Politico published an interesting interview with “Democratic polling and data expert” David Shor. The interview is lengthy and covers a lot of territory but I wanted to highlight one section in particular where Shor talks about the power of the media and the elites who guide it in determining what issues matter during elections. Shor’s view is frankly something that I think a lot of people on the right would largely agree with. He recognizes the media isn’t merely an observer in a neutral process but has the power to set national narratives which amount to either headwinds or tailwinds for campaigns.

Shor first starts talking about this in terms of message discipline, i.e. choosing which topics to talk about and which one not to talk about:

There are very real tradeoffs to talking about things that aren’t popular. Obviously, there’s a lot of disagreement about what is popular and what isn’t, and polling is hard. It’s very easy to create polls that make single-payer health care popular or background checks [for gun purchases] popular. But then when these things show up at the ballot box in various ways, they end up losing. The things that liberals want — or that the left wants — some of them are very popular and some aren’t, and I think we have to be honest with ourselves about which is which.

This article was sourced from Hot Air