{"id":5719,"date":"2022-03-01T20:18:04","date_gmt":"2022-03-02T01:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=5719"},"modified":"2022-03-04T22:16:57","modified_gmt":"2022-03-05T03:16:57","slug":"when-commonsense-fails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/03\/when-commonsense-fails\/","title":{"rendered":"When commonsense fails"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cC<\/span>ommon sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one likes.\u201d \u2013Antonio Gramsci<\/em>1

In November of 2021, Jacobin<\/em> magazine announced<\/a> the findings of their study<\/a>, produced in conjunction with YouGov and the Center for Working-Class Politics2released to the New York Times<\/a> in advance of its summary and full release for Jacobin<\/em>, aim to offer \u201cnew and powerful perspective on working-class political views.\u201d<\/p>\n

Authors Jared Abbott<\/a>, Leanne Fan<\/a>, Dustin Guastella<\/a>, Galen Herz<\/a>, Matthew Karp<\/a>, Jason Leach, John Marvel, Katherine Rader<\/a>, Faraz Riz, many affiliated with Jacobin<\/em>, have produced a number of essays and journalistic pieces influential on the so-called \u201cnew socialist movement\u201d around Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)3would-be statistical analyses<\/a> that also fall flat <\/a>upon closer scrutiny.<\/span><\/span>. They have now embarked on a new project to measure the attitudes of working-class people and determine \u2018what works to get progressives elected?\u2019<\/p>\n

Conceptually, this is a good development. Socialists can\u2019t rely on gut feelings and purely subjective assessments in understanding the world and ultimately changing it. In this regard, Commonsense Solidarity<\/em> represents a welcome attempt to give objective consideration to politics, to attitudes among our class, and to the search for openings that can build and prepare workers for the conquest of political power.<\/p>\n

And yet something is very wrong about Commonsense Solidarity<\/em>. In design, construction, execution, and conclusion, the report is flawed if not willfully misleading. In what follows, we will explain Commonsense Solidarity<\/em> as it has been presented, investigate its methodology, test its claims, and consider the piece politically. While initially we expected the report to be full of confirmation bias, close examination of their method presents a different sort of problem: whether their conclusions are supported by their own data.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s in the Report?<\/h4>\n

The report begins with a motivation: Democrats need the working class to win elections. The wave of \u201cprogressive Democrats\u201d (such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and others) has largely been confined to urban centers, which the authors contend \u201chave been concentrated in well-educated, relatively high-income, and heavily Democratic districts.\u201d They then set out to find answers to some problems they pose: how can Democrats win over \u201cthe working class\u201d; can \u201cprogressives\u201d win outside urban liberal areas; and if so, how?<\/p>\n

From there, they explain that they have engaged in an \u201cexperimental study, the first of its kind\u201d in order to quantify the preferences of working-class voters<\/em> in \u201cfive key swing states.\u201d The study \u201cnonrandom[ly]\u201d selected 2000 participants (400 each) in Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina (19). \u201cTo ensure we only surveyed working-class individuals\u201d the study selected respondents who were 1) not college educated; and 2) not self-identified Republicans.<\/p>\n

The experiment itself \u201ctest[ed] how working-class voters respond to head-to-head electoral matchups.\u201d Essentially, they created fictional politicians based on archetypes they devised, paired them against each other, and asked survey participants which they preferred and then to score them. These hypothetical politicians are differentiated by a number of variables: race, gender, policy positions, political affiliation, message delivery (\u201csoundbites\u201d or fictional statements delivered by these imagined candidates), and occupation.<\/p>\n

With the data collected, the report plotted values in pages of busy visuals and concluded that they represent the entire working class. The graphs are effective for the purpose of dazzling the viewer and lending a sense of authority to the authors\u2019 claims, but they are not particularly useful for conveying information or supporting their claims. All the same, the report declares that its method yields key takeaways about how Democrats can appeal to working-class voters:<\/p>\n