Biography:David Shor

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Short description: American political data scientist (born 1991)
David Shor
Born1991 (age 32–33)
NationalityAmerican
Alma materFlorida International University
Occupation
  • Data scientist
  • political consultant
Employer
Political partyDemocratic Party

David Shor (born 1991)[1] is an American data scientist and political consultant known for analyzing political polls.[2] He serves as head of data science with Blue Rose Research[1] in New York City ,[3] and is a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund.[4] Shor describes himself as a socialist and advised a number of liberal political action committees during the 2020 United States elections.[5][6]

Early life

Shor grew up in Miami, Florida, in a Sephardic Jewish family.[7] He holds a mathematics degree from Florida International University.[8] Shor was a precocious child and gifted in mathematics, starting his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 and finishing at the age of 17.[9] Shor was awarded the Math in Moscow scholarship in fall 2009.[10]

Career

Shor joined the Barack Obama 2012 presidential campaign at the age of 20,[11] working on the Chicago -based team that tracked internal and external polls and developed forecasts.[12] The team Shor worked with developed a polling forecasting model, known as "The Golden Report",[13] that projected Obama's vote share within one percentage point in eight of the nine battleground states.[14] New York Magazine described Shor as the "in-house Nate Silver" of the Obama campaign.[5][15]

(((David Shor))) Twitter
@davidshor

Post-MLK-assasination [sic] race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage. http://omarwasow.com/Protests_on_Voting.pdf

May 28, 2020[16]

Shor then worked as a senior data scientist with Civis Analytics in Chicago[9] for seven years,[17] where he operated the company's web-based survey.[18] On May 28, 2020, Shor tweeted a summary of an academic study by Omar Wasow, a black political scientist at Princeton University, that argued riots following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination likely tipped the 1968 presidential election in Richard Nixon's favor.[19] Some critics argued that Shor's tweet, which was posted during the height of the George Floyd protests, could be interpreted as criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement.[20] Jonathan Chait wrote in New York Magazine that "At least some employees and clients on Civis Analytics complained that Shor’s tweet threatened their safety."[21] Shor apologized for the tweet on May 29, and he was fired from Civis Analytics a few days later.[21]

Shor's firing has been cited as an example of "the excesses of so-called cancel culture."[22][23] Political scientist and journalist Yascha Mounk wrote that Shor had been "punished for doing something that most wouldn’t even consider objectionable."[24] Vox editor and columnist Matthew Yglesias condemned the idea "that it’s categorically wrong for a person — or at least a white person — to criticize on tactical or other grounds anything being done in the name of racial justice," which he claimed was common among Shor's progressive critics.[25]

Since 2020, his work at Blue Rose Research aims to develop a data-based model to predict the outcome of future elections on the basis of simulations, designed in particular to advise the Democratic Party in campaign strategies.[26] Shor is an advocate for what he terms "popularism", the idea that Democrats should campaign on a strategy of focusing on issues that enjoy electoral popularity, such as focusing on economic issues over polarizing social and cultural issues.[26][27] Some political analysts, including Michael Podhorzer, have criticized his work for a lack of transparency regarding his methods and data sources.[26]

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 "David Shor". https://twitter.com/davidshor. 
  2. Levitz, Eric (2021-03-03). "David Shor on Why Trump Was Good for the GOP – and How Dems Can Win in 2022" (in en-us). https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html. 
  3. "David Shor's Postmortem of the 2020 Election". https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/david-shors-postmortem-of-the-2020-election/ar-BB1aZe3c. 
  4. "David Shor" (in en-US). https://www.americanprogressaction.org/about/staff/shor-david/bio/. 
  5. 5.0 5.1 Levitz, Eric (2020-07-17). "David Shor's Unified Theory of American Politics" (in en-us). https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/david-shor-cancel-culture-2020-election-theory-polls.html. 
  6. Garrison, Joey; Morin, Rebecca (November 24, 2020). "'Almost Impossible': As Education Divide Deepens, Democrats Fear a Demographic Problem for Future Power". https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/11/24/education-divide-deepens-democrats-worry-future-power/6325025002/. 
  7. Shor, David [@davidshor] (March 7, 2016). "My sephardic Morrocan relatives don't believe me when tell them that American Jews have historically been left-wing". https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/706708886825394177. 
  8. "See why @davidshor of @CivisAnalytics is one of @crainschicago #Crain20s" (in en). https://www.chicagobusiness.com/static/section/20-in-their-20s-2018@recipient=shor.html. 
  9. 9.0 9.1 Graff, Garrett M. (June 6, 2016). "The Polls Are All Wrong. A Startup Called Civis Is Our Best Hope to Fix Them". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. https://www.wired.com/2016/06/civis-election-polling-clinton-sanders-trump/. Retrieved 2021-03-04. 
  10. "Our Alumni List – Math in Moscow". https://mathinmoscow.org/alumni-list/. 
  11. "One Needle to Predict Them All" (in en). 2021-01-06. https://slate.com/podcasts/the-gist/2021/01/new-york-times-polling-and-georgia. 
  12. "See why @davidshor of @CivisAnalytics is one of @crainschicago #Crain20s" (in en). https://www.chicagobusiness.com/static/section/20-in-their-20s-2018@recipient=shor.html. 
  13. Newton, Ben (2018-10-27). "An Interview with David Shor – A Master of Political Data" (in en). https://medium.com/newtonian-nuggets/an-interview-with-david-shor-a-master-of-political-data-c2fa735731af. 
  14. "Data Science Seminar Series (DS3)". http://pages.stat.wisc.edu/~karlrohe/ds3.html. 
  15. Lourie Cohen, Hillel (2022-11-02). "Why U.S. Jewish Voters Are Bucking the Worldwide Trend and Still Voting Democrat" (in en). Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT-why-u-s-jewish-voters-are-bucking-the-worldwide-trend-and-still-voting-democrat-1.9278779. 
  16. (((David Shor))) [@davidshor] (May 28, 2020). "Post-MLK-assasination [sic] race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage. omarwasow.com/Protests_on_Voting.pdf". https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1265998625836019712. 
  17. "MIDAS & Dept. Political Science Co-Present: David Shor – Democratic Political Data Scientist" (in en-US). https://midas.umich.edu/event/midas-seminar-series-presents-david-shor-democratic-political-data-scientist/. 
  18. Matthews, Dylan (2020-11-10). "One Pollster's Explanation for Why the Polls Got It Wrong". https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/11/10/21551766/election-polls-results-wrong-david-shor. 
  19. Mounk, Yascha (2020-06-27). "Stop Firing the Innocent" (in en). https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/. 
  20. Yglesias, Matthew (July 29, 2020). "The real stakes in the David Shor saga". https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow-speech. 
  21. 21.0 21.1 Chait, Jonathan (2020-06-11). "The Still-Vital Case for Liberalism in a Radical Age" (in en-us). https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-tom-cotton-new-york-times-james-bennet.html. 
  22. Levitz, Eric (2020-07-17). "David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics". https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/david-shor-cancel-culture-2020-election-theory-polls.html. 
  23. Robertson, Derek (2021-06-05). "How Everything Became ‘Cancel Culture’". https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/06/05/cancel-culture-politics-analysis-491928. 
  24. Mounk, Yascha (2020-06-27). "Stop Firing the Innocent". https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/. 
  25. Yglesias, Matthew (2020-07-29). "The real stakes in the David Shor saga". https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow-speech. 
  26. 26.0 26.1 26.2 Klein, Ezra (October 8, 2021). "David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don't Want to Hear". https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/democrats-david-shor-education-polarization.html. 
  27. Brownstein, Ronald (2021-12-09). "Democrats Are Losing the Culture Wars" (in en). https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/12/democrats-lose-culture-war/620887/. 

Further reading

External links