David Shor Tells Bill Maher Why Polls Are So Skewed: WATCH

Data scientist David Shor appeared on Real Time Friday night and explained to host Bill Maher why the “brand” of the Democratic Party may not always align with the values of its voters.

Shor, the Head of Data Science at OpenLabs, worked on Barack Obama’s campaign for President when he was 20 (he began college when he was 13) and Maher asked him about his impressions of the 2020 election. Shor did something of a deep dive on polling methodologies and polling errors in 2016 and 2020. “Everyone likes to talk about the undecideds breaking or turnout, but it’s really just that the survey-takers are super, super weird,” Shor said. “That’s the big problem.”

Shor clarified that the people who respond to polls are already more likely to trust other people. Social trust began to have partisan consequences in the 2016 election — which Shor cited as an explanation of why the state polls in 2016 were inaccurate. Most people he said “do not have that trust.”

He also said the COVID-19 pandemic badly skewed 2020’s polls because liberal/Democrats were staying at home and answering polling calls while Republicans for the most part ignored CDC warnings. “Starting in March the percentage of people answering surveys that identified as Democrats shot up.”

He also said that liberals believe in values like positive sum change, are open to new experiences and love novel stimuli. They tend to like new ideas, restaurants etc., it excites them and gets them energized. Meanwhile conservatives often can’t deal with new anything. “The majority of people see novel stimuli and it drains them,” he said,  “It freaks them out.”

Watch the whole interview below.