only noticed this 'Style' section story because it is causing much bitter argument between Dem political types on Twitter -
One guest at the party - who did not make it into the piece - described the tendency/world Shor represents as the "revenge of the empirical" https://t.co/3Sms3uGn05
from the article, a good one line summary of what irks some
His most influential idea, called “popularism” (or sometimes “Shorism”), boils down to message discipline for candidates in competitive races: They should talk about what’s popular with voters and shut up about what’s not.
....Jelena Luketina, a computer scientist at Oxford University who served as the head of the party planning committee, said she had met Mr. Shor a few weeks earlier at a book party for Will MacAskill, a central figure in effective altruism, a rising philosophical movement.
Effective altruists, who frequently come from the tech industry, prize rationality over gut feeling. A few of them are a new source of funding in Democratic politics. The guests at Mr. Shor’s parties are often “E.A. adjacent,” which is how he describes himself....
and this
....One reason behind his transformation into one of New York’s busiest hosts has to do with his beliefs on the use of urban space. Mr. Shor, who shares the views of a group of pro-housing-development activists known as YIMBYs, said that his place, at nearly 2,000 square feet, is simply too big for one person.
“No one should have an apartment like this,” he said. “But if you do, you have an obligation to open it up to others.”....
and this
....Nearby stood a consultant, Nik Palomba, who has known Mr. Shor for more than a decade through a Facebook group for fans of the political writer Matthew Yglesias....
and this
...As a wiz-kid working for the Obama re-election campaign more than a decade ago, he wore a red silk shirt to a fund-raiser. To complete the look, he plastered down his curls with gel.
“My boss came up to me,” Mr. Shor recalled, “and he just said, ‘David, this is Chicago.’”
After Mr. Obama left the White House, the energy in youthful New York political circles went to the Bernie Sanders-supporting left [....]
In 2020, amid the nationwide protests after the murder of George Floyd, Mr. Shor tweeted excerpts from a political science paper suggesting that the violent protests after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had pushed voters toward Richard Nixon in the 1968 election. The implication was that any violence taking place at the Floyd demonstrations would lead to an electoral backlash against Democratic candidates.
After the tweet, Mr. Shor was pushed out of his job at Civis Analytics, a consultancy started by Dan Wagner, the former chief data analyst for Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign. As Mr. Shor was vilified by progressives, he became a cause célèbre among the anti-woke set who saw him as a data geek who had been fired for drawing attention to the paper’s data.
After Mr. Sanders lost to Joe Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, demoralizing many on the left, and Democrats in general lost ground with Black and Hispanic voters, Mr. Shor made use of his new prominence to make the case for his brand of political messaging in a series of interviews. At its core, his theory holds that Democrats in competitive races should drop progressive slogans like “defund the police” from their stump speeches and refrain from highlighting immigration and other divisive issues.
These views alienated many on the left. As did his hosting, with Mr. McElwee, a fund-raiser for Ritchie Torres, a pro-Israel Democratic congressional representative of the Bronx....
Comments
from the article, a good one line summary of what irks some
by artappraiser on Fri, 09/09/2022 - 11:51pm
there's also this
and this
and this
and this
by artappraiser on Sat, 09/10/2022 - 12:09am