This is supposed to be an argument against nihilism, but is it?

“I think there’s this nihilism that’s very popular in our [Democratic polling] industry — that nothing we do, or that the other side does, really matters. But in the wake of inflation, voters went from favoring Republicans by about 5 points on the economy to favoring them by 15 or 16. And after Dobbs, voters started trusting the Democrats much more on abortion. Education used to be the Democrats’ strongest issue. But our standing on that collapsed during Covid, and now it’s basically even. So, what people care about and trust us on really is responsive to concrete events that happen in the world. That isn’t 100 percent of the story. There are a lot of other things going on. But what we do and what we say does matter.”

The quote is from David Shor of Blue Rose Research which “conducted 26 million voter interviews in 2024,” in an interview with Erik Levitz on why Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election. On the surface, Shor’s statement does rebut the idea that nothing matters. But what is the mechanism through which things matter? The Democrats didn’t cause inflation, they didn’t take away reproductive rights and they weren’t responsible for COVID-19 and were not in power when it hit.

There’s a separate part of the interview that deserves some attention.

The most important thing is that we saw incredible polarization on political engagement itself. There’s a bunch of different ways to measure this: There’s how many elections you vote in, or how important politics is to your identity. There’s how closely you follow the news. But across all of these, there’s a consistent story: The most engaged people swung toward Democrats between 2020 and 2024, despite the fact that Democrats did worse overall.

Meanwhile, people who are the least politically engaged swung enormously against Democrats. They’re a group that Biden either narrowly won or narrowly lost four years ago. But this time, they voted for Trump by double digits.

And I think this is just analytically important. People have a lot of complaints about how the mainstream media covered things. But I think it’s important to note that the people who watch the news the most actually became more Democratic. And the problem was basically this large group of people who really don’t follow the news at all becoming more conservative.

For those of us who write or podcast about politics, should we be encouraged that we were convincing to the people who read and listened to us, or should we despair that the whole effort was dwarfed by shifts in people who don’t pay any attention to politics?  Sure, we can comfort ourselves that things would have surely been worse without our contributions. But look at this:

The issue that voters cared the most about was overwhelmingly the cost of living. I really cannot stress how much people cared about the cost of living. If you ask what’s more important, the cost of living or some other issue picked at random, people picked the cost of living 91 percent of the time. It’s really hard to get 91 percent of people to click on anything in a survey.

I get very frustrated when I hear progressives and Democrats mock this sentiment as people voting only on the cost of eggs, but that’s mainly because I think it’s a defense mechanism to avoid taking any responsibility for Harris’s loss that prevents needed introspection. However, in the context of nihilism, the idea that nothing else mattered, the numbers come pretty close to backing it up. If there’s a lesson, it’s to treat the price of groceries as seriously as a heart attack because if they’re high, nothing else you say is going to break through.

There’s more to digest from this interview. The two biggest takeaways is that high turnout now favors the Republicans rather than the Democrats, and that the Zoomer generation is dramatically more conservative than the Millennials, especially among men and people of color. The last generation as conservative as the Zoomers was my own (Generation X) which came of age during the Reagan administration.

The thing to remember about all this data however is that it is entirely about the 2024 electorate and the 2024 electorate will never vote again. Maybe none of us will ever vote again, at least not in a free and fair election. But, if and when we do, we’ll be voting in reaction to a fascist takeover of our government. How people respond to this assault isn’t very predictable because it’s different from everything that came before it.

But how people get and digest information is still going to be vitally important, no matter what.