guest is David Shor, a political data scientist. David worked for the Obama campaign and was described in New York Magazine as “Obama’s in-house Nate Silver”. You may know David’s name because he was fired in June, over a tweet that was widely viewed as innocent. The tweet cited research showing that riots, unlike non-violent protests, tend to move voters to the right. Although Coleman wanted to talk to David about the circumstances of his firing, due to legal reasons, David can’t talk about it publicly. Fortunately, he is an extremely interesting person outside of his cancellation, and he’s the perfect person to talk to about the lessons of the 2020 election.

This episode focuses on the basics of polling and why the polls under predicted Trump’s performance in both 2016 and 2020. Coleman also talked about David’s skepticism of the so-called ‘Shy Trump Voter Effect’, the problem of non-response bias, and what to make of the growing cultural divide between college-educated and non-college-educated voters. Coleman had a very productive disagreement about the so-called racial resentment scales, used as a tool to understand why people voted for Trump and much more.

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