With the 113th Congress returning to D.C. for its final weeks of this session, it is important for the public to weigh in on the “tax extenders” – the obscure set of policy choices that have an immense impact on family incomes, the economy and the deficit – which will be considered. The pundits and elites have rallied around the bi-partisan support for R & D tax credits and the media report a deal that includes making those and the college-tuition tax credits permanent; not slated for permanence in this deal are the Child Tax Credit or the Earned Income Tax Credit. Congressional leaders considering this deal should know that they are threatening to walk away from the tax credits that have the most support with the public.
Democracy Corps conducted surveys in the Senate and House battlegrounds during the last two months before the 2014 election with the off-year electorate. In those surveys, we tested the different tax extenders that would be before the Congress.[1] The two tax credits that are the most popular choices for permanence and earn the most intense support among voters are the Child Tax Credit for lower income and middle class working families with children and the $4,000 a year tax credit for college-tuition and fees.

House battleground: 88 percent favor making the college-tuition credit permanent, 59 percent strongly; 85 percent favor making the Child Tax Credit permanent, 58 percent strongly.
Senate battleground: 83 percent favor making the Child Tax Credit permanent, 59 percent strongly; 82 percent favor making the college-tuition credit permanent, 57 percent strongly.

Some have described the college-tuition credit as a “middle class” policy offer and the Child Tax Credit as targeted to lower income families, but that analysis misses the extent to which working and middle class voters are struggling in this economy with jobs that don’t pay enough. They are looking for help making college affordable and want help lessening the burden of children on working families. Making these credits permanent has broad support and listening to the voters in these contested House districts and Senate states is key to lawmakers being relevant when it comes to the new economy as well as to getting people to view politics as relevant for them.
The Rising American Electorate of minority, Millennial, and unmarried women voters respond to both credits with great intensity. Remember, they will constitute one-half of the electorate in 2016.

House battleground: 87 percent of the RAE support making the college-tuition credit permanent, 63 percent strongly; 84 percent support making the Child Tax Credit permanent, 59 percent strongly.
Senate battleground: 86 percent of the RAE support making the Child Tax Credit permanent, 66 percent strongly; 87 percent support making the college-tuition credit permanent, 61 percent strongly.

But as Democrats begin the broader discussion of how to appeal to the white working class, note that white non-college educated voters also put the child tax credit at the top of their list. Both are clearly central to the Democrats as they move forward.

House battleground: 87 percent of white non-college voters favor making the college-tuition credit permanent, 61 percent strongly; 87 percent favor making the Child Tax Credit permanent, 56 percent strongly.
Senate battleground: 84 percent of white non-college voters favor making the Child Tax Credit permanent, 61 percent strongly; 83 percent favor making the college-tuition credit permanent, 54 percent strongly.

There is broad support for extending R & D tax credits, but note it does not have the intensity and breadth of support that the public gives to the college-tuition and Child Tax Credits.

House battleground: 83 percent favor making the R & D credits permanent, 48 percent strongly.
Senate battleground: 80 percent support favor the R & D credits permanent, 50 percent strongly.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
This blog post is partly about politics and partly about economic policies that will expand America’s middle class and make it more prosperous in the modern era. The story of the 2014 election was that Democrats can’t succeed at the former without succeeding at the latter. A Democratic strategy, that is superb and state of the art on voter targeting and turnout, can’t succeed if you haven’t delivered the goods to the generally younger and less prosperous people you are trying to turn out. Carefully refined political positioning and focus group tested ads won’t win swing voters, if those swing voters haven’t felt the benefits of you being in office. And economic policies that deliver better stock prices and profits to businesses, and even create a fair number of new jobs, don’t feel to voters like prosperity when they never get a raise or when those new jobs being created pay low wages.
To be clear, Democrats don’t deserve all or most of the blame for an economy that still punishes the poor and middle class 7 years into the economic crisis that began building in 2007 just because Obama has been president for most of those years — not even close. It was George W. Bush’s policies and regulators who led us into economic collapse while cluelessly ignoring the bright red warning signs flashing everywhere around them. And the Republican House and Republican Senators in the last 4 years who blocked good policies that would have helped create more jobs and raise a lot of workers’ wages (infrastructure spending, minimum wage increase, etc) deserve a great deal of the blame. But the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, was the one who pushed for the most massive deregulation of the financial industry in modern history, and Obama’s made a series of decisions that haven’t helped either — failing to restructure Wall Street excess when he had the chance to in 2009, agreeing to a program of extreme austerity when the economy was still severely damaged in 2011, and keeping his executive actions to raise wages and spur the economy much more modest than they could have been over the last 2 years. And beyond the facts on what Obama has or hasn’t done on the economy, when you are presiding over an economy this bad at raising wages, you are going to get most of the blame from the voters.
So let’s talk about the politics first, starting with the Rising American Electorate (RAE) that Democratic strategists like Stan Greenberg frequently talk about — African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, unmarried women, and voters 30 years old and younger. In the Obama years, and in the Democratic wave election of 2006 that was a precursor to Obama’s decisive 2008 victory, those voters have tended to be Democratic base voters, although there are more swing voters in those demographic categories than many casual observers realize. The problem for us as a party is that if you look at what has happened to these constituencies income, net wealth, job prospects, amount of student debt, and political rights during the Obama presidency, they haven’t done very well. If you want to look at why those constituencies didn’t vote in higher percentages, or gave a lower percent of their vote to Democrats in 2014, you can clearly start with that as an explanation. Yes, it is true — and important to point out — that Republicans’ policy prescriptions are a lot worse for all those constituencies than Democrats, but at some point we also have to deliver some tangible benefits to our voters.
The RAE is central to any Democratic prospects for the foreseeable future. We have to deliver on policies that tangibly improve their lives. We have to cultivate, motivate, register them to vote, and turn them out to vote. But for at least another couple of generations, especially in non-presidential election years but even in presidential election years too, we still have to do relatively well with the white working class voters that used to be the foundation stone of the old New Deal majority. The numbers don’t add up in swing Presidential states like OH, PA, MI, WI, IA, NH, or MN, which tend to be a little too old and a little too white to win 51 percent of the vote with a political calculus geared mostly around the RAE. The fact is we won these states in 2008 and 2012 not only because we did so well at turning out RAE voters to vote and winning strong percentages of them, but because we did respectably among white working class — mostly because of the herculean efforts of the labor movement. Similarly, a RAE-centric and Obama-centric strategy doesn’t add up to wining a majority of the Senate, where Democrats have an overwhelming majority of seats in states won by Obama, 41-11 but we still have to win some seats in the 24 states carried by Romney: if Landrieu loses, there are only 5 Democrats among those 48 Senate seats. And even if you were to lessen the impact of gerrymandering, which has been a fact of political life since the earliest days of the American republic, there is no way we get to a majority in the House without doing better among white working class voters because so many RAE voters are concentrated in heavily Democratic urban core House districts.
Let me take you down to the county level to show how this worked in the 2014 election. I’m going to use a couple of examples given to me by Paul Booth from AFSCME, one of the best political strategists in the labor movement. I have talked about why and how RAE voters overall were not as motivated to turn out this year. But one thing Democrats proved is that they could be successful mechanically with great GOTV operations in targeted places. First example: the labor movement and other Democratic forces decided that the way to win the Florida Governor race was to do a massive turnout operation in heavily urban and Democratic counties in the state, and they picked 5 as their top targets, the 3 big South Florida counties as well as Pinellas (the St Pete/Tampa area) and Orange (Orlando). They did an incredible job: Crist had almost 123,000 vote higher margin because of the work in those 5 counties than the Democratic candidate (Alex Sink) did in 2010, which was more than double the goal they had set for themselves. The problem was that the Republican margin for Scott in the 60 more Republican counties — mostly more rural and whiter — increased by about 131,000, meaning instead of winning by 56,000 as he had in 2010, he won by 64,000 instead. Here’s a 2nd example: the turnout operation for Democrats in Milwaukee and Madison was incredibly successful — they went so far above projections in Madison that they ran out of ballots by late afternoon and had to print more. But again, Walker’s team won by bigger margins in rural Wisconsin than he had in 2010, and it was enough to carry him to victory. As Paul said after telling me these stories: “we need to go beyond Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy. We need a 3,144 county strategy.” (That’s how many counties there are nationwide).
This is not fashionable talk among some of my fellow progressives. Among some people I talk to, the natural tendency of younger, lower-income, black, Hispanic, and unmarried voters in presidential years will solve most of our problems, especially if we do a good job of turning them out to vote. But that’s not what the numbers say: if we only get the 38 percent of white voters we got this year in 2016 in places like OH, MI, MN, NH, IA, PA, WI, CO, and other swing states, we will not win either the presidency or the Senate back, let alone the House.
So where do we get those extra voters who are white? Union members who are not people of color are part of the answer, but union membership continues to slip every year. Young whites are part of the answer too, but our numbers among that demographic have slipped a lot from the Obama 2008 high, and their economic problems aren’t getting any rosier. We got a lot more white unmarried voters, especially unmarried women, in 2008 and 2012 than we did in 2014, so hopefully we can win more of them, but again, this economy isn’t tending to lift them up much.
We can win back a lot of the swing white voters in the categories above with a stronger message and outreach strategy, but with the weak economy continuing to be a drag, I believe it won’t be enough. To solve the problem Booth identified, we have to start a serious re-engagement with working class white voters — in message, outreach and organizing, and policy. We can’t ignore them and hope the surging RAE vote alone carries us to victory.
The way to win more votes in those whiter, older, rural counties is a message of economic populism. The good news is that economic policies and messaging that appeal to white working class folks also appeal to RAE voters. As I wrote yesterday about progressive populist candidates who won important statewide victories in 2014 (Merkley in OR, Franken in MN, Peters in MI, Shaheen in NH, and Malloy in CT):

Let me note one other fact about these races: In a year where white, working-class swing voters mostly deserted the Democratic party, all of these candidates did well with this demographic group. Of the states where we won those victories, only one — Michigan — had a significant people of color population. Connecticut, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Oregon are four of the whitest states that Obama won in 2008 and 2012, with neither a large African-American or Hispanic population. And in Michigan, while there is a large black population, a Democrat can’t win without competing well in the mostly white working class suburban Detroit counties like Macomb, which Peters did. A populist message and narrative worked for those Democrats.

Democrats need a clearly defined and strongly messaged economic platform that helps low and moderate people. We can’t only bash the Koch brothers and Wall Street, although we certainly should do our fair share of that — it helped the candidates I mentioned above win, and kept others running steeply uphill races in this terrible cycle like Braley, Udall, Hagan, and Begich in the game all the way to the end. But we also need a Democratic economic agenda that provides a compelling roadmap as to where we want to take the country: a $15 per hour minimum wage; an investment in road, bridge, and school construction; putting insulation into every public building that needs it in America, and saving billions of dollars of utility bills in the process; millions of new manufacturing jobs in wind and solar energy; a fair trade and currency policy that will create millions of new manufacturing jobs; an end to a tax and regulatory policy that encourages job out-sourcing and reckless financial speculation; a rigorous anti-trust policy that helps small businesses compete with big corporations; and a welcoming hand to the hard-working immigrants bringing their talents to our nation.
Armed with a real agenda like that, we can create a narrative about who we are, what we believe in, and what our values are. The story that we can tell is about an America that built a prosperous and expanding middle class where everyone who wanted a job was able to find one, where workers actually got raises and decent benefits most of the time, and where there was dignity in work and our families had the chance to pursue our version of the American dream. Over the last few decades, we lost that America, as the level playing field got tilted more and more to wealthy CEOs and big businesses who could get sweetheart deals because of their insider connections. The things we are advocating for are more jobs, better jobs with higher pay, and a level playing field so that workers and small businesses can get a fair shake rather than being rolled by big money.
As progressives, that is what we fight for, that agenda and that hope for the future of America. Based on all the evidence I see, even from the rotten year of 2014 but also from other polling and evidence, that agenda and narrative about America will build an electoral majority.

The headline of Harold Meyerson’s Washington Post column hits a core issue of the immigration debate: “Obama calculates the human cost of deportations.” Written before the President issued his executive order, Meyerson nonetheless captured the central issue, the one few Republicans are willing to address:

Of the thousands of words written lately on President Obama’s impending order to exempt some undocumented immigrants from the threat of deportation, most have dealt with the politics of the issue, not the humanity behind it. What the media have largely failed to emphasize is that Obama’s order will be shaped almost entirely by the imperative of keeping parents with their children. The administration is planning to allow the undocumented parents of children born here (and who are, thus, U.S. citizens) to stay and receive work permits. Unfortunately, this will not include parents of the “dreamers” who are already protected by executive order from deportation.
…It’s not as if Obama hasn’t waited for Congress to address the immigration conundrum. Nearly 18 months ago, a bipartisan majority of 68 senators passed an Obama-backed bill that would have significantly augmented our border security forces and provided a long and tortuous pathway to legalization for an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. The Republican-controlled House refused to take up the bill, however, though it likely would have passed. Speaker John Boehner and other GOP leaders declined to risk the ire of the nativists in their ranks.

Meyerson adds that Republicans are likely to hold a House majority until 2023, and immigrant families would have little hope of congressional action to help them keep their families together. He credits President Obama with making a humane decision, “beyond the political and legal calculations are those that are simply human…even democracies can, and not infrequently do, violate the most elemental human rights. Stripping children of their parents is such a violation. It’s time — past time — to stop the stupidity, the lack of humanity.”
Any person with a decent mind and heart ought to be able to see that immigrants are making a tremendous contribution to contemporary American life. Making it possible for them to keep their families together isn’t asking a lot. The President did the humane thing in moving immigration reform in that direction.

The Democratic Strategist has posted a lot of content about the party’s quest for winning a greater share of the white working-class vote, which has become a more widely shared concern in the wake of the midterm elections. Trade unions have a critical role to play in meeting this challenge, and the Democratic party has a reciprocal obligation to support the labor movement, not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is a strategic imperative. For today, we’ll just flag two recent articles worth review for those who share these concerns.
Thomas B. Edsall’s New York Times op-ed “Republicans Sure Love to Hate Unions” provides a well-sourced update on the status of unions in America, coup-led with a richly-deserved scold for the Democratic party for neglecting this key constituency: One of Edsall’s nut graphs:

Democrats neglect the union movement at their peril. Not only does organized labor provide millions of dollars – the Center for Responsive Politics reports that unions spent $116.5 million on politics in 2013-14 – but union members are a loyal Democratic constituency. On Nov. 4, the 17 percent of voters who come from union households supported Democratic House candidates by a margin of 22 points, 60-38, while the remaining 83 percent from non-union households supported Republicans 54-44.

To get a sense of the future possibilities for the labor movement, the must-read is Harold Meyerson’s post at The American Prospect Long Form, “The Seeds of a New Labor Movement.” Meyerson takes an in-depth look at the more innovative organizing strategies, with particular focus on the creative efforts of David Rolf, president of a Seattle-based long-term care local of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Meyerson writes of Rolph:

…Between 1995 and 1999, while still in his 20s, Rolf directed a campaign that unionized 74,000 home care workers in Los Angeles. It was the largest single unionization since the United Auto Workers organized Ford in 1941. SEIU then sent him to Seattle, where he has nearly quadrupled SEIU’s Washington state membership. Last year, he led the initiative campaign that persuaded voters in SeaTac, the working-class Seattle suburb that is home to the city’s airport, to raise the local minimum wage to $15–the highest in the nation. He also managed to make SEIU’s campaign to organize fast-food workers and raise their pay to $15 the centerpiece of the mayoral race in Seattle proper…
Over the past 15 years, no American unionist has organized as many workers, or won them raises as substantial, as Rolf. Which makes it all the more telling that Rolf believes the American labor movement, as we know it, is on its deathbed, and that labor should focus its remaining energies on bequeathing its resources to start-up projects that may find more effective ways to advance workers’ interests than today’s embattled unions can.

Meyerson shares some of Rolph’s organizing techniques and has more to say about American labor’s future prospects. All of this should be of interest to anyone who believes that the Democratic party’s route to winning a larger share of the white working-class vote must go through a healthier labor movement.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Since I have been involved in politics as a full-time job, there have been five times where I had a really bad election night, where the Republicans kicked our ass and won most of the important races: 1980, 1994, 2004, 2010, and of course this year. Every single time was awful. Every single time the country suffered a great deal as a result. But every single time, Democrats came storming back the very next election and had a great year. It’s not too surprising, really: Republicans are an arrogant bunch with really bad and unpopular policy ideas that don’t work out well when they are enacted. And of course, we know that the voting pool in a presidential year tends to look more like the actual population of the country — younger, more people of color, more unmarried voters — and that is a very good thing for Democrats. So while I take absolutely nothing for granted, and know that we will have to work our collective Democratic asses off, I go into 2016 with some confidence.
The key, though, is good strategic thinking. We can’t go into the 2016 cycle thinking that Republican arrogance and demographics alone will save us. We have to have a strategy that simultaneously fires up our base and appeals to middle- and working-class swing voters. Central to that strategy is picking the right fights to have and to drive with an extended grassroots and media campaign, and avoiding the stupid “bipartisan” deals the DC establishment tends to love, but that are harmful to poor and middle income folks. Some examples of both the good ideas and the dumb stuff below.
In 1981, Reagan had swept into power with a Republican Senate, and although the Democrats still controlled the House, there was a sizable enough Southern conservative Democratic faction in the House that Reagan was able to push through his massive supply-side tax cuts for the rich. The Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, knew he was going to lose on the budget battle, but he made a point of picking a big fight on it and driving a message about the Democrats standing with the working class and the Republicans standing with the wealthy. When the budget deal resulted in a recession and a massive deficit in 1982, people remembered O’Neill’s stand, and the Democrats picked up 26 House seats that year, securing his ability to control the House the rest of the Reagan years.
In 1993-94, when Democrats had control of Congress, Clinton split the Democratic base and ticked off a lot of working-class swing voters by pushing NAFTA hard. He then failed to get health care reform passed; leaving a lot of Democrats completely unenthused about turning out. But in 1995, after the slaughter of the 1994 elections, when Clinton (at the strong urging of the labor and progressive movements, and against the advice of centrist advisers like Mark Penn) picked a big fight with the Republicans in Congress on the budget over Medicare, Medicaid, Education, and the Environment, the tide turned for Clinton permanently. Clinton went into that fight behind Dole in the polls by about 10 points, and by the time it was done, he was ahead by about 10 — and he never lost that lead.
After the 2004 elections, with conservative Republicans firmly in control of every branch of government, Democrats, backed strongly by the entire progressive movement, stood their ground and picked big fights with Bush and Tom DeLay over Social Security privatization, the Iraq war, the handling of Katrina, and the fact that Republican leadership was trying to cover up a growing wave of scandal involving sleazy lobbyists like Jack Abramoff. In each of these fights, progressives put campaigns together, gave them enough resources to give them a punch, and worked closely with the Democratic leadership to hold Democrats solidly together on those issues. The result was the most sweeping Democratic midterm election victory of the modern era, a 31 House seat and six Senate seat pick-up.
After the Republican blowout of 2010, Obama’s initial reaction was to reach out to cut deals with Republicans on the budget. He agreed to a couple of deals, making massive cuts in spending with no corresponding tax increases, and proposed (but thankfully did not get) a “grand bargain” with Republicans that would have cut Social Security benefits and made other big cuts in domestic spending. The progressive community was in open rebellion, Obama looked weak and like he didn’t care about fighting for his principles, and his approval ratings hit a first term low. But he saved himself in time with a strong populist speech in the fall of 2011 in Osawatomie, Kansas, that picked fights with the Republicans on a series of economic issues, and then he put out a progressive budget package that stood in stark contrast with the Ryan budget, which progressives had been fighting an on-going campaign to bring down. And Obama’s campaign successfully painted Romney as a heartless Wall Street CEO. In the worst economy for a President to be re-elected in since 1936, the Democrats won every closely contested presidential state but one, as well as most of the close Senate races.
The lessons here are clear: pick economic fights about helping poor and middle-class people instead of the wealthy and powerful, and avoid dumb bipartisan trade or budget deals that end jobs and cut benefits for the middle class.
And guess what? Speaking of populism, in the 2014 elections, one key point that people should think about isn’t just how Democrats lost, but where we won relatively easily in races that were supposed to be competitive. In Minnesota and Oregon, Democratic Senators Franken and Merkley went into the cycle with people thinking they might be in trouble. In Michigan, the Koch brothers invested a huge amount of money in a race that was supposed to be extremely competitive when Sen. Levin retired. In all three swing states, Democrats followed the same playbook: they ran an unapologetic economically populist campaign; brought in Elizabeth Warren in early to rally the troops and get activists excited to help them; and campaigned as proud progressive Democrats. On a night when most other Democrats struggled, these three strong progressives never went on defense, never struggled, and won the day strongly. Furthermore, of the ten closest Senate races in the country that had been considered the most competitive throughout the cycle (AK, NH, AR, KY, GA, KY, CO, IA, LA, NC), we won only one, Jeanne Shaheen in NH. Shaheen used Warren’s populist playbook (and repeated visits to NH to rally the troops) to beat corporate “moderate” Scott Brown.
I will close on this extremely important note: While the path to a solid Democratic victory in 2016 is clear, we need to be working toward a Democratic wave not just a Democratic victory. With the gains the Republicans made in the House and Senate, it will take a big Democratic election to have a chance at winning back both, especially the House. And whether it is Hillary or another Democratic president, I sure as hell would want to be governing without having to deal with a Republican-controlled House.
Having been deeply involved in both the 1996 Clinton re-elect and the 2006 strategy that won back both houses of Congress, I can tell you that there was a huge difference in both strategies and outcomes in those years. While Clinton thankfully rejected Penn’s and Dick Morris’ advice in 1995 to just split the difference with Gingrich and Dole on the budget, he did take their advice in terms of overall political positioning: he “triangulated,” intentionally setting himself apart from congressional Democrats and running his campaign on a completely separate track from other Democrats in 1996. The result was that Dole, indelibly linked in the public’s mind to a very unpopular Gingrich because of the 1995 government shutdown over the budget, was easily beaten, yet we lost two Senate seats and only picked up two House seats. In spite of the decisive budget victory, in spite of Gingrich’s unpopularity, in spite of a lifeless Dole campaign, there were no Clinton coattails because of the distance he created between his campaign and other Dems. It would be the last election where a president or party nominee had so little impact on the rest of the election.
In 2006, the contrast could not have been more dramatic. While there were some differences between Democrats on message, in general the party and progressive movement worked closely together on issue fights and messaging with a goal around building a wave. Staying united and winning decisively on the Social Security fight, and creating effective messaging campaigns around Bush’s failures in Iraq and with Hurricane Katrina, as well as driving message around the widespread scandal and corruption in the House under DeLay’s leadership, built the wave to an unprecedented level of strength.
In a presidential turnout year, with Republican hubris and extremism on full display as they flex their newfound power, I have no doubt a big wave for the Democrats can be built. It will take smart strategic thinking about what big issue fights to pick and what dumb bipartisan deals to avoid; it will take a strong dose of economic populism in an economy overwhelmingly skewed to the top 1 percent; and it will take a unity of purpose instead of Democrats trying to set themselves apart from the core values of the party. But if we are smart and tough and relatively unified, 2016 will be a great election for the Democratic Party.

As many have noted in the past week, the economy remains the dominant issue facing Americans, as many struggle to keep up in an age of stagnant wages and an ever increasing cost of living. Not surprisingly, there is strong support for policies that address the struggles of low wage workers, many of whom just barely get by or live in poverty. As the largest creator of low wage jobs in the US economy, the federal government has a particularly important role to play in improving the lives of workers and rebuilding the middle class. In a recent survey commissioned by Good Jobs Nation, voters overwhelmingly favor requiring the federal government to give preference to companies that pay their employees a living wage and provide benefits, as well as for the President’s executive order that raised the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $10.10. Support for these policy changes cross partisan, demographic and regional lines. Key findings include:
*A large majority of voters, 88 percent (54 percent “a very big problem”), believe that the growing gap between the rich and everyone else is a problem in the country. This view crosses party lines, as over three-quarters (88 percent) of Independents and 79 percent of Republicans feel this way.
*Sixty-two percent of voters rate low wage workers favorably, significantly higher than CEO’s (26 percent favorable) and Wall Street (24 percent favorable). Congress receives the lowest ratings among voters, earning only a 17 percent favorable rating.
*Almost three-quarters (71 percent) of voters support the executive order issued to require businesses with contracts with the federal government raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.
*Voters overwhelmingly favor the government taking further action in support of low wage workers. Seventy-seven (77) percent of voters favor the government, when awarding con-tracts, giving preference to businesses that pay their employees a living wage and providing benefits such as healthcare and sick leave. The depth of support for such a measure is evident, as it receives majority support regardless of partisanship or ideological leaning. In fact, 60 percent of conservative Republicans support the federal government taking such action.

*After voters learn about the scope of the federal government in low wage job creation, to the tune of one trillion dollars in purchased goods and services and being the largest creator of low wage jobs, support for the federal government giving preference to model employers, those who pay a living wage and provide benefits and sick leave, remains almost unchanged (72 percent).
The above findings are based a national survey among 1000 likely 2016 voters. The survey was con-ducted November 5-9, 2014 and carries an overall margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent at a 95 percent confidence interval, with the margin being higher among subgroups. Forty percent of respondents were reached by cell phone, in order to account for ever-changing demographics and trying to accurately sample the full American electorate.
For a PDF of the memo, click here.

The 2014 midterm election demonstrated voters’ dissatisfaction with the current state of campaigns and campaign spending. More and more money is being spent each cycle, voters feel bombarded by advertisements from opaque outside groups, and they have no doubt that Congress is bought and sold by special interests and campaign donors. Voters are acutely aware that wealthy interests have an increasing influence on the political process and they now have a strong appetite for change.
A nationwide survey conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner during and immediately after election day, on behalf of Democracy Corps and commissioned by Every Voice, sampled both 2014 voters and those likely to participate in 2016, allowing for analysis of this issue’s impact this year and its relevance moving forward. The survey shows the extent to which candidates’ positions on campaign spending had a clear electoral impact in 2014 and how much more important the issue will become in the next presidential campaign.
There is no doubt that voters find the status quo unacceptable – most find Super PACs disturbing and bitterly regret the amount of money spent on campaigns today. And as we have found numerous times before, voters across party lines endorse Every Voice’s proposed solutions. But rather than seeing this as a long-term ‘pie in the sky’ policy goal, we find here important evidence that campaign spending mattered to voters’ choice in the ballot box and that they demand Congress make reform a priority.
Read the full memo here