I’ve written before about data analyst David Shor. He’s a progressive who found himself canceled back in 2020 after he tweeted some data suggesting that riots made for bad politics. That didn’t go over well in the BLM summer and he got fired. But he’s become a leading figure on the left both for analyzing election data but also for warning Democrats about repeating deeply unpopular phrases like “defund the police” or terms like “Latinx.” He wants Dems to win and he can see certain woke terms are just off-putting to voters.

Today New York Magazine published an interview with Shor in which he offered his early assessment of the midterms. He started out by noting that Democrats really didn’t have great turnout overall this year but did better in the races where it mattered.

The party’s overall share of the national vote is actually going to look fairly bad. It looks like we got roughly 48 percent of the vote. But that’s because Democratic incumbents in safe seats did much worse than those in close races.

In districts that the Cook Political Report rated as “likely” or “solid” or “safe” for the Democratic incumbent, Democrats’ share of the vote declined by 2.5 percent relative to 2020. In districts that were rated as “toss ups” or “lean Democratic,” however, our party’s vote share went down by only 0.4 percent compared to 2020.

As for what helped keep Democrats motivated in those close races, Shor agrees the Dobbs decision probably had a lot to do with it but his explanation was interesting.

We track party ownership of 33 different issues. And in 2020, abortion was middle of the pack. It wasn’t an issue that Democrats dominated. But the Dobbs decision changed that. Abortion suddenly became our second-best issue basically overnight…

I think it’s important to emphasize that what happened with abortion is extremely rare. It’s very rare for party ownership of an issue to shift this rapidly. And I think it really boils down to this concept of “thermostatic” public opinion...

The reason why the party that controls the presidency does poorly in midterms is that voters are trying to balance out policy change by creating divided government. And I think what’s really unique about this midterm cycle is that Republicans created a radical policy change — and one that was quite unpopular — without controlling the presidency or the legislature. And that allowed Democrats to plausibly run as the party that was going to make less change than the opposition, which is a super-unusual situation.

So midterms are usually bad for the party in power not because there’s some rule saying it must be so but because the party in power is usually the party judged to be going too far by voters. You can easily think back to Democrats passing Obamacare and then getting wiped out and losing 63 seats in the 2010 midterms. But this year, the big social change wasn’t anything done by Joe Biden or the Democrats it was Dobbs. So despite high inflation and an unpopular president there was a countervailing pressure created by people unhappy with the big change and the result is a midterm election where there’s actually less change than you would normally expect.

Shor was also asked about the change in Latino voting. Did it continue to shift right this year? Did it revert back?

…with the exception of Beto regaining ground in the Rio Grande Valley, I think there’s a pretty clear story nationwide. We’re still looking at precinct-level data. But if you look at county-level regressions, it really does seem like support continued to fall in relative terms in Hispanic areas. Certainly support was down relative to 2016. But it’s possible that it was down relative to 2020…But if you look at the results in Virginia last year, and in special elections earlier this year, I think it’s all consistent with the idea that a significant percentage of Latino voters durably realigned in 2020.

Looking forward, Shor has been one of the analysts warning that the 2024 Senate map is going to be bad news for the party. He thinks this election changes that but only very slightly.

If this had been a typical midterm, we would’ve lost four or five Senate seats. A lot of this is luck. Even a very small shift toward Republicans, and we would have lost two or three seats. And we were also lucky that this year’s Senate map was favorable for Democrats.

But because we did so well, Republicans no longer have a path to a filibusterproof Senate majority in 2025. That’s something I’m incredibly happy about.

Nevertheless, in 2024, we have eight senators facing reelection in states that are more Republican than the nation as a whole. And we’ll also need to defend states like Montana, West Virginia, and Ohio, where, even in this cycle, no Democrats came close to winning. So we’re at a high risk of losing six or seven seats.

The red wave in the Senate didn’t happen but we’re still heading for a red wave in two years.