It's not mentioned often enough that Shor's message is essentially 'People should get less mad about the thing people got mad at me about,' and that's a damn shame. He presents himself as a kind of disinterested empiricist and is usually discussed in those terms, but the man was literally fired from his job over a tweet about race and that seems pretty relevant to me when he offers his opinion on how salient racial issues should be. It's not discrediting, at least in my opinion, but it's important context.
That said, I do get the sense that he believes what he's selling, which is very different than the sense I get from the other popularists. If your theory of the electorate is that the Democrats are so vulnerable to the activist left's lack of message discipline that Sunrise Movement's embrace of 'Defund the Police' lost the Hispanic vote, you should really spend all of your time persuading the activist left, but writers like Matt Yglesias or German Lopez only seem interested in antagonizing them. I understand why, but the fact that they treat the people they see as a threat to the Democratic Party's electoral chances as having opinions beneath their contempt suggests that they're not really interested in firming up that message discipline.
It's not mentioned often enough that Shor's message is essentially 'People should get less mad about the thing people got mad at me about,' and that's a damn shame. He presents himself as a kind of disinterested empiricist and is usually discussed in those terms, but the man was literally fired from his job over a tweet about race and that seems pretty relevant to me when he offers his opinion on how salient racial issues should be. It's not discrediting, at least in my opinion, but it's important context.
That said, I do get the sense that he believes what he's selling, which is very different than the sense I get from the other popularists. If your theory of the electorate is that the Democrats are so vulnerable to the activist left's lack of message discipline that Sunrise Movement's embrace of 'Defund the Police' lost the Hispanic vote, you should really spend all of your time persuading the activist left, but writers like Matt Yglesias or German Lopez only seem interested in antagonizing them. I understand why, but the fact that they treat the people they see as a threat to the Democratic Party's electoral chances as having opinions beneath their contempt suggests that they're not really interested in firming up that message discipline.