David Shor

This article is about the American political consultant. For the television writer, see David Shore.

David Shor
Born1991 (age 33–34)
NationalityAmerican
Alma materFlorida International University
Occupations
Employers
Political partyDemocratic Party

David Shor (born 1991)[1] is an American data scientist and political consultant known for analyzing political polls.[2] He serves as head of data science with Blue Rose Research[1] in New York City,[3] and is a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund.[4] Shor describes himself as a socialist and advised a number of liberal political action committees during the 2020 United States elections.[5][6]

Early life

Shor grew up in Miami, Florida, in a Sephardic Jewish family of Moroccan origins.[7] He holds a mathematics degree from Florida International University.[8] Shor was a precocious child and gifted in mathematics, starting his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 and finishing at the age of 17.[9] Shor was awarded the Math in Moscow scholarship in fall 2009.[10]

Career

Shor joined the Barack Obama 2012 presidential campaign at the age of 20,[11] working on the Chicago-based team that tracked internal and external polls and developed forecasts.[12] The team Shor worked with developed a polling forecasting model, known as "The Golden Report",[13] that projected Obama's vote share within one percentage point in eight of the nine battleground states.[14] New York Magazine described Shor as the "in-house Nate Silver" of the Obama campaign.[5][15]

(((David Shor)))
@davidshor
 Twitter logo, a stylized blue bird

Post-MLK-assasination [sic] race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage. http://omarwasow.com/Protests_on_Voting.pdf

May 28, 2020[16]

Shor then worked as a senior data scientist with Civis Analytics in Chicago[9] for seven years,[17] where he operated the company's web-based survey.[18] On May 28, 2020, Shor tweeted a summary of an academic study by Omar Wasow, a black political scientist at Princeton University, that argued riots following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination likely tipped the 1968 presidential election in Richard Nixon's favor.[19] Some critics argued that Shor's tweet, which was posted during the height of the George Floyd protests, could be interpreted as criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement.[20] Jonathan Chait wrote in New York Magazine that "At least some employees and clients on Civis Analytics complained that Shor's tweet threatened their safety."[21] Shor apologized for the tweet on May 29, and he was fired from Civis Analytics a few days later.[21]

Shor's firing has been cited as an example of "the excesses of so-called cancel culture."[22][23] Political scientist and journalist Yascha Mounk wrote that Shor had been "punished for doing something that most wouldn't even consider objectionable."[24] Vox editor and columnist Matthew Yglesias condemned the idea "that it's categorically wrong for a person – or at least a white person – to criticize on tactical or other grounds anything being done in the name of racial justice," which he claimed was common among Shor's progressive critics.[25]

Since 2020, his work at Blue Rose Research aims to develop a data-based model to predict the outcome of future elections on the basis of simulations, designed in particular to advise the Democratic Party in campaign strategies.[26] Shor is an advocate for what he terms "popularism", the idea that Democrats should campaign on a strategy of focusing on issues that enjoy electoral popularity, such as focusing on economic issues over polarizing social and cultural issues.[26][27] Some political analysts, including Michael Podhorzer, have criticized his work for a lack of transparency regarding his methods and data sources.[26]

References

  1. ^ a b "David Shor". Twitter. Retrieved October 12, 2021.
  2. ^ Levitz, Eric (March 3, 2021). "David Shor on Why Trump Was Good for the GOP – and How Dems Can Win in 2022". Intelligencer. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  3. ^ "David Shor's Postmortem of the 2020 Election". www.msn.com. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  4. ^ "David Shor". Center for American Progress Action. Retrieved March 3, 2021.
  5. ^ a b Levitz, Eric (July 17, 2020). "David Shor's Unified Theory of American Politics". Intelligencer. Retrieved March 13, 2022.
  6. ^ Garrison, Joey; Morin, Rebecca (November 24, 2020). "'Almost Impossible': As Education Divide Deepens, Democrats Fear a Demographic Problem for Future Power". USA Today. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  7. ^ Shor, David [@davidshor] (March 7, 2016). "My sephardic Morrocan relatives don't believe me when tell them that American Jews have historically been left-wing" (Tweet). Retrieved August 13, 2021 – via Twitter.
  8. ^ "See why @davidshor of @CivisAnalytics is one of @crainschicago #Crain20s". Crain's Chicago Business. Retrieved March 3, 2021.
  9. ^ a b Graff, Garrett M. (June 6, 2016). "The Polls Are All Wrong. A Startup Called Civis Is Our Best Hope to Fix Them". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  10. ^ "Our Alumni List – Math in Moscow". mathinmoscow.org. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  11. ^ "One Needle to Predict Them All". Slate Magazine. January 6, 2021. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  12. ^ "See why @davidshor of @CivisAnalytics is one of @crainschicago #Crain20s". Crain's Chicago Business. Retrieved March 3, 2021.
  13. ^ Newton, Ben (October 27, 2018). "An Interview with David Shor – A Master of Political Data". Medium. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  14. ^ "Data Science Seminar Series (DS3)". pages.stat.wisc.edu. Retrieved March 3, 2021.
  15. ^ Lourie Cohen, Hillel (November 2, 2022). "Why U.S. Jewish Voters Are Bucking the Worldwide Trend and Still Voting Democrat". Haaretz. Retrieved March 13, 2022.
  16. ^ (David Shor) [@davidshor] (May 28, 2020). "Post-MLK-assasination [sic] race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage. http://omarwasow.com/Protests_on_Voting.pdf" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  17. ^ "MIDAS & Dept. Political Science Co-Present: David Shor – Democratic Political Data Scientist". MIDAS. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  18. ^ Matthews, Dylan (November 10, 2020). "One Pollster's Explanation for Why the Polls Got It Wrong". Vox. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  19. ^ Mounk, Yascha (June 27, 2020). "Stop Firing the Innocent". The Atlantic. Retrieved March 14, 2022.
  20. ^ Yglesias, Matthew (July 29, 2020). "The real stakes in the David Shor saga". Vox. Retrieved November 8, 2021.
  21. ^ a b Chait, Jonathan (June 11, 2020). "The Still-Vital Case for Liberalism in a Radical Age". Intelligencer. Retrieved March 13, 2022.
  22. ^ Levitz, Eric (July 17, 2020). "David Shor's Unified Theory of American Politics". New York. Archived from the original on December 12, 2023. Retrieved December 12, 2023.
  23. ^ Robertson, Derek (June 5, 2021). "How Everything Became 'Cancel Culture'". Politico. Archived from the original on December 9, 2022. Retrieved December 12, 2023.
  24. ^ Mounk, Yascha (June 27, 2020). "Stop Firing the Innocent". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on December 8, 2023. Retrieved December 12, 2023.
  25. ^ Yglesias, Matthew (July 29, 2020). "The real stakes in the David Shor saga". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on October 29, 2023. Retrieved December 12, 2023.
  26. ^ a b c Klein, Ezra (October 8, 2021). "David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don't Want to Hear". The New York Times. Retrieved October 12, 2021.
  27. ^ Brownstein, Ronald (December 9, 2021). "Democrats Are Losing the Culture Wars". The Atlantic. Retrieved December 10, 2021.

Further reading