The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
In 1992, the Clinton for President campaign is said to have had a poster on the wall of its war room that read: It’s the Economy Stupid. The object of the slogan was to keep the campaign on task.
Its goal was to make sure that every campaign message ultimately returned to the question of the economy. The campaign was convinced that no matter what else diverted their attention, the ultimate outcome of the election would hinge on who the voters thought would fix that broken economy.
Today, we would do well to have a poster that reminds us: It’s Economic Inequality Stupid. That’s because a good case can be made that to deal with any of our most pressing economic, social and economic problems, we must end the massive — still growing — disparity in distribution and control of the fruits of our economy.
In fact, whether it’s the federal deficit, increasing economic demand and growth, investment in education, preventing climate change, or simply the expectation that our children will have a better life then we do – serious progress is likely impossible, unless our country deals with the growing crisis of economic inequality.
Today, to qualify for the top 1%, your family has to have an income of at least $394,000 — and the average income of the top 1% of the population is $717,000. The average for the rest of the population is $51,000. The difference in net worth is even more stark. The top 1% have net assets that average $8.4 million. That would be 70 times the average net worth of the rest of the population.
And this inequality is growing. In 2012, the share of income flowing to the top 1% soared to almost 20% of the income generated by the entire economy. That is the highest level since 1927 – the height of the “Roaring 20’s” that set the stage for the Great Depression.
This increase in income and wealth inequality has gone on for some time. According to a study by UC Berkeley economist Emmaunuel Saez, from 1993 to 2012 average real income for the bottom 99% of the population increased 6.6%. Average real income for the top 1% went up 86%. In other words, over the last two decades, the top 1 percent received two thirds of the overall economic growth in real income per family.
During the Great Recession (2007 to 2009), Saez found that the one-percenters saw their incomes drop by 36.3 percent while the 99% fell 11.6%. But during the recovery — between 2009 and 2011 – incomes of the top 1% increased 31.4% while those of the bottom 99% went up only .4%.
In other words, over that period, 95% of the total increase in income went to the top 1% of the population.
When it comes to wealth, the top 1 percent controls 43% of the wealth in the nation – the next 4 percent control an additional 29% — and between us, the other 95% of the population control only 28%.
But if you want to look at real inequality, cast a gaze on the top .1%. According to Forbes, their annual incomes average $27 million. That would be 540 times the national average income.
Economic inequality is not simply unfair – it has dire consequences for virtually every major problem facing our society.
Because average people have not had a significant raise in over three decades, it is easy to convince people that our country is living through a time of economic scarcity where we “can’t afford” to make the investments in our future we once did – investments that are critical to our long-term success – and even to our survival.
In fact, America is wealthier than ever. We have higher average income per capita than at any other time in our history. Productivity has increased 80% since 1979. That means that ordinary people should be 80% better off today than 30 years ago – but we aren’t. The problem is that for thirty years, all of the increased income that resulted from that increase in productivity went to a tiny sliver of the population.
That has created an environment where it has been easy to starve the public sector – since everyday Americans have no appetite to pay higher taxes to support education, critical investments infrastructure, or basic research when they are struggling to make ends meet. And, of course, the very rich have done a very good job of cutting their own tax rates and keeping them low.
There were two exceptions in the last three decades. First was the Clinton era tax increase – especially on the wealthy – that yielded the first balanced budgets in decades, substantial economic growth and a temporary narrowing of economic inequality. That brief period of economic sanity came to a shrieking halt with the Bush tax cuts that plunged the country into fiscal chaos.
The second, of course, was the modest increase in taxes on the wealthy championed by President Obama that flowed from the “fiscal cliff” crisis earlier this year.
There is growing agreement that the increasing volume of violent weather events like Hurricane Sandy in the U.S. and Typhon Haiya in the Philippines that have cost billions in property damage and thousands of lives, result directly from the discharge of more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. To address the menace of global climate change requires that we change the rules of the economy and put a price on discharging carbon into the atmosphere. But that would cause economic dislocation, cost ordinary people money and threaten many scarce jobs in the short term — even as it will open massive economic opportunities in the long term.
The stagnation in wages for everyday Americans has also made it easy for energy companies to prey on economic insecurity to prevent the serious action that is necessary to forestall global ecological disaster.
Finally, growing economic inequality is an anchor that weighs down and stifles the economic growth that would benefit everyone. To grow, the economy needs consumers with money in their pockets to create demand for goods and services. Companies make investments if they see growing demand in the market place for their products. Economies grow from the bottom up, not the top down.
Last summer, President Obama put it this way:
“This growing inequality isn’t just morally wrong; it’s bad economics, because when middle-class families have less to spend, guess what, businesses have fewer consumers. When wealth concentrates at the very top, it can inflate unstable bubbles that threaten the economy. ”
But is this increasing economic inequality a natural, inevitable product of the “modern” economy? Absolutely not.
Increasing inequality is not the inevitable consequence of some “natural law.” It is a result of the rules society has set for the economic game — rules we can change. Economist Paul Krugman points out that at the beginning of the Great Depression, income inequality, and inequality in the control of wealth, were very high. Then came what he calls the great compression between 1929 and 1947. Real wages for workers in manufacturing rose 67% while real income for the richest 1% of Americans fell 17%. This period marked the birth of the American middle class. Two major forces drove these trends – unionization of major manufacturing sectors, and the public policies of the New Deal.
Then came the postwar boom -1947 to 1973. Real wages rose 81% and the income of the richest 1% rose 38%. Growth was widely shared, but income inequality continued to drop.
From 1973 to 1980, everyone lost ground. Real wages fell 3% and income for the richest 1% fell 4%. The oil shocks, and the dramatic slowdown in economic growth in developing nations, took their toll on America and the world economy.
Then came Ronald Reagan – the resurgence of the political Right and what Krugman calls “the New Gilded Age.” Beginning in 1980, there were big gains at the very top. The tax policies of the Reagan administration magnified income redistribution. Between 1980 and 2004, real wages in manufacturing fell 1%, while real income of the richest one percent rose 135%.
Growing income inequality is caused by the human decisions and the economic rules of the game we create. And shamefully, America lags behind every other first world nation in closing that income gap. That can be changed. There are seven major steps that must be taken to seriously address the crisis of economic inequality. All of them are popular politically:
1). Rein in the financial sector. Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that an underlying cause of inequality is the degree to which our policies have created a “rentier” economy — one where income comes more and more from what we own, rather than what we do or create. That creates a vicious cycle of increased inequality. As wealth pools at the top of the society, income follows the wealth and inequality accelerates.

Read more…

Hopefully this Quinippiac poll is an outlier. The Democratic tumble seems awfully sudden and steep.
The Virginia Democratic sweep is looking pretty solid — the first VA trifecta since 1989.
Here’s a message that might resonate with swing voters: “Republicans are coming after your sick leave.” As Bryce Covert reports at Moyers & Company “Ten states — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin — have passed preemption laws that ban all cities and counties from enacting paid sick days bills, according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute.” When the benefit is gone for government workers, the private sector will not be far behind.
This is just plain weird, even for California. New Age guru Marianne Williamson is an inspiring speaker on political topics and a solid progressive. She could bring a compelling voice to the House. But why run against one of the best progressive Democrats in Congress, when she could move to another district and unhorse a Republican?
Ari Berman reports at Moyers & Company that “Voter Suppression Backfires in North Carolina, Spreads in Texas.”
Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, explores “What a Successful Midterm Looks Like: Setting expectations for both Republicans & Democrats in 2014.” Kondik’s take at this political moment: “Losing just two seats would probably be the best-case scenario for Democrats, and would probably also coincide with a positive national environment that also generates gains in the House: Perhaps not the requisite 17, but maybe somewhere in the high single digits…Democrats’ best hope might be that the Republican Party is so unpopular — according to the HuffPost Pollster average, just 28% have a favorable view of the party compared to 58% who have an unfavorable view — that the typical rules of a midterm, which can be dictated by the approval of a president or the state of the economy, might simply not apply.”
At WaPo’s PostPartisan Jonathan Bernstein makes the case that “It’s time to go nuclear in the Senate.
Larry Summers provides an impressive defense of Obamacare on Morning Joe, noting among other factors that the now-popular Massachusetts health care plan had low enrollment when it was first rolled out.
I say yes. Boehner may have a safe seat. But Dems running in every House district should not hesitate to remind voters about the costs of his lousy leadership. More than any other political figure, he embodies Gridlock, Obstruction and Paralysis. He is Mr. GOP.

In the media-driven panic over cancellation of individual insurance policies that aren’t “grandfathered” and aren’t ACA-compliant, Democrats are in danger of forgetting they are going to be associated with the success or failure of Obamacare no matter what they do. That’s true of the congressional Democrats backing potentially Obamacare-unraveling “Keep Your Insurance” bills in Congress, and it’s also true of single-payer fans who are taking a bit too much pleasure in the problems with the private-insurance exchanges. Here was my comment at Washington Monthly about the need for “owing Obamacare:”

[I]t’s perfectly understandable that proponents of a single-payer system or those who thought a public option was absolutely essential to the kind of competitive system the ACA set up would note some of their concerns may have been vindicated, or that even as the Obamacare exchanges founder, the Medicaid (thought of as a single-payer program, though actually semi-privatized in many states) expansion is enrolling new people at a fairly robust pace in the 25 states where it’s proceeding.
Atrios–nobody’s idea of a neoliberal squish–offered a reminder of the political realities of Obamacare right now.

Whatever the merits of ACA, it is now something the Dems own. For decades I’ve watched Dems try to run away from things which have been surgically implanted on any politician with a D next to their name. It’s always bizarre and pointless. You’re the party of gay marriage, abortion, and Obamacare whether you like it or not.

That’s as true of single-payer fans as it is of those chasing after GOP “fixes” of Obamacare. If Obamacare doesn’t work, we go back to the status quo ante, not to some magic moment where Medicare For All becomes the national rage overnight.

Perhaps non-destructive “fixes” of this or that short-term problem with the exchanges or the cancellation of individual policies before the exchanges are functional can be found. But even as it took left-center Democratic unity to enact the Affordable Care Act, it will take left-center unity to prevent its destruction by a now-united Republican opposition.

If you haven’t done so already, make Isaiah Poole’s “Winning Isn’t The Only Thing. It’s About Movement-Building” at The Campaign for America’s Future blog your required reading for the day. Poole packs several important observations about the Virginia governor’s election — and progressive politics in general — into his post.
First, although McAuliffe’s disciplined and well-organized campaign merits praise and emulation, the ‘dog that didn’t bark’ needs some attention. As Poole explains::

A major key to forging an enduring progressive majority is to connect the elements of the Obama coalition – young people, single women and people of color, the so-called “rising American electorate” – with white, working-class voters receptive to an economic populist message, what Rev. Jesse Jackson in his 1988 presidential bid called the “rainbow coalition.”
Simply put, McAuliffe did not complete the rainbow. His win, even though it was a decisive defeat of a tea party hero, doesn’t offer a template for rebuilding the electoral framework for progressive reform. Establishing that template and using it to dismantle the tea-party stranglehold on government is going to be the challenge of 2014 and beyond.

Poole points out that “What most voters saw of McAuliffe was that he was not Cuccinelli” and adds “McAuliffe looked a lot like the wheeling-dealing corporate wing of the Democratic Party, not a grassroots fighter against the power brokers of Wall Street and Washington.” Some might say that McAuliffe had the right formula for Virginia at this political moment, which is what was needed to win, however narrowly. But Poole continues,

Large swaths of voters were unimpressed. Exit polls show that McAuliffe lost male voters by three percentage points (45 percent to 48 percent for Cuccinelli). He won female voters by nine percentage points (51 percent vs. 42 percent for Cuccinelli), but he actually lost white female voters decisively (38 percent vs. 54 percent for Cuccinelli). Cuccinelli won voters with less than a four-year college education and voters earning between $50,000 and $100,000 a year. He also won the lion’s share of the state’s rural counties.
Particularly striking is the exit poll finding that among voters who were most worried about the direction of the nation’s economy, Cuccinelli won handily, by a margin of 64 percent to 29 percent. McAuliffe simply did not present himself as a compelling choice for voters who feel left out in today’s economy.

Regarding the largest potential swing constituency, white working-class voters, Poole observes:

Coming up with a way to win the white working-class voting blocs where McAuliffe underperformed has been a preoccupation of Andrew Levison, a contributing editor at The Democratic Strategist and the author of “The White Working Class Today: Who They Are, How They Think and How Progressives Can Regain Their Support.” His core argument is that a candidate can be an unabashed progressive economic populist and still be competitive among restive working-class voters that have been lured into supporting tea-party candidates.
What Levison explicitly rejected in a recent interview is the model of so-called “Third Way” or “moderate” Democrats who borrow heavily from conservative policy positions in an effort to woo Republican support. “The centrists [in Congress] who claimed that they were representing their constituents when they were writing dirty tax deals on behalf of corporations, that’s not at all what I’m talking about,” he said. “You don’t have to do that to win white working-class voters. In fact, quite the contrary.”
What Levison envisions instead are economic populist candidates who are comfortable with the values of red-state and purple-state working-class voters and who can then earn the trust of those voters as they advance progressive prescriptions. What those candidates need as support are local institutions that can serve the same role that unions, Democratic Party organizations and some churches used to play when the Democratic Party was dominant in many of these districts until the 1980s – supplying what Levison called “a framework and interface through which people can see government at work” and “the speed bump that kept white working class people from falling into a conservative framework.”

Poole adds that “Polls show that a large percentage of white working-class voters and the rising American electorate share a common disdain for the fact that so much of the political system is rigged in favor of the wealthy and the powerful. They also understand in a visceral way how the middle class has fallen behind…” He notes that pollster Celinda Lake has identified several common concerns shared by the rising American electorate and red state voters, including “raising the minimum wage, requiring equal pay for equal work, and pushing for affordable child care, and paid family maternity and sick leave.”
As for conservative government-bashing, Poole distills a salient insight from Levison’s book:

Levison says progressives need to do a better job of giving people a way of grasping how government can be used as a tool to improve their economic condition. That, he argues, requires patience with people who are used to hearing that government is a remote, alien entity that hinders instead of helps, and should thus be pushed out of the way.
“If you’ve never encountered the Keynesian idea in an economic textbook, the idea that government spending stimulates the economy doesn’t sound plausible,” he said. “You have to have learned that framework in order to grasp the idea. … Once you understand that, it makes perfect sense. If you don’t, it sounds insane.”

Poole notes that Levison’s insights are reflected in the efforts of ‘Working America,’ which is building a grass-roots “membership of millions” who are participating in “face-to-face, one-voter-at-a-time movement-building.” He quotes Karen Nussbaum, who heads Working America:

“We talk to working-class moderates about good jobs and a just economy and part of the solution is that we need strength in numbers; join Working America so we can fight the corporate elites who are destroying our democracy, and two out of three people join,” Nussbaum said…”These are people who are not in the progressive movement, but they totally agree with us…”

Looking toward the future, Poole cautions “Democrats should not make the opposite mistake of believing that it is winning that matters, and the principles that candidates advance on their way to victory, and the coalitions they knit together, don’t matter.” Further, adds Poole:

What we really need to build is a new consensus based on an economic vision that is more positive and more powerful than tea-party anger – of full employment and economic security based on an economy that works for everyone, not just for a favored few. In that regard, the landslide election of Bill de Blasio in New York City – where white working-class voters have helped elect a series of Republicans, a Republican-turned-independent and center-right Democrats for the better part of the past four decades – is a more important beacon for the way forward than Virginia…Let’s be restrained with the congratulations over Tuesday’s elections until we see more evidence that we’re building a real “rainbow” progressive coalition.

Dems should savor our victories, however broad or limited in scope they may be. But we should also nurture a vision that extends beyond the next election, even decades ahead, so the inevitable setbacks will not discourage or deter the Democratic coalition.
Even as Dems congratulate McAuliffe for his well-run campaign, let’s not assume that it is a transferable template. Nor should we dismiss the possibility that he might have won by a larger margin by more assertively addressing the economic concerns of white working-class voters. Poole is right that building a progressive social movement that is well-rooted in all major constituencies, including the white working-class, is the key to creating a decent society for everyone. And that’s a strategy that should be replicated everywhere.

A TDS Strategy Memo by Ed Kilgore, James Vega and J.P. Green

The Democrats recent victory in the October standoff with the GOP over the shutdown and debt ceiling would have been impossible without the absolutely firm and unbreakable unity that was displayed by every sector of the Democratic coalition. You can choose any adjective you want; “vital,” “indispensable”, “critical,” “essential.” The contribution of Democratic unity to that victory simply cannot be overstated.
The source of this unprecedented unity is not a mystery. It was created by an unprecedented threat – The GOP strategy of hostage-taking and political blackmail not only presented a profound menace to all progressive priorities but also to the basic norms and institutions of American democracy itself.
As the Democratic coalition and community looks to the future, however, there is a quite different challenge that the coalition must also prepare to confront: Democrats will soon have to begin debating important and deeply divisive issues about the Democratic platform and message for 2016 and beyond. These intra-Democratic debates will set the stage for the more public disputes that will emerge during the next presidential primaries.
The critical challenge Democrats face is this: How can Dems energetically debate their differences while at the same time still retaining a sufficient degree of unity to maintain a united front and “hold the line” against the profound Republican threat?
Two Avoidable Obstacles to Democratic Unity
As a starting point for confronting this challenge, it is essential to note that there are two important ways in which Democrats unnecessarily intensify and exacerbate conflict within their coalition.
First, Democrats unnecessarily magnify conflicts within the Democratic coalition because of the particular methods and the forums for debate that they use when they conduct intra-party discussion.
Second, Democrats unnecessarily intensify conflicts within the Democratic coalition because they often fail to distinguish between disagreements over political strategy from those that involve disagreement over basic goals and principles.
Dealing with these two problems will not provide a complete solution to the problem of maintaining Democratic unity but recognizing and confronting them can materially improve the situation. Let us consider the two issues in turn.
To read the memo, click HERE

In “Black Voters, Not the ‘Gender Gap,’ Won Virginia for McAuliffe,” Zerlina Maxwell makes the point that “Women of color are the “gender gap.”
From The New York Times editorial on “Low Stress Voting.” “The Brennan Center for Justice recommends that New York and other states with outdated election schedules provide for a two-week voting period instead of cramming it all into one day. At least 32 states and the District of Columbia offer some form of early voting, and apparently voters like it a lot…The center’s survey found that early voting also means shorter lines, better performance by poll workers and more time to fix broken machines or other problems.”
Harold Meyerson considers “What Divides Democrats” — and what should unite Dems — at The American Prospect.
At last — a big presidential push for infrastructure investment. A Bloomberg poll found earlier this year that “Americans by 49 percent to 44 percent believe Obama’s proposals for government spending on infrastructure, education and alternative energy are more likely to create jobs than Republican calls to cut spending and taxes to build business confidence and spur employment.”
Ben Jacobs argues at The Daily Beast that the relatively good showing for Libertarian candidate Robertt Sarvis in the VA governor’s election just may signal trouble ahead for both parties –particularly in the south.
In his New York Times column, Bill Keller has a well-stated suggestion for President Obama’s message: “The message could be: “Divided government has brought us paralysis and crisis and made us a global laughingstock. Send me Democrats, and we’ll get things working again. Or at least, send me Republicans with a trace of pragmatism.”
In their National Journal article, “What Two Bellwether Counties Tell Us About the Republican Party’s Future,” by Josh Kraushaar, Peter Bell, Brian McGill and Stephanie Stamm the authors explain: “Our guys don’t understand [suburban] areas like Northern Virginia, suburban Philadelphia, areas that used to be our base. We’re getting smoked in these areas,” said former Republican congressman Tom Davis, who represented a Fairfax County-based House seat from 1992 to 2008. “Northern Virginia is a disaster for Republicans, these [statewide candidates] do not know how to run up here. They focus so hard on the social issues, cultural stuff.”
John Perr’s “The revenge of the insurance industry” at Daily Kos provides a revealing round-up of the ways some insurance companies have obstructed the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
Lest we forget on this Veterans Day: in addition to repeatedly cutting budgets for American veterans services, remember this video clip showing how former Republican presidential nominee and Purple Heart vet Bob Dole was treated when he came to congress to support the U.N. Treaty on People with Disabilities:

Since the off-year Election Day, I’ve been noodling around with some exit poll comparisons for NJ and VA in 2009, 2012 and 2013 (sadly, there were no exit polls in either state in 2010, which would be useful to know about in looking ahead to 2014). I quickly discovered the composition of the electorate in both states was quite similar in 2009 and 2013–with one glaring exception in VA, as I wrote about at Washington Monthly:

In New Jersey the 2013 electorate looked an awful lot like it did in 2009, and quite different from its composition in 2012. The racial breakdown was 73% white, 14% African-American and 9% Latino in 2009, and 72% white, 15% African-American and 9% Latino in 2013. By contrast, it was 67% white, 18% African-American and 10% Latino in 2012. You see a similar pattern with the vote by age: in 2009, voters over 50 represented 55% of the vote while those under 30 were 10%. Yesterday voters over 50 were 59% of the vote while those under 30 were 10%. In 2012, over-50s were 49% while under-30s were 16%.
So New Jersey followed the expected pattern of an off year election producing a significantly older and whiter electorate than in a presidential year. Christie would have won with either electorate, but he did have a stiff wind behind him this year.
The age breakdowns in Virginia follow the same pattern. Over-50s were 54% in 2009 and in 2013, but only 43% in 2012. Under-30s were 10% in 2009 and 13% in 2013, but rose to 19% in 2012.
But the racial breakdowns broke the mold a bit: in 2009, the Virginia electorate was 78% white and 16% African-American (with 5% Latino or Asian). In 2012 it was 70% white and 20% African-American (with 8% Latino or Asian). And yesterday it was 72% white, 20% African-American (with 5% Latino or Asian). It’s unclear whether the McAuliffe campaign did an unusually good job of turning out the African-American vote, or something else was going on, but it is clear it was a key factor in his victory, since the additional 4% of the electorate that were African-American as compared to 2009 represented close to 90,000 votes. He won by just over 54,000.

Since I wrote that quick analysis, there’s been a lot of talk about the composition of the VA electorate resembling that of 2012, but little or no focus on the African-American vote specifically. This, too, I mentioned at Washington Monthly:

Now comes the magisterial Ruy Teixeira at TNR with a deeper look at Virginia, and he, too, focuses on the unexpected composition of the electorate:

In 2009, Virginia voters were 78 percent white and 22 percent minority. In 2013, they were just 72 percent white and 28 percent minority–not far off the 70/30 split in the 2012 presidential election. There you have the key to McAuliffe’s victory: Despite performing much better among white voters than the hapless Creigh Deeds, McDonnell’s Democratic opponent, McAuliffe would nevertheless have lost this election if the white/minority voter distribution had mirrored that of 2009. It was the increase in the minority vote that put him over the top.

But here’s the thing: according to the exits, the Hispanic/Asian percentage of the vote came in this year at 2009 (5%), not 2012 (8%) levels. And the age composition of the electorate was very much like that of 2009, not 2012. Nor was there any “super sizing” of the overall electorate; total turnout was up a bit from 2009, but nowhere remotely close to presidential levels. So what we are looking at is not some sudden change in the overall size or configuration of the off-year vote, but a pretty isolated but very significant surge in African-American turnout.
Ruy has no particular explanation for this phenomenon; nor have I. I’ve heard a few random folk cite the pre-election voter purge executed by Virginia (about 37,000 people suspected of dual registrations were disqualified, not the kind of purge most likely to overwhelmingly target minorities) as a provocation to black voters. And there’s a general sense that the McAuliffe campaign devoted a significant portion of its abundant resources to GOTV efforts, which would naturally affect African-American turnout. But that was quite a surge in the black vote, and Democrats looking ahead to 2014 ought to go to school on it.

So the mystery remains, but I’m sure there’s an answer that some Democrats in Virginia are chortling about.

The following article by Stan Greenberg and James Carville, Democracy Corps Erica Seifert, Democracy Corps and Page Gardner, Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund is cross-posted from a Democracy Corps e-blast:
On November 5, 2013, Terry McAuliffe won the gubernatorial election with the overwhelming support of Virginia’s unmarried women. Unmarried women, who gave McAuliffe two thirds of their votes, matching President Obama’s vote among this group, were decisive in the Democrat’s narrow victory over Republican Ken Cuccinelli. While unmarried women turned out in the off-year election in smaller numbers than in 2012 and slightly below 2009, they supported McAuliffe in strong numbers. This is both a good early indicator for Democrats in 2014, but also an equally important warning sign. Democrats need these voters to win and that means turnout to vote. But in order to turn them out, Democrats must speak to the issues that matter to them most.
Key findings
• Unmarried women made the difference in this election. Unmarried women voted for Terry McAuliffe by a decisive 42-point margin (67 to 25 percent). Married women, by contrast, voted Cuccinelli by 9 points.
• Marital status was clearly determinative in this election. If unmarried women had voted as married women, Ken Cuccinelli would have won the election by 7 points.
• While unmarried women supported McAuliffe at similar rates as they supported Obama in 2012, their share of the vote declined from 22 percent in the presidential election year to 18 percent in 2013 (and from 19 percent in 2009). Campaigns have to work to get these voters to the polls- and give unmarried women a reason to turn out in 2014 by speaking to the issues that matter most to them.
• The most important issues for unmarried women in this election were the economy, healthcare, and choice issues. But compared to every other group, health care and abortion mattered to them in their vote.
• Vote share among all groups in the Rising American Electorate dropped from 2012 to 2013, due to smaller share among unmarried women and young voters. Unmarried women, who were a quarter of the presidential year electorate, represented 18 percent of Virginia voters in 2013.
• However, African Americans – just 16 percent of the 2009 electorate in Virginia – represented 20 percent of Virginia voters in 2013.
• While young voters supported McAuliffe in stronger numbers this year than they did Creigh Deeds in 2009, they were far less supportive of McAuliffe than they were of President Obama. However, their votes largely did not move to the Republican column. Instead, young people supported independent candidates in higher proportions than the electorate as a whole.
Read the full memo here.