What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

To Nathaniel’s earlier point about Minneapolis’s City Question 2, it’s easy to overlook, because the race was not at all competitive, but New York City just elected as mayor a former cop who promised to bring back the plainclothes police force that was just dismantled last summer and one of his main talking points was “safety is a prerequisite to prosperity.”

And in that same vein (but also disagreeing): There’s an argument that what looks like support for the Shor argument is just normal thermostatic movement.

In some ways, though, I think getting too specific is the wrong idea. For one thing, the data likely isn’t robust enough to make those distinctions. For another, voters may have a vague directional feeling that one party has gone “too far” or is not standing up for their interests, and then that will manifest itself in lots of specific opinions about specific issues. I do think there’s probably something to the David Shor critique of Democratic elites being out of touch with the electorate, but I don’t know that it’s as specific as CRT or some specific menu of issues.