"We have a huge problem: People do not think the recovery has affected them" (Democratic pollster Celinda Lake)

"We have a huge problem: People do not think the recovery has affected them, and this is particularly true of blue collar white voters. What is the Democratic economic platform for guaranteeing a chance at prosperity for everyone? Voters can’t articulate it. In the absence of that, you vote for change.

"Our number one imperative for 2016 is to articulate a clear economic vision to get this country going again."

-- Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, to washingtonpost.com's
Greg Sargent, in "What really went wrong for Democrats"

"Obama had a historic opportunity to be the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Instead, he chose to save the rich, and let them eat everyone else. This was a choice, he could have done other things."

-- Ian Welsh, in a post today,
"Could Obama have fixed the economy?"

by Ken

Yesterday, in "A Post About Why Democrats Got Trounced -- Without Once Mentioning Steve Israel," Howie quoted an important chunk from Greg Sargent's post from yesterday morning, "What really went wrong for Democrats," focusing on a problem he's heard much talk about from Democratic pollsters: "the failure of the Democrats’ economic message to win over persuadable voters."

Democratic candidates in many places just got killed among voting groups like blue-collar wh ites and older voters, and indications are that once again it was, as Bill Clinton once put it, the economy, stupid. I think this is important enough to bear repeating, so here's Greg again (with links onsite):

“We have a problem,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, who polled on the Kentucky Senate race, told me. “If we’re really going to expand our chances in the Senate and House, we have to appeal to a wider group than we are now.”

The exit polls show that candidates like Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan, Bruce Braley and Mark Udall lost by anywhere from large to truly massive margins among non-college whites and older voters. That’s also true of the overall national electorate.

"A FAILURE TO CONNECT WITH
THESE VOTERS' ECONOMIC CONCERNS"

Greg advises "treat[ing] these exit polls with a grain of salt," says "the pollsters I spoke to agree that this gets at a fundamental problem Democrats face."

These pollsters argued that this was above all the result of a failure to connect with these voters’ economic concerns. At the root of these concerns, Mellman says, are stagnating wages and the failure of the recovery’s gains to achieve wider, more equitable distribution. Democrats campaigned on a range of economic issues — the minimum wage, pay equity, student loan affordability, expanded pre-kindergarten education — but these didn’t cut through people’s economic anxieties, because they didn’t believe government can successfully address them.

“People are deeply suspicious that government can deliver on these problems,” Mellman says, in a reference to the voter groups that continue to elude Democrats. “And they are not wrong. We’ve been promising that government can be a tool to improve people’s economic situation for decades, and by and large, it hasn’t happened.”

We'll come back to the question of why this should have benefited Republicans so handsomely, since DWT readers undoubtedly know that the one group of people all but guaranteed to be less able to address any of these issues is the Republicans. For now I think it's important to take note of the existence and scope of this economic discontent, especially in an election that we were told wasn't going to be about the economy.


"TWO CHARTS SHOW WHY THE OBAMA
ECONOMY SUCKS" (IAN WELSH)

As it happens, this has been in my head since this brief Tuesday-night post of Ian Welsh's, "Two Charts Show Why the Obama Economy Sucks":

The Employment-Population Ratio (measures the portion of the working age population which is employed, from the BLS):



Median Household Income:



All of the blather about how the unemployment rate has decreased, the stock market is up, and so on, conceals the fact that there are less jobs for ordinary people, and they pay less. Yes, the rich are doing great, but that’s all.

Why are Democrats losing the Senate? I won’t say it’s just this, it’s not. But if the economy was actually good for most people, they probably would be holding it.

IAN REVISITS THE QUESTION: COULD
OBAMA HAVE SAVED THE ECONOMY?

Finding himself swamped with claims that the president couldn't have fixed the economy, and that "wage stagnation has been going on for decades," Ian yesterday revisited a question he has dealt with before, "Could Obama have fixed the economy?" He says that this argument, "to give it more courtesy than it deserves," is "bullshit." He refers us back to an August 2010 post, "What Can Obama Really Do?," but then covers the ground again -- "because," he says, "you will never get good leadership if you keep excusing your leaders for betraying you."

He breaks it down, in recognition of the Republican-controlled House the president had to deal with beginning in 2011, into two parts: first "something that needed Congressional approval," which is to say the botched job of the stimulus, and then "all the things Obama could have done which DID NOT require Congressional approval." The point he keeps coming back to is that "Obama is a right-wing president," a Reaganite, that "he did not fix the economy because he did not want to. Or rather, keeping rich people rich was more important to him."

After going through his case, Ian writes:

History does not grade on a curve “well, we aren’t all chewing on our boots”. Obama had a historic opportunity to be the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Instead, he chose to save the rich, and let them eat everyone else. This was a choice, he could have done other things.

Nor is this a noble failure: he did not try. He did not use the real tools he had at his disposal.

I note, finally, again, because I know most readers will have heard over and over again that Obama saved you from armaggedon, that the US economy cannot be fixed until the wealth, and therefore power, of the very rich is broken. It can not be done. However bad you think it would have been if that had been allowed to happen, this economy will continue to get worse because it was not done.

The Federal Reserve has printed trillions of dollars, and given them to the rich. Imagine another world, where it had printed that money and used it to restructure the economy for prosperity and growth again.

That, my American friends, is the future Obama stole from you. Indeed, as the rest of the developed world would have followed his lead, stole from all of us.

STILL, WHY SHOULD REPUBLICANS OF ALL
PEOPLE HAVE BENEFITED FROM THIS?

The short answer, I guess, especially given the fact that they did, is that they were there. They presented themselves as the alternative to the status quo, without being much more specific than that. As I pointed out Wednesday night, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank noted in his column "For Republicans, the hard part is about to begin" that the very absence of any stated or even implied agenda in the 2014 Republican campaign now creates all sorts of problems for the newly all-Republican-controlled Congress, where differences between (or even among) factions may be as bitter as differences between R's and Dems.

I said we would be returning to Greg Sargent's "What really went wrong for Democrats," and here we are.

It certainly mattered, Greg says, that so many battles were fought in states where the president was already seriously unpopular, "which helped ensure that the Democratic Party owned people’s economic anxieties." This, he says, "fed into the broader Republican strategy of seizing on every crisis that came along to sow doubts about Obama's -- and government's -- competence."

Such themes were sounded by a number of the Democratic pollsters Greg talked to.

• Geoff Garin (who polled the Iowa Senate race): "Republicans were exceptionally successful in nationalizing the election in most places, and on focusing voters' anger and anxiety on Obama. Voters were particularly inclined to punish whoever is running things. Democrats owned the status quo in voters' minds."

• Andrew Maxfield (who polled the Arkansas and Alaska Senate races): "This election -- like 2006 -- was in large part about accountability. It became a referendum on perceived government incompetence. ISIS, Ebola, and the border fit squarely in there but it wasn’t exclusively about competence. It was also about who government is working for economically. Linking specific Democrats to Obama became a catch-all for that broader case."

• Then there's the pollster we heard from at the top of this post. "Voters want to hear a more comprehensive message about how Democrats would move the economy forward," Greg writes. "Pollster Celinda Lake, who polled on multiple races, says the broader failure to articulate this -- from the President on down -- led these voters to opt instead for vague promises of a change in direction."


ALL TRUE, BUT ONE THING WE CAN'T FORGET IS
THE CLIMATE OF TODAY'S POLITICAL "DEBATE"

By which I mean, first, the deformation of all of our political discourse by the carte blanche the Right has won to lie all the time. Couple this with its increased sophistication at cobbling lies and obfuscations, and the electorate's growing divorce from so many aspects of reality, and reality is easily steam-rollered by delusion.

Lying below this -- and around and above it -- is the long-running, bountifully financed right-wing campaign against reality. The point isn't what percentage of individual races all that right-wing moolah has tipped, but the steady and unrelenting toll it has taken on voters' grasp of, or even interest in, reality.

Except of the starkest pocket-book kind. Ironically, Democrats in 2014 have gone a long way toward turning that reality over, free of charge, to the forces of darkness.

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