David Shor wants the Democratic Party to publicly reject the views of people like David Shor. “I personally identify as a socialist, I think I’m a very left-wing person,” he said. But “I am keenly aware that my views and my values are not shared by the median voter.” Shor describes the median voter as 50 years old, without a college degree and watching five hours of TV a day. Their values, he says, are very different from the values of people like Shor, who is the head of data science at the progressive nonprofit OpenLabs. That’s a problem that he doesn’t think Democrats and the progressive movement are focused on enough.
Shor is one of the leading voices of an idea that might be called “popularism”—the argument that the Democratic Party and organizations and activists who are allied with it should focus their messaging efforts on only the most popular elements of their agenda. Certain items of the left’s wish list, in Shor’s estimation, may be good ideas on the merits, but they turn off the sort of voter Democrats need to win elections and therefore need to be deemphasized—like immigration policy.
“The data definitely bears out that immigration is one of the least popular parts of the Democratic Party’s policy agenda,” Shor told Blue Tent. “It’s particularly politically toxic when it comes to the non-college-educated whites who are structurally overrepresented due to our racist electoral system… Biden is a lot better off bragging about expanding the childhood tax credit and reducing childhood poverty than he is talking about how he brought back DACA, or that he’s bringing in more refugees.”
That’s a typical line of popularist reasoning. The No. 1 duty of everyone on the left, this thinking goes, should be to make sure Democrats win elections. Popularists see all this as self-evident, but their opponents are worried that this worldview is just another excuse to water down left-wing ideas and stand in the way of true progress.
Popularism’s growing influence
Popularism, ironically, isn’t all that popular. The name is brand new, coined by Data For Progress head Sean McElwee, another notable popularist. But it is growing in influence as its arguments are advanced by a loose collection of journalists and analysts like Matthew Yglesias and McElwee’s team at DFP, a progressive polling firm that runs surveys on a wide variety of issues. Joe Biden has referenced DFP numbers in calls with House Democrats, and Barack Obama tweeted approvingly about Shor’s latest interview with New York writer Eric Levitz, in which Shor said that the emphasis left-wing activists placed on “defund the police” likely led conservative Latino voters to turn away from Democrats.
Obama himself did not govern as a popularist would have, McElwee told Blue Tent. Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan gave an average of $1,200 in tax breaks to nearly every American household, but this cash was spread out over time, which economists said would lead to people spending the extra money, thus boosting the economy rather than saving it. But the downside was that almost nobody noticed they even received the money; effectively, the administration hid what should have been a wildly popular achievement. Similarly, much of the debate over the Affordable Care Act focused on the hated mandate that required everyone to buy health insurance rather than the Medicaid expansion, an idea that was (and still is) very popular.
On its face, it seems obvious that politicians would tend to support popular policies. But that is often not the case: former President Donald Trump, who Shor points out won the 2016 Republican primary partly by denouncing unpopular conservative ideas like cutting Medicare and Social Security, began his presidency by supporting a wildly unpopular plan to repeal the ACA and then a similarly despised tax cut. “The actual lived reality of American politics is that the last four presidents before Biden had not really pursued particularly popular first-term agendas,” McElwee said. Biden, by contrast, not only ran a campaign based on popular ideas (expanding the ACA rather than eliminating private insurance, for example), his first major bill was a very popular COVID relief act.
Backlash and balance
The most controversial popularist arguments don’t have to do with elected officials’ agendas, but the messaging of left-wing activist organizations. Shor sees the growing influence of groups like the Sunrise Movement as a positive for the Democratic Party, but thinks that with that power comes a built-in responsibility not to say things that could hurt the party’s electoral chances. “What they tell their supporters to go out and say is seen as an extension of the Democratic Party,” Shor said of ascendant liberal organizations. “That means that you need a much wider variety of folks to have message discipline than before.”
The most commonly cited example of an unpopular message promoted by such groups is the call last summer to “defund the police,” a slogan rejected by Democratic leaders from Biden to Sen. Bernie Sanders, but which was widely covered in the media. “It was endorsed by a very large variety of groups,” Shor said. “You have groups like Indivisible, you have groups like NextGen, that ended up embracing this pretty unpopular thing in order to do coalition service.” In his view, liberal organizations like these can be too focused on appealing to one another in their public communications and not paying attention to how their messages are received by the median voter.
“Having the media obsessed with defunding the police was not good for Democrats,” Matthew Yglesias told Brian Beutler on a recent Crooked Media podcast. “Even though Biden wasn’t up there championing it, it was still, people in their mind were like, ‘This is a thing people are talking about in politics.’” (See Blue Tent’s deep dive into whether “defund the police” really did affect Democratic fortunes in 2020.)
To those skeptical of popularism, calls for activists to tone down their rhetoric in the name of pragmatism may bring to mind debates from the civil rights era, when white liberals decried the confrontational tactics of Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Steve Philips, an author and the host of the Democracy in Color podcast, told Blue Tent that this sort of tone policing goes back a long way. “This is something they were saying after the Civil War,” he said. “They were saying, ‘Do not be too aligned with Black equality, because that will pay a political price.’ That’s really not much different from what Shor and them are saying right now.”
Beutler has called popularism an “impoverished” view of politics, writing recently that “Do Popular Stuff warps the frontier of politics not just by excluding morally righteous ideas (Abolish Private Health Insurance) but by feeding into bad ones (Invade Iraq).” In this view, Democrats should support whatever policies they think are virtuous, and “embody values” that inspire people to vote for them.
Popularists would point out that they are not centrists trying to nudge the party in a Joe Manchinian direction. McElwee and Shor both pointed to the wealth tax, supported by Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, among others, as an extremely popular idea; part of the project of popularism is convincing reluctant establishment politicians to back those sorts of policies.
There’s also a version of the popularist argument that doesn’t say activists should avoid talking about what matters to them, but that they should focus on finding the right message to achieve their ends. “Many climate organizations do focus quite closely on whether or not they’re pursuing popular policies,” said McElwee. “In fact, a lot of them were dismissive of the Green New Deal for this reason.” He pointed to the LGBTQ rights movement as another arena of activism that embraced popularist principles, as it focused on the right to marry as opposed to a more radical vision of politics.
Marcela Mulholland, DFP’s political director, doesn’t see popularism as being diametrically opposed to radical activism, but as a complement to it. “There will always be a certain tension between groups and people who are trying to expand our imagination of what is possible and groups and people who are trying to then codify the political possibilities into law,” she said. But in her view, the two sides are really working in tandem—as radicals expand the Overton window of policy possibilities, others need to convince fence-sitting politicians that backing these new ideas is popular.
The turnout versus persuasion debate
Embedded in the popularist worldview is the notion that persuading voters should be the primary goal of campaigns and activism, an idea sometimes disputed by people who think turning out infrequent voters is a better pathway to victory. Philips believes that the lesson of 2020 is that the turnout operation painstakingly built by Stacey Abrams and others in Georgia is what won Democrats the White House and the Senate. And while it’s true that Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock ran Senate campaigns with relatively moderate messages, Warnock’s status as the pastor of the church where MLK preached was more important to Georgia voters than any policy position, said Philips.
Popularists like Shor “look too narrowly at specific numbers without a deeper level of cultural competence around how these different communities function,” Philips said.
To Philips and others, the answer to Democrats’ well-publicized problems with Latino voters last cycle isn’t to find a message that resonates with moderate Latinos but to do a better job at turning out Latinos who respond to progressive messaging. This is a fundamental disagreement between him and the popularists, who say that popular messages can bolster both persuasion and turnout operations. “I just reject the idea that highly activist messages are particularly effective at mobilizing low-propensity voters,” said McElwee.
Both popularists and their critics believe they are fighting against the establishment to some degree. Philips, who said he is “terrified” of popularism being adopted by more Democrats, sees that poll-focused method of politics as a reason that establishment organs like the Senate Majority PAC spent so much in Iowa as of last summer while largely ignoring Georgia.
Popularists might counter that Biden’s victory was due in large part to his laser focus on popular ideas. They can point to the minimum wage increase component of the recent stimulus bill, which was defeated thanks to moderate Democrats, as evidence that the party is still too hesitant simply to do popular things. They see themselves not as in control of the party, but as insurgents trying to thread a needle: Get voters’ support for progressivism through careful messaging, then persuade Democratic politicians that certain progressive policies are more popular than bland centrism.
“This is a very old left-wing idea, which is, we need to get broader support from working-class people in order to accomplish our goals,” said Shor. “In order for us to win, we have to talk about things using language that regular people can understand. And we have to focus on the issues that they care about. Otherwise, they won’t vote for us. They’ll vote for the fascists, who are actually giving them what they want.”
