With help from Allie Bice and Daniel Payne Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here! Have a tip? Email us at transitiontips@politico.com. Democratic data scientist DAVID SHOR was fired in 2020. Now, he’s got an audience in the White House and is one of the most in-demand data analysts in the country. There are the MSNBC hits, the recent guest appearance on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” and the innumerable podcast interviews. At just 29 years old, he is one of the few party strategists right now whose interviews tend to run Q&A style — the ultimate status symbol for the political elite. BARACK OBAMA approvingly tweeted out one such interview from New York Magazine in March. And some Biden White House officials have taken notice, too. Some aides in the White House pay close attention to Shor’s analysis and have talked with him about his data, according to two sources familiar with the matter. That may be because Shor sings from the same hymnal as many — but not all — of Biden’s political advisers. He’s advised Democrats to stand against “defund the police,” not talk too much about immigration, assume that Twitter is not real life, and talk about things that already have approval instead of trying to make unpopular things popular. The White House declined to comment. Shor declined to comment on any conversations with clients or talks with the White House but agreed to talk about politics generally. “I like to joke that I feel like I've stolen my ideas from JOE BIDEN much, much, much more than the other way around,” Shor said. “The advice I give to every Democrat that I ever get a chance to talk to is talk about popular things that people care about using simple language,” Shor said. “I think it's as simple as that.” Shor, however, has been at odds with some of the grassroots of the party when it comes to understanding and talking about voters of color, racial justice issues and discrimination. At one point, his analysis on these topics cost him his job. The controversy took place last year when he tweeted out an academic study days after GEORGE FLOYD’s murder that found — in Shor’s words — that the rioting after MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.’s assassination “reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon.” It wasn’t what many progressives wanted to hear. He apologized but was fired soon afterward from the Democratic data firm where he worked. Nonetheless, Shor, a veteran of Obama’s 2012 campaign and now head of data science for the progressive nonprofit OpenLabs, has gained newfound prominence as Democrats try to chart their direction for the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election. DONALD TRUMP’s surprise strength last November has made the party eager for explanations and Shor has helped fill that vacuum. But he has articulated a path forward that not everyone in the party agrees with. Shor has argued or amplified studies that contend that “defund the police” rhetoric and the riots last summer that spun out of protests against Floyd’s death hurt the Democrats in November. And he has been particularly outspoken on the issue of immigration, calling it “probably the least popular part of the Democratic policy agenda.” Shor says he strongly disagrees with some pollsters who argue that Democrats can and should lean into immigration issues, or at least not be scared to talk about them. One of those pollsters is JOHN ANZALONE, who advised Biden’s campaign and recently told immigration advocates that it’s wrong to think of immigration as a wedge issue. “Some of this stuff has such incredibly high support and bipartisan support that, quite frankly, politicians kind of lag behind it,” Anzalone said. CORNELL BELCHER, a former Obama pollster, wouldn’t comment on Shor’s data or other Democratic pollsters’ views, specifically. But he said attempting to “predict what unique characters, like Obama and Trump, can do to certain segments of the electorate that are not traditional” is not the best use of the party’s time. Instead, Democrats should be asking themselves two questions after 2020: “We had more older non-college white voters in the electorate than we've had previously...did we just see a high watermark for Trump voters?” Second, how do Democrats “build a narrative” that energizes the “segment of the electorate that we don't typically see in an off-year election, which means Gen Z, millennials, people of color?” The hand-wringing Belcher mentioned includes a Democratic fixation on the roughly 9 percent of Latino voters who shifted toward Trump in 2020 — something Shor has focused on. Framing it that way, Belcher said, “is way too simplistic and it doesn't help us strategically make a better decision.” And Democrats “shouldn't even be grouping” the very different Latino populations across the country together anymore. While Shor believes immigration is a place where Democrats shouldn’t focus too intently, he also sees a larger problem afflicting the party. The people running it are just, well, odd. “I think the biggest fundamental problem in American politics is that the people who work in politics are super, super weird,” he said. “The people who actually staff, all of these organizations are very different, you know, obviously, than the people we're trying to persuade.” PSA — We’re going to be experimenting with some new items and sections. Tell us what you like and what you hate. Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you JONATHAN BLACK? 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