THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT (profanity alert):

But what if, hidden below their laptop stickers and campaign totes, these young people represent a real political risk for Democrats? And what if, contrary to conventional Democratic wisdom, the power that these young people wield within the party is actually hurting its chance at the ballot box rather than helping it?

In the eyes of David Shor, one of the Democratic Party's most coveted and most controversial data gurus, that's exactly what's happening. In some respects, Shor understands the power that young, hyper-educated staffers wield in the world of Democratic politics because he once wielded it himself -- and to great effect. In 2012, at the age of 20, Shor joined Barack Obama's re-election campaign to develop and oversee its election forecasting system, a complex statistical modeling system that helped campaign staff decide how and when to spend money to optimize support in specific areas. In 2020, during the height of that summer's racial justice protests, Shor was fired from the progressive data firm Civis Analytics for tweeting out an academic study suggesting that riots have historically hurt Democrats in major election years. The firing, however, has not done much to diminish Shor's influence within the party, and he reportedly still has the ear of both Obama and senior members of the Biden administration.

This week, Shor's theory of the electorate was subjected to a long, skeptical but sympathetic scrub by Ezra Klein, who seemed persuaded by Shor's pessimism about the Democrats' chances to hold the Senate, but more mixed on his prescriptions for how to fix it. Shor has another theory, though, about the Democratic Party itself -- a mirror he holds up to his own side, and which might be similarly unpalatable to its insiders and even his friends.

"It is descriptively true that people who work in campaigns are extremely young and much more liberal than the overall population."

At its most basic, Shor's theory goes something like this: Although young people as a whole turn out to vote at a lower rate than the general population, the aforementioned type of young person is actually overrepresented within the core of the Democratic Party's infrastructure. According to Shor, the problem with this permanent class of young staffers is that they tend to hold views that are both more liberal and more ideologically motivated than the views of the coveted median voter, and yet they yield a significant amount of influence over the party's messaging and policy decisions. As a result, Democrats end up spending a lot of time talking about issues that matter to college-educated liberals but not to the multiracial bloc of moderate voters that the party needs to win over to secure governing majorities in Washington.

"It is descriptively true that people who work in campaigns are extremely young and much more liberal than the overall population, and also much more educated," said Shor who at the advanced age of 30 says he feels practically geriatric in professional Democratic politics. "I think that this is pushing them to use overly ideological language, to not show enough messaging or policy restraint and, from a symbolic perspective, to use words that regular voters literally don't understand -- and I think that that's a real problem."

People who paid close attention to the 2016 presidential campaign probably remember the most-watched Democratic campaign commercial from the cycle, Hillary Clinton's "Mirrors" ad, which featured images of young women gazing at themselves in mirrors intercut with footage of Donald Trump making disparaging comments about women. It was powerful stuff -- at least among the young liberals on Clinton's staff.

The "Mirrors" ad featured prominently in a series of experiments that Shor did with Civis to evaluate the effect of various Democratic campaign commercials on voters' decisions. The findings of the experiments were not encouraging. For one, they found that a full 20 percent of the ads -- including "Mirrors" -- made viewers more likely to vote for Republicans than people who hadn't seen the same ads. And after his team started polling members of Civis's staff, they made an even more troubling discovery. On average, the more that the Civis staff liked an ad, the worse it did with the general public.

"The reason is that my staff and me, we're super f---ing different than than the median voter," said Shor. "We're a solid 30 years younger."

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