Wait... Why Didn't Voters Vote?

Many of the Democrats who lost their seats-- or nearly lost their seats-- Tuesday had nothing to offer voters, which helps explain why voters stayed away. DCCC Chair Steve Israel had a purposeful "mystery meat" strategy for his collection of lousy candidates-- almost all of whom lost. That excuse for a strategy calls for candidates to say nothing controversial that might make someone (like a Republican) not want to vote for them. Of course, by offering nothing, you not only don't get Republicans to vote for Democrats, you discourage Democrats to even both. So they didn't turn out. That's why consummate centrist Mark Warner came within a few thousand votes of losing his seat to a ridiculous party hack who didn't even bother airing any TV commercials in October and never thought he had a serious chance to win. Democratic voters were just plain not inspired by Warner's insipid, contentless, mealy-mouthed, doctrinaire centrism. Populist and progressive candidates like Jeff Merkley, Al Franken and Brian Schatz won with sizable majorities in their states because they had records of standing up-- unabashedly so-- for working families... and they ran on those records.

working families didn't find much reason to vote

Other than John Rockefeller, who is retiring in January, Mark Warner is the richest member of the Senate, with a net worth of $95.13 million. He's not exactly a raging populist. Merkley and Schatz are blue color guys. We need more like them in the Senate-- a lot more... and a lot fewer multimillionaires. Yesterday Jeffrey Sachs won the day with his HuffPo piece, Understanding and Overcoming America's Plutocracy. Mark Warner should read it before he tries to persuade the Clintons to let him be Hillary's VP nominee. When Sachs explained that what unites the billionaire financiers of the two parties is greater than what divides them, he could have just as well been talking about the super-rich members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. "The much-discussed left-right polarization is not polarization at all," he wrote. "The political system is actually relatively united and working very effectively for the richest of the rich."

There has never been a better time for the top 1%. The stock market is soaring, profits are high, interest rates are near zero, and taxes are low. The main countervailing forces-- unions, antitrust authorities, and financial regulators-- have been clobbered.

Think of it this way. If government were turned over to the CEOs of ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, Bechtel, and Health Corporation of America, they would have very little to change of current policies, which already cater to the four mega-lobbies: Big Oil, Wall Street, defense contractors, and medical care giants. This week's election swing to the Republicans will likely give these lobbies the few added perks that they seek: lower corporate and personal tax rates, stronger management powers vis-à-vis labor, and even weaker environmental and financial regulation.

The richest of the rich pay for the political system-- putting in billions of dollars in campaign and lobbying funds-- and garner trillions of dollars of benefits in return. Those are benefits for the corporate sector-- financial bailouts, cheap loans, tax breaks, lucrative federal contracts, and a blind eye to environmental damages -- not for society as a whole. The rich reap their outsized incomes and wealth in large part by imposing costs on the rest of society.

...The evidence is overwhelming that politicians vote the interests of their donors, not of society at large. This has now been demonstrated rigorously by many researchers, most notably Princeton Professor Martin Gilens. Whether the Republicans or Democrats are in office, the results are little different. The interests at the top of the income distribution will prevail.

Why does the actual vote count for so little? People vote for individuals, not directly for policies. They may elect a politician running on a platform for change, but the politician once elected will then vote for the positions of the big campaign donors. The political outcomes are therefore oriented toward great wealth rather than to mainstream public opinion, the point that Gilens and others have been finding in their detailed research. (See also the study by Page, Bartels, and Seawright).

It's not easy for the politicians to shun the campaign funds even if they want to. Money works in election campaigns. It pays for attack ads that flood the media, and it pays for elaborate and sophisticated get-out-the-vote efforts that target households at the micro level to manipulate who does and does not go to the polls. Campaigning without big money is like unilateral disarmament. It's noble; it works once in a while; and it is extremely risky. On the other hand, taking big campaign money is a Faustian bargain: you may win power but lose your political soul.

Yes, yes, yes, of course there are modest differences between the parties, and there is a wonderful, truly progressive wing of the Democratic Party organized in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but it's marginalized and in the minority of the party. So many Democrats have their hand in the fossil-fuel cookie jar of Big Oil and Big Coal that the Obama administration couldn't get even the Democrats, much less the Republicans, to line up for climate-change action during the first year of the administration. And how do Wall Street money managers keep their tax privileges despite the public glare? Their success in lobbying is due at least as much to Democratic Party Senators beholden to Wall Street as it is to Republican Senators.

Is there a way out? Yes, but it's a very tough path. Plutocracy has a way of spreading like an epidemic until democracy itself is abandoned. History shows the wreckage of democracies killed from within. And yet America has rallied in the past to push democratic reforms, notably in the Progressive Era from 1890-1914, the New Deal from 1933-1940, and the Great Society from 1961-1969.

All of these transformative successes required grass-roots activism, public protests and demonstrations, and eventually bold leaders, indeed drawn from the rich but with their hearts with the people: Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. Yet in all of those cases, the mass public led and the great leaders followed the cause. This is our time and responsibility to help save democracy. The Occupy Movement and the 400,000 New Yorkers who marched for climate-change control in September are pointing the way.

Working class voters can smell that Jeff Merkely is part of that-- and that Mark Warner is not... and not even close. 




UPDATE: Republicans Are Laughing At Israel And The Beltway Democratic Leaders

Looks like mealy-mouthism didn't work for the pathetic Republican wing of the Democratic Party (aka, the self-proclaimed centrists like DCCC chair Steve Israel, DSCC chair Michael Bennet and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. They should all be fired and made to sit in the corner and keep their traps shut. Israel, with his mystery meat "strategy" of keeping candidates from talking about a progressive Democratic economic vision-- which he abhors-- was the biggest failure of all. Republican strategists can't stop laughing.

Republican operatives still relishing their Senate election victory offered some unlikely criticism of their Democratic opponents’ campaigns Thursday.

“They sidelined the president,” Rob Collins, the Executive Director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) told reporters at a backslapping post-election briefing. Instead, Collins argued, Democrats shouldn’t have been scared off by Republican attempts to tie Obama to their candidates.

Collins said NRSC polling had long identified the economy as the issues voters cared about most, and one where Democrats stood to gain. “We felt that that was their best message and they sidelined their best messenger,” he said. Collins added that in many states, Democratic candidates had positive stories to tell. “In Colorado, unemployment is 5.1 percent and they never talked about it,” he added.

“They were so focused on independents that they forgot they had a base,” Collins said of Democratic Senate candidates. “They left their base behind. They became Republican-lite.”

...“I can’t remember a Democrat who spent any kind of money in a significant way talking about the economy,” he added. “If I had a choice between talking about the number one issue we saw in every single poll, and talking about a single issue, I would be talking about the number one issue.”

A friend of mine, a white southern Democrat and a local elected official told me that the career-oriented Beltway Democratic elite are losing the middle class. "Too much narrow issues and not broad economic statements," said of the campaign Steve Israel and Michael Bennet (and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid) put together. "The middle class is scared; they're afraid. How many of us wake up every day and even though we have jobs, wonder if you got fired, how would you make ends meet? Wages in general don't allow cushions to anyone. A medical problem can bankrupt you. People with children feel this fear every day... not enough solid broad economic platforms to the people that are going to vote."