David Shor is characteristically brilliant - and characteristically indifferent to conventional wisdom - in this insightful New York interview. There’s a ton of interesting stuff in there but I want to focus on one element, which is a problem I’ve noticed many times in a life spent in academia, media, and left politics. I call it the synecdoche problem.
The synecdoche problem is just this: when people consistently advocate for a particular group, they come to believe that they know what’s best for that group, can speak for that group, or just literally are that group. The constant advocacy creates a sense of identification that deludes the advocate. They become incapable of seeing that their point of view is not universally shared, or even broadly shared, by the people who make up that group. This is relevant to an important point that Shor makes, which is that our perception of the concerns and positions of voters of color is often far out of line with their self-reported preferences.
...
...
Rather than quote much more of deBoer's post I will link to something Terry Mattingly wrote at GetReligion on recent coverage about how some Latino voters are shifting to the GOP and for Mattingly the news peg is that the coverage says the shift is about money whereas anyone covering religion beat news for decades would point out that, unsurprisingly, religiously-shaped social beliefs play some kind of role.
Whereas someone like Mark Driscoll could bluntly declare that engaging Latino evangelical or even Catholic voters would be a way to shift politics rightward in A Call to Resurgence back in 2013 contemporary press coverage seems to, as Mattingly assesses it, tiptoe around the religion angle. It can be easier, per deBoer's elucidation of the synecdoche problem, for members of the press to imagine an intra-press cultural set of norms and expectations that would explain a Latino shift than to consider other possibilities.
Which is to say that deBoer has spotted a problem and Mattingly may have at least a potential explanation for one potential way in which the problem of the press not quite tracking an otherwise inexplicable Latino electoral shift away from the DNC in the last eight years as being explicable but not necessarily on the premises that most readily spring to mind within institutional journalism.
