Democrats get lots of bad advice
Description
Episode Summary
One year after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, Democrats are still trying to figure out what to do for the next time around, and in the 2026 midterm elections.
There are many people offering advice to the Democrats in this regard, and certainly the most well-funded are the ones who say that the party has become too liberal and has to modify its stances to become more popular and resonant with public opinion.
And at the same time, there are people on the further left side of the coalition arguing that the Democrats have become too conservative and that they have alienated people who want a more radical change in society to fix things that are broken, and not to step back at all on defending abortion access or trans rights.
Each side of this intra-left debate offers worthy points, but both groups tend to understate the immense effect that media have on people’s political opinions. That is the central topic of my new e-book, What Republicans Know, so please do help me out and purchase it if you haven’t yet.
Someone else’s work you should consider in this regard is our guest on today’s program: Dave Karpf is an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, and he’s written several books on the role of media and public opinion.
Last week, he wrote an article in the New Republic about a new report from a group called WelcomePAC, which argued that Democrats need to become more moderate, but which also largely ignored how many people don’t know about candidates’ policy views.
The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.
Theory of Change and Flux are listener supported. We need your help to keep going. Please subscribe to stay in touch!
Related Content
Free excerpt from “What Republicans Know”
How much do political party elites know about their own voters?
Reactionaries built an infrastructure to attack democracy, their opponents must do the same to defend it
Americans want big ideas, but Trump’s opponents aren’t providing them
Democratic losses stem from their failure to communicate
Trump’s insult comic shtick and the right’s new media shock troops
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
11:01 — Policies are far from the only thing that matters to voters
17:03 — Democrats created their gigantic media disadvantage through inaction
22:11 — Political parties need permanent infrastructure
34:55 — Is the U.S. left too obsessed with internal debate?
43:20 — The perils of thinking that polling alone is political science
53:11 — Conclusion
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
Matthew Sheffield: And joining me now is Dave Karp. Hey Dave. Welcome back to Theory of Change.
Dave Karpf: Thanks for having me again.
Matthew Sheffield: So, you had a great thread on the WelcomePAC report, which I have to say is when I read that, I instantly was like, oh man, these people like “Welcome Back, Kotter,” the seventies TV series.
Dave Karpf: It does.
Matthew Sheffield: So, but you know, in fairness to them, I, do want to say that there are some things, there’s a bunch of stuff in this report that’s high-quality and that does match established, well-confirmed political science. And this is, in my view, the highest-quality, more centrist-leaning document that we’ve seen since 2024.
Do you agree with that?
Dave Karpf: Yeah, I mean the, when I opened this, the first thing that I noticed, they, they have a list of people that they’re thinking and it includes a number of political scientists who I know and deeply respect. It also includes a [00:04:00 ] number of people who are immediate red flags for me, Nate Silver is on this thing, like Nate Silver was a great person to talk to five, 10 years ago. Lately he’s mostly seems to be playing poker.
So there were a couple of immediate red flags, but also there were a number of people who I was like, okay, if you are, like, if you’re talking to Aaron Strauss and Chris Warshaw. I’m interested in what you have to say. And I think they took seriously that they wanted to gather the data and see what it told them.
I have some things we can get into about what data they decided to look at and what they didn’t decide to gather. But I think they, at least took it seriously.
Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Absolutely. And, and there were a couple of other red flags for me with a, like they cited James Carville and their title page and a Republican pollster. How does that make you look better? I, don’t think that it does guys.
But nonetheless there are some points in here that are true and like one of the, things that I try to do with my writing and podcast [00:05:00 ] is to, show the various factions of the, left that, nobody is a hundred percent correct in, understanding elections.
Like each side actually has viewpoints that are true and each one has ideas that are false. And so one of the, there are a couple of things that are true in this report is that irregular voters are
United States
