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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: September 2006

New Pew Report on Economic Security

by Scott Winship
So, my intent with this post was to emphasize that I really was playing devil’s advocate in my last post on the middle class. I received an email from the Pew Research Center with the following plug:

Americans See Less Progress on Their Ladder of Life
In the past four years, some of the edge has come off good old American optimism. As economists and politicians debate whether there is less mobility in the United States now than in the past, a new Pew Social Trends survey finds that many among the public are seeing less progress in their own lives.

I thought that I’d highlight this study [pdf] and thereby provide counter-evidence against my devil’s advocacy. Well, you’re just going to have to believe me that I’m agnostic on the question of middle-class insecurity because it turns out that my read of this study is that things ain’t that bad.
The report begins by noting that the number of Americans saying that they’d be better off in 5 years declined from 61 percent in 2002 to 49 percent today — less than half the population. Sounds kind of ominous on first glance. But only 12 percent think that the in 5 years they will be worse off. It turns out that 74 percent think they will be at least as well off as they currently are (14% don’t know). And while the report doesn’t give the information necessary to say for sure, I’m willing to bet that the 2006 figure isn’t statistically different from the figures Pew found for the years 1964 to 1979. Much of this period was actually economically a pretty lousy era, but the second half of the 1960s were robust years.
Similarly, while the number of people saying that they are better off today than 5 years ago has declined, it stands at 48 percent, versus 21 percent saying they are worse off. That’s no worse than from 1976 to 1996, which again includes good years and bad years.
Next is the finding that the average rating for how respondents will be doing in 5 years is down from 1999. True enough, but it is still 15% higher than the average for how they say they are currently doing, and nearly 30 percent higher than the average for how they say they did 5 years ago. And the 5-years-from-now figure is no worse than any year between 1964 and 1997.
Young people are even more optimistic about the future, with those 18-49 much significantly more optimistic than older adults. That could be due to the fact that people earn more as they age. However, blacks and Latinos are more optimistic than whites. Optimism declines as family income increases, but 48 percent of those with less than $30,000 in income are optimistic, compared with 14 percent who think they’ll do worse in 5 years.
Americans are more optimistic than their counterparts in nearly every European country.
Finally, the report indicates that Americans’ predicted rating of how they’ll be doing in 5 years is always higher than how Americans 5 years later rate the present. Aha!! The poor naifs are simply mistaken in their optimism! Maybe a bit, but Americans in 2006 ranked the present higher than respondents in any year from 1964 to 1996 did, so compared with the past, they feel they’re actually doing better than people in those years.
The patterns shown in the report tend to confirm that people who are more disadvantaged tend to be more likely to think they were better off in the past and that they’ll be better off in the future, but that’s what we’d expect if most of these folks are currently at their low point economically. They probably were better off in the past and will be better off in the future.
Oh, one more finding: Republicans and conservatives are more optimistic than Democrats and liberals….


Real Optimism

By Elizabeth Warren
“It’s the economy, stupid.” Where do the famous words that propelled Bill Clinton into the White House fit in the optimism-pessimism paradigm that Kim, Solomon, and Kessler assert defines the politics of winning? Nowhere, and that’s what’s wrong with their paradigm.
Bill Clinton ran for office on a clear statement that he got it. I agree with Jacob Hacker (once again) that Clinton understood what was wrong in America, and he thought we could do better. If that were KSK’s message, then I’d be singing doo-wop backup in the chorus.
There is optimism born of realism–the “here’s the problem, and here’s how we can beat it” attitude, conveyed in the messages of “here’s what we need to unleash the potential of our young people” and “here’s how we can secure the safety of our neighborhoods.” It is the optimism that knows things are wrong and but believes that things can get better.
But something called optimism that is nothing more than trying to put a happy face on the struggles facing middle-class families in America is not optimism. Quoting average statistics of wealth that are inflated by the extraordinary gains made by those at the top is a manipulative ploy. Talking about the rise in family income without talking about the fact that the entire increase came from putting a second earner into the marketplace and that a median-earning one-earner family in America is hanging on by its fingernails to the bottom rung of the middle class is an insult. Politicians who try these sorts of good-news number scams should be called on it.
So what is the reality? Each year since Bush has occupied the White House, more people have filed for bankruptcy than have graduated from college.1 Why? Just three reasons–job losses, medical problems, and family breakups–explain 90% of those bankruptcies. Americans across the spectrum are drowning in debt, with the median family now owing a record 108% of its annual income.2 Try telling those hard-working, middle-class families that Americans are richer than ever.
I think of the people behind the data–the families fielding debt collection calls, the half of Americans who wake up at night worrying about paying their bills,3 the third of Americans who owe money they cannot pay to a doctor or hospital.4 I think about the 46.6 million Americans with no health insurance (a new record!),5 and the 21 million households that couldn’t afford to make more than a minimum monthly payment on their credit card bill.6 I think of one in four military families who are trying to serve their countries while they are tangled up in financial scams and payday loans that are running an average of 400% interest.7 I think about the 20-30% of college grads who will graduate with so much debt that experts predict their debt loads will be “very difficult to manage,”8 and the almost 20 percent of low-income high school graduates with very high math test scores for whom money is a barrier that keeps them from going on to college.9
I think we can do better. And I think that’s a message of real optimism.

A native Oklahoman, Warren graduated from the University of Houston and Rutgers Law School. She is now the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she teaches contract law, bankruptcy and commercial law. Her latest book, All Your Worth, is for people who worry about money. She posts on TPM Cafe.

1Administrative Office of the United States Courts; U.S. Census Bureau. Data calculations in Warren and Tyagi, The Two-Income Trap, Chapter 1.
2Center for American Progress, Drowning in Debt (analysis of 2004 Survey of Consumer Finance data)
3AP/Neilsen poll of 1,000 Americans December 2004, reported in “Poll: Half of Americans Worry About Debts” (December 20, 2004). The medical effects of these worries are discussed in Jean Lawrence, “Debt Can be Bad for Your Health,” WebMD (January 3, 2005); Center for American Progress/Center for Responsible Lending, “Frequency Questionnaire,” April 13-20, 2006 (33% of respondents “very worried” or “somewhat worried” about being the victim of a terrorist attack, 48% “very worried” or “somewhat worried” about “not having enough money to pay all your bills”).
4Sarah Collins, Michelle Doty, Karen Davis, Cathy Schoen, Alyssa Holmgren, and Alice Ho, The Affordability Crisis in U.S. Health Care: Findings from the Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey xii (March 2004) (reporting 32% of Americans aged 18-64 with incomes above $35,000 have outstanding medical bills they cannot pay, have been contacted by collection agents on behalf of health care providers, have medical debt being paid off over time or have other signs of distress in paying medical bills).
5Rick Lyman, Census Reports Slight Increase In ’05 Incomes, New York Times, August 30, 2006.
6Cambridge Consumer Credit Index, March 7, 2005 (45% of those with credit balances were making minimum payment or no payment because they couldn’t afford more); 2004 Survey of Consumer Finance, A-30 2006 (46.2% of all household carry an unpaid credit card balance).
7Summary data at Center for Responsible Lending.
8Sandy Baum and Marie O’Malley, College on Credit, Nellie Mae, 2003.
9David Ellwood and Thomas Kane, “Who is Getting a College Education? Family Background and the Growing Gaps in Enrollment,” in S. Danziger and J. Waldfogel, eds. Securing the Future. New York: Russell Sage (2000). See also Sandy Baum and Kathleen Payea, Education Pays: The Benefits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society, 2004. The College Board, 2004.


GOP Primary Turnout in Rhode Island not so Impressive

by Alan Abramowitz
Republican Party leaders are claiming a lot of credit for their GOTV effort in Rhode Island on Tuesday and boasting that they’re going to apply the same techniques in every competitive House and Senate contest this fall. Leaving aside the question of whether it would be possible to duplicate this sort of all-out effort in 40+ House districts and 8-10 states, how impressive was the turnout in the Rhode Island Republican primary? Impressive for a Rhode Island Republican primary, but really not all that impressive. It’s not just that more votes were cast for Democratic nominee Sheldon Whitehouse than for both Republicans combined even though Whitehouse faced only nominal opposition. GOP turnout in the hotly contested Rhode Island Senate primary was actually less impressive than Democratic turnout in the hotly contested Maryland Senate primary. When we calculate the votes cast in each primary as a percentage of the votes cast for the party’s 2004 presidential nominee we find that the Republican turnout in Rhode Island (64,000 votes) was 37.9 percent of the vote for George Bush in Rhode Island in 2004 (169,000 votes) while the Democratic turnout in Maryland (513,000 votes) was 38.5 percent of the vote for John Kerry in Maryland in 2004 (1,334,000 votes). So perhaps Democratic party leaders should be bragging about their great GOTV effort in Maryland and about how they’re going to duplicate it in every competitive House and Senate contest this fall.


Primaries Message: Ground Game, Poll Monitoring Critical

Democrats wondering how to tweak campaign strategies in the wake of Tuesday’s primaries are directed to Chris Cillizza’s and Jim VandeHei’s WaPo article “In R.I., a Model for Voter Turnout: Employing Senate Primary Strategy May Give GOP an Edge.” Read the entire article, but give this excerpt some extra thought:

The turnout campaign that Republican operatives used to help pull Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee to victory in the Rhode Island primary was a potent demonstration of how money and manpower can transform a race even in an unfavorable political environment — and a preview of the strategy that national party officials say they plan to replicate in the most competitive House and Senate races over the next 55 days.
In the past two national elections, in 2002 and 2004, Republicans outperformed Democrats in bringing their backers to the polls, but many Democrats and independent analysts have suggested that the competition may be different this year, in part because of slumping morale among GOP activists. But Chafee’s performance — combined with reports of late-starting organization and internal bickering on the Democratic side — suggest that the Republican advantage on turnout may remain intact even as many other trends are favoring the opposition.
The Republican National Committee, convinced that Chafee is the party’s only chance of keeping a seat in a Democratic-leaning state, spent $400,000 to ship 86 out-of-state volunteers and several paid staff members to Rhode Island. They targeted not just Republicans but also independent voters during the final days of the campaign, following a blueprint developed months ago by the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Chafee campaign.
…”Their turnout operation is exquisite,” a senior Democratic strategist said. “We are not going to match them.”

Gulp. And then there’s this:

Recent history underscores the importance of superior voter-mobilization plans. In 2004, Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) thought that if he received 190,000 votes it would be impossible for former congressman John Thune (R) to beat him. Daschle won 193,340 votes; Thune got 197,848. In Ohio — the central battleground in the race between Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) — Democrats met all of their projected vote totals but came up more than 100,000 short.

VandeHei and Cillizza provide a lot of very interesting detail about the GOP’s strategy and tactics in R.I.. Read it all. Twice.
Also check out Ron Brownstein’s more encouraging L.A. Times wrap-up of the primaries, probably the best yet published on the topic. Not to pile on with the hand-wringing, but Brownstein adds:

In a memo obtained by The Times, RNC officials said they used their “microtargeting” technology, which tries to deduce voter sympathies in part by tracking their consumer preferences, to direct a massive get-out-the-vote effort for Chafee. The RNC said its turnout program made 198,921 contacts with voters in the campaign’s final 11 days, helping to propel a record turnout nearly 40% larger than the previous high in a Republican primary.
That large influx to the polls “means there was a bunch of independents who flooded into that primary and they are the ones who saved Chafee,” said Darrell West, a political scientist at Brown University in Rhode Island. “It suggests that this general election is going to be very competitive.”

And if the GOP turnout machine wasn’t enough to worry about, Dems need to take a hard look at the failures of election day machinery, particularly the Maryland mess. For more on this, check out Richard Wolf’s disturbing USAToday piece “Election Watchers Predict Glitches” and hope — nay, pray — that Dems are on the case.


GOP Primary Turnout in Rhode Island not so Impressive

by Alan Abramowitz
Republican Party leaders are claiming a lot of credit for their GOTV effort in Rhode Island on Tuesday and boasting that they’re going to apply the same techniques in every competitive House and Senate contest this fall. Leaving aside the question of whether it would be possible to duplicate this sort of all-out effort in 40+ House districts and 8-10 states, how impressive was the turnout in the Rhode Island Republican primary? Impressive for a Rhode Island Republican primary, but really not all that impressive. It’s not just that more votes were cast for Democratic nominee Sheldon Whitehouse than for both Republicans combined even though Whitehouse faced only nominal opposition. GOP turnout in the hotly contested Rhode Island Senate primary was actually less impressive than Democratic turnout in the hotly contested Maryland Senate primary. When we calculate the votes cast in each primary as a percentage of the votes cast for the party’s 2004 presidential nominee we find that the Republican turnout in Rhode Island (64,000 votes) was 37.9 percent of the vote for George Bush in Rhode Island in 2004 (169,000 votes) while the Democratic turnout in Maryland (513,000 votes) was 38.5 percent of the vote for John Kerry in Maryland in 2004 (1,334,000 votes). So perhaps Democratic party leaders should be bragging about their great GOTV effort in Maryland and about how they’re going to duplicate it in every competitive House and Senate contest this fall.


Primaries Message: Ground Game, Poll Monitoring Critical

Democrats wondering how to tweak campaign strategies in the wake of Tuesday’s primaries are directed to Chris Cillizza’s and Jim VandeHei’s WaPo article “In R.I., a Model for Voter Turnout: Employing Senate Primary Strategy May Give GOP an Edge.” Read the entire article, but give this excerpt some extra thought:

The turnout campaign that Republican operatives used to help pull Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee to victory in the Rhode Island primary was a potent demonstration of how money and manpower can transform a race even in an unfavorable political environment — and a preview of the strategy that national party officials say they plan to replicate in the most competitive House and Senate races over the next 55 days.
In the past two national elections, in 2002 and 2004, Republicans outperformed Democrats in bringing their backers to the polls, but many Democrats and independent analysts have suggested that the competition may be different this year, in part because of slumping morale among GOP activists. But Chafee’s performance — combined with reports of late-starting organization and internal bickering on the Democratic side — suggest that the Republican advantage on turnout may remain intact even as many other trends are favoring the opposition.
The Republican National Committee, convinced that Chafee is the party’s only chance of keeping a seat in a Democratic-leaning state, spent $400,000 to ship 86 out-of-state volunteers and several paid staff members to Rhode Island. They targeted not just Republicans but also independent voters during the final days of the campaign, following a blueprint developed months ago by the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Chafee campaign.
…”Their turnout operation is exquisite,” a senior Democratic strategist said. “We are not going to match them.”

Gulp. And then there’s this:

Recent history underscores the importance of superior voter-mobilization plans. In 2004, Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) thought that if he received 190,000 votes it would be impossible for former congressman John Thune (R) to beat him. Daschle won 193,340 votes; Thune got 197,848. In Ohio — the central battleground in the race between Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) — Democrats met all of their projected vote totals but came up more than 100,000 short.

VandeHei and Cillizza provide a lot of very interesting detail about the GOP’s strategy and tactics in R.I.. Read it all. Twice.
Also check out Ron Brownstein’s more encouraging L.A. Times wrap-up of the primaries, probably the best yet published on the topic. Not to pile on with the hand-wringing, but Brownstein adds:

In a memo obtained by The Times, RNC officials said they used their “microtargeting” technology, which tries to deduce voter sympathies in part by tracking their consumer preferences, to direct a massive get-out-the-vote effort for Chafee. The RNC said its turnout program made 198,921 contacts with voters in the campaign’s final 11 days, helping to propel a record turnout nearly 40% larger than the previous high in a Republican primary.
That large influx to the polls “means there was a bunch of independents who flooded into that primary and they are the ones who saved Chafee,” said Darrell West, a political scientist at Brown University in Rhode Island. “It suggests that this general election is going to be very competitive.”

And if the GOP turnout machine wasn’t enough to worry about, Dems need to take a hard look at the failures of election day machinery, particularly the Maryland mess. For more on this, check out Richard Wolf’s disturbing USAToday piece “Election Watchers Predict Glitches” and hope — nay, pray — that Dems are on the case.


A Hairy Situation

by Scott Winship
We can talk about national security, values issues, tactics, and the like. But I think I’ve discovered the real problem we’re having: this.
According to this remarkable study by the respected firm Radar Magazine, 58% (14 of 24) of the Members of Congress with bad hair are Democrats (counting Bernie Sanders). Hell, we sweep the “Extreme Symmetry” and “Just-Nuts Hair” categories. Why is this not getting more attention? Look for an upcoming TDS issue devoted to better hair. I only hope this doesn’t decide the November elections….


Poles Apart?

By Ralph Whitehead, Jr.
[CORRECTION: Stephen Rose has found an important error in my originalpost. In the following passage, the assertion in the second sentence is wrong: “Granted, $44K is not the midpoint in the income distribution for prime age households. But it isn’t too far below the midpoint of the earnings distribution for prime-age white households of a particular type: those with at least two adults, neither of whom holds a four-year college degree.” The assertion holds for ALL prime-age households in this universe, but does NOT hold for white households only. Using Steve’s methodology and age range for prime-age adults, the median earnings figure for the white households only is roughly $55,000 and the median income figure for them is $61,500. The median income figure is very close to Third Way’s median income figure for prime-age households of all races and is significantly higher than $44,000. This error obviously weakens my case for the validity of the $44K figure. The post has been edited in order to omit the passage that was affected by the error.] The topic of this roundtable is well-chosen. As all of the contributors to it have agreed, the economic posture of our party is crucial, but is now at odds with both economic reality and electoral necessity. The topic is also well-timed. If November goes well, the party can begin to shift onto offense. Then, the good news might be that our economic message will be heard. But the bad news might be that it won’t be much worth hearing.
In the borderless universe of cyberspace, this debate has spread across several websites, and the roundtable is now part of a broader discussion. So this post touches on posts elsewhere, as well as the posts so far on TDS.
Third Way’s position, as it now stands, is roughly this:
Within the party, there is an incumbent definition of the middle class: households whose incomes are close to the median for all of the country’s roughly 115 million households, $44,000. But this definition should be challenged. It underestimates the affluence of the middle class. It makes its economic circumstances seem gloomier than they are. It prompts the party to hold a view of the economic standing and outlook of the middle class that is more pessimistic than the reality. The party’s expressions of this view cause the members of the middle class to wonder what economic planet the party is living on. To solve the problem, the party should adopt a different definition of the middle class, and thus a different conception of it. Using this conception, the party will offer apter descriptions of the economic life of the middle class and apter prescriptions for improving it.
FtdsLet me begin with a note on nomenclature: “Middle class” is a charged term. The country has long viewed itself as a middle-class nation, and this implies that “middle class” is synonymous with “The majority” or “The mainstream.” So a party that is out of touch with the middle class must be out of touch with the majority. In a two-party system, this is a bad place for a party to be. Because of what “middle class” implies, and because there are divergent definitions of the term (some of them have appeared in this debate)–a country that can’t agree on a definition of “class” can’t agree on a definition of “middle class”–I’ll try to use “middle class” sparingly, in favor of blandly clinical terms that are low on connotation.
To add a little perspective to this discussion, it is useful to recognize one of the effects of economic polarization. Here, I refer not to the division between the top one percent and the other 99–a division highlighted by Paul Krugman, and with good reason–but to the divisions that now exist within the 99 percent. As Democrats, we worry about this polarization, study it, talk about it, try to make sure it gets the media attention that we think it deserves, and search for ways to lessen it. Nevertheless, we don’t always get a chance to pause and note that economic polarization has been occurring for many decades now, and has advanced to a point where the distribution is now pretty divergent. It isn’t our father’s economic ladder–wide and short, hammered into shape by The Great Compression. This has consequences for our efforts to discern the shape of the playing field. For example:
To make its case for the affluence of prime-age households, Third Way mentions a particular type of household, the household with two earners, and notes its current median income of nearly $80,000. Even after we apply Professor Hacker’s point (over 10 years, $80K will average $74K) and Professor Warren’s (on the balance sheet of a two-adult household, a topline of $74K doesn’t necessarily lead to a strong bottom line), Third Way’s two-earner households are still flusher than the prime-age households whose incomes are closer to $44,000. To put it a little differently: If you have to be on an economic rollercoaster, it’s better to take its periodic plunges from a height of $74K than $44K. Thus, what we might have here–and this suggestion is made less implicitly in Stephen Rose’s post over at The American Prospect–are voters who seem to be holding a relatively good economic hand, and don’t necessarily think it has been dealt to them by the Democratic Party.
In my view, this suggestion should be viewed as a hypothesis, not an assertion, and subjected to empirical inquiry and possibly trial-and-error, not to reflexive scorn. But, even as this particular set of households is put beneath the microscope, there are a couple of other things to bear in mind at the same time:

  1. Let’s define a two-earner household as one with two adults who both work full-time and year-round, and then briefly note a bit of its history. In 1960, at roughly the midpoint of the era of the Social Contract, TV wives like June Cleaver and Wilma Flintstone weren’t doing paid work on a full-time/full-year basis, and neither were their real-life analogues. The share of prime age households who fit our definition then was just nine percent.1
    Since then, of course, the percentage of partnered women who do paid work full-time and full-year has grown. So the two-earner household makes up a larger share of prime-age households today. But this doesn’t mean that it makes up a majority of them. Its share is roughly 30 percent. This is not a majority of prime-age households, nor does it contain a majority of the prime-age adults.

  2. During those years, as it happens, another type of household has also increased its share to 30 percent. It is a household of a different kind: It has no more than one adult earner for the simple reason that it has no more than one adult. In 1960, it was 14 percent of prime-age households.

Its share of the prime-age electorate, of course, is smaller than 30 percent, just as the two-earner share is larger than 30 percent. Still, it forms the prime-age segment of the men and women who make up what has been called Unmarried America. The adults in these households are an important–and also a growing–constituency for the Democratic Party. Their median income: roughly $30K.
Thus, a 60-percent majority of prime-age households now consists of two very different household types. The income gap between them is nearly $50,000. It’s a big and economically diverse country.
Consequently, for those who will shape the economic posture of the party, the task is not only to deal with economic polarization. It is also to deal with it in light of the distribution that is marked by this polarization. This is a hard thing to do. Recognizing the nature and degree of the difficulty is one step toward making it possible for the party to do it.
Finally, on optimism and pessimism: As Third Way says, we don’t want to be seen as the party of economic gloom and doom. Also, if we want to avoid this, we have to consider the relationship between how we describe the economy and how the electorate experiences it. (Here, Teixeira’s post offers evidence and advice.) But another relationship matters, too: the relationship between diagnosis and prescription. This is because the goal shouldn’t be to express economic optimism. If it were, George W. Bush would be our model, and Herbert Hoover our ideal. The goal should be to instill optimism. Thus, I would echo the spirit of John Halpin’s post: In describing the economic experience of a particular region or particular group, and if the evidence warrants, we should feel free to diagnose like lions. This by itself won’t brand us as Doctor Gloom-and-Doom. What will do it, however, is if we diagnose like lions, but only as a prelude to prescribing like mere lambs. The worse conditions are, and the franker we are in describing them, the more pressure we put on our policy designers to come up with high-protein solutions and on our leaders to build support for them.

Ralph Whitehead, Jr., a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts, is completing a book on the new distribution of earnings, how it hurts the Democrats, and how they can offset the damage.

1The data on non-college two-adult households, two-earner households, and one-adult households are for a definition of prime-age households that is slightly broader than the one used by Third Way: households whose heads are ages 25 through 62. All income and household composition data cited are from the March 2005 Current Population Survey.


The Clinton ’92 Approach: Tap Economic Anxiety and Instill Hope

By John Halpin
Quantitative data and historical evidence suggest that talking up the economy and seeking to downplay “security” policies to focus on ownership and opportunity issues alone is not a wise approach for Democrats to pursue. It has not worked for Republicans over the past few years and was not the successful model utilized by President Clinton in his 1992 victory. Voters across the income spectrum expect attention to both economic security and opportunity, particularly as the decades-old social contract between individuals, business and government continues to fall apart, leaving more middle-class voters out on their own.
According to Democracy Corps’ time series data, from March 2001 to the November 2002 midterm elections, the Republican Party held anywhere from a 1- to 9-point advantage over the Democrats on the economy. From the beginning of 2003 to the present, the GOP has steadily lost support on economic issues and now suffers a 14-point deficit on the economy–a net swing of 23-points since the GOP golden years in mid-2002. More importantly, Democrats currently hold a 23-point advantage on the economy among those with $50,000-$75,000 in total family income–a range encompassing Third Way’s conception of the typical middle class family.
What happened during this time period?
President Bush (like his father before him) and his GOP allies in Congress relentlessly talked up the economy for three years running. They passed numerous tax cuts, some of which arguably helped the shareholding voters at the upper end of the middle-class income range. They attacked the building blocks of the Democratic economic security agenda as wasteful and archaic and proposed to replace it with an “ownership society” built on education, tax cuts, private accounts and greater individual responsibility. All of this to no avail. Their economic numbers tanked and Republicans resorted to running on fear about national security.
Democrats, in contrast, acknowledged the economic truth facing the middle class over this same period and challenged Bush on his economic interpretation, his tax cuts, and his attempts to privatize key social programs. The party’s numbers rose considerably on multiple fronts, from the economy and taxes to health care and Social Security. There is scant survey evidence to suggest that the Democrats should suddenly reverse course, talk up the economy and embrace economic optimism as the best path forward.
On the historical front, the Third Way authors continually cite President Clinton as evidence for their thesis of optimism and opportunity. But as Jacob points out, Clinton got elected in 1992 by telling people the truth about the economy and “putting people first.” The 1992 campaign was won on a message of change and the issues of the economy and health care–obviously not about opportunity or middle-class optimism alone.
President Clinton in his recent autobiography described the enthusiasm for his campaign in 1992 as follows:

It represented both the common touch and forward progress. In 1992, Americans were worried but still hopeful. We spoke to their fears and validated their enduring optimism. Al and I developed a good routine. At each stop, he would list all of America’s problems and say, ‘Everything that should be down is up, and everything that should be up is down.’ Then he would introduce me and I’d tell people what we intended to do to fix it.

Worries and fears combined with optimism and hope; not one set of ideas over the other.
Clinton successfully united lower-and middle-income voters with a message that wisely recognized that economic truth can be a powerful form of identification with voters. Optimism and prescriptions for the future then helped to seal the deal for his election, but they did not replace Clinton’s emotional connection with people’s economic anxieties.
In his acceptance speech after winning the ’92 contest, Clinton stated, “This victory was more than a victory of party; it was a victory for those who work hard and play by the rules, a victory for people who felt left out and left behind and want to do better.” When the Democrats are out of power at multiple levels, why would the party want to avoid those who feel “left out and left behind” to focus solely on those seeking to do better?
Successful Democratic politics in the future will require a new version of both Al Gore’s truth-telling routine and Clinton’s optimism if the party is to address genuine concerns among middle-class voters about the fraying social contract in America.


Missing Lincs

When returns from RI last night began showing that Sen. Linc Chafee was winning his primary over conservative challenger Stephen Laffey, I bet more than one pundit arose from the sofa, cursing, and began rewriting a prepackaged column that paired Chafee’s demise with the Lieberman-Lamont primary in Connecticut as signs of partisan and ideological polarization.Perhaps some Republican chatterers will make the absurd claim that the results show the GOP is more open to centrist candidates than the Democratic Party. My colleague The Moose, an early riser, has already done a post offering a sunnier and more balanced take: Chafee’s win and Lieberman’s steady poll lead as an indie candidate indicate an appetite for centrist candidates across the board, with the different primary results being attributable to the ability of independents to participate in RI primaries. The Moose may well be right that Lieberman’s narrow loss in the August 8 primary would have become a narrow victory if indies could have participated; as always, close races make it possible to point to all sorts of different shoulda woulda scenarios (e.g., that Lieberman would have also won if he had foresworn a post-primary indie race altogether). But I wouldn’t overstate the “closed primary” factor. CT allows indies to switch their registration to participate in partisan primaries right up to Election Eve, and anecdotal evidence this year was that thousands of them were doing just that. But there’s a much bigger difference between the two primaries that should give pause to anyone making comparisons. Throughout the primary contest in RI, Republicans were deluged with polls showing Laffey getting absolutely killed in general election matchups with Dem candidate Sheldon Whitehouse; Chafee, while often trailing, was always close. That’s why national Republicans threw absolutely every available resource into helping Chafee. And by primary day, most of those voting for Laffey did so with an understanding that they might be tossing away a Senate seat at a time when Democrats were beginning to realistically think they could retake the Senate. In CT, by contrast, the implosion of Republican Senate candidate Alan Schlesinger meant that Democrats could cast primary ballots without any real fear of losing a seat. And that’s also why national Dems, even though most of them endorsed Lieberman in the primary, didn’t devote anything like the kind of effort on Joe’s behalf that GOPers made for Chafee (and why a lot of them who have since endorsed Lamont aren’t exactly kicking out the jams for him, either, given Lieberman’s pledge to stay within the Caucus if he wins). So I dunno if the two primaries can be accurately compared; there are too many missing links, or Lincs.