Shor joined the
Barack Obama 2012 presidential campaign at the age of 20, working on the
Chicago-based team that tracked internal and external polls and developed forecasts. that projected Obama's vote share within one percentage point in eight of the nine
battleground states.
New York magazine called Shor the "in-house
Nate Silver" of Obama's campaign. Shor then worked as a senior data scientist with
Civis Analytics in Chicago operating the company's web-based survey. On May 28, 2020, Shor
tweeted a summary of an academic study by
Omar Wasow, a black political scientist at
Princeton University, that argued that
riots following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination likely tipped the
1968 presidential election in
Richard Nixon's favor. 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.
Jonathan Chait wrote in
New York magazine, "At least some employees and clients on Civis Analytics complained that Shor's tweet threatened their safety." Shor apologized for the tweet on May 29 and was fired by Civis Analytics a few days later. Political scientist and journalist
Yascha Mounk wrote that Shor had been "punished for doing something that most wouldn't even consider objectionable". Former
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. Since 2020, Shor's work at Blue Rose Research has aimed 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. His hosting of a fund-raiser for pro-Israel Democratic Representative
Ritchie Torres along with
Sean McElwee was said to have alienated the Democratic left-wing and he became an anti-
woke celebrity for his highlighting of the academic study. Since the
2024 election, Shor has argued that
Gen Z is the most
conservative generation in decades, more conservative than even the
Baby boomers, and that Democrats must therefore moderate their positions to win elections.
Jean M. Twenge has criticized this argument as based on a single year's data, saying that most long-term and other available evidence contradicts it. She further argues that 2024 may been a "one-off event" as a result of Gen Z's
anti-establishment attitudes and that they are more liberal than other generations on specific issues and less likely to identify as conservative. Shor has said, "The reality is anything that empowers online donors mechanically disempowers nonwhite and working-class Democrats."
Popularism Shor advocates what he terms "popularism", the idea that Democratic candidates should focus on issues that enjoy electoral popularity and disengage on poorly-polling issues to avoid raising their
salience. Some political analysts, including
Michael Podhorzer, have criticized his work for a lack of transparency regarding his methods and data sources. ==References==