A note on Shor's ridiculous study of donor partisanship
The paper is ambiguous, and it doesn't say what he says it says.
Popularist David Shor has been arguing with populist Matt Karp over the popularity of their politics. And while this may sound like a fight between the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea, it turns out that these men have very different politics. Usually we would just say that Shor is a center-right Democrat and Karp some variety of socialist; but since both of them also think that their politics are popular, we have to give each a new term. Don’t ask me why.
Anyway, Shor thinks that Karp’s politics are unpopular, and to prove it he’s been directing people on social media to the same chart over and over [1][2][3][4]:
This comes from an unpublished research note that the authors titled “What Do Donors Want? Heterogeneity by Party and Policy Domain”. In it, the authors attempt to show that among Democrats, rich donors are to the left of another group. What group? Don’t ask David Shor, who has variously described them as
It turns out this second group is “the mass public” — which makes a lot of sense, but also makes this paper a lot less interesting.
Why? Because this paper is really a comparison of 1) a group that excludes nondonors to 2) a group that includes them. And as a matter of both common sense and empirical fact, nondonors are obviously less partisan than donors. A 2017 study on this makes it clear:
So are rich donors to the left of your average Democrat because they are rich or because they are donors? Whatever the answer is, it isn’t in this paper.
And that’s a problem for Shor’s argument. First because, as noted above, he has just flat-out misrepresented group two as “donors overall”. More importantly, however, it confounds the suggestion that left politics are for the rich and centrist politics are for the masses. There is just no way to draw that conclusion from this data.
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