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…

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.

McAuliffe’s victory is all the more impressive in light of the repressive electoral system detailed in Qasim Rashid’s PolicyMic post, “Virginia’s Racist Voter ID Law is a Chilling Step Towards Jim Crow America.”
Politico’s Alexander Burns explains “How Terry McAuliffe mapped his Virginia win” According to Burns, “In February, McAuliffe took a large-sample poll of 10,000 Virginia voters. That huge tranche of data allowed the campaign to create a detailed model of the off-year electorate. While media attention has largely focused on whether McAuliffe would be able to turn out apathetic Democrats who participated in the 2012 presidential race, his campaign also had another objective in mind: identifying all the occasional voters who participated in the 2009 Virginia elections and ensuring that they showed up at the polls in a second off-cycle year.”
Not surprisingly, the Crystal Ball’s Larry J. Sabato Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley have a superb wrap-up about what happened in Virginia in their article “The Surprisingly Dramatic Terry & Ken Show.”
At USA Today Cara Richardson has an update on current Senate races.
Time Swampland’s Maya Rhodan takes an interesting angle in her post-mortem “Election 2013’s Biggest Winner? Labor Unions.” Rhodan explains, “Working America was one of the many unions and super PACs on the ground in Boston canvassing for mayor-elect Walsh, and the group worked in states across the country to push prolabor candidates and ballot measures. Nine of the eleven candidates they were pushing for are heading into office, and their positions on minimum wage prevailed…”We have a major challenge coming in 2014, and we have important battles to fight at the state and national levels,” says Mike Podhorzer, the political director of the AFL-CIO. “We are hoping this is a harbinger of how the electorate is feeling and gives us momentum.”
More good news for unions — and Dems — at NPR Jay Hancock’s “Administration Looks To Give Labor Unions Health Tax Relief”
Lewis Krauskopf reports at Reuters that “Interest in Obamacare rises despite website problems: Reuters/Ipsos poll.” Krauskopf reports “The uninsured view the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, more favorably since online marketplaces opened – 44 percent compared with 37 percent in September, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll…A higher proportion of the uninsured also said they are interested in buying insurance on the exchanges, with 42 percent in October, saying they were likely to enroll compared with 37 percent in September. The results have a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.”
Late-breaking — Great news for Georgia Democrats: “Democratic state Sen. Jason Carter will challenge Gov. Nathan Deal next year in a move that catapults the gubernatorial contest into the national spotlight and tests whether Georgia’s changing demographics can loosen the Republican Party’s 12-year grip on the state’s highest office,” reports Greg Bluestein at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The entry of President Carter’s well-liked grandson gives Georgia two exciting young Democrats running statewide in 2014 — and the likely involvement of two of Georgia’s most popular leaders, Sam Nunn and Jimmy Carter.
Talk about a mismatch. Try to imagine a duel of wits between Rachel Maddow and Sen. Rand Paul. Maddow could be arrested for child abuse.

The following article is by Erica Seifert of DCorps:
In today’s Wonkblog, Ezra Klein writes that despite Terry McAuliffe’s victory in yesterday’s Virginia gubernatorial election, the exit polls point to a “demographic drift that could help Republicans next year.”
“A Republican looking at these numbers should feel disappointed by last night’s election but hopeful about next year’s,” Klein writes.
Central to his argument is the fact that seniors represented 18 percent of Virginia’s 2013 electorate — up 4 percent from 2012 — and can therefore be expected to make up a larger share of next year’s midterm electorate. While we accept that demographic trends in odd-year elections point to potential shifts in the off-year body of voters, we take issue with the idea — taken as fact by most pundits — that a high vote share among seniors is necessarily bad news for Democrats.
More important than the vote share among seniors was the vote choice among seniors last night. At Democracy Corps, we have been closely examining voting trends among seniors in our polls and noting that they are increasingly supporting Democrats. But this is not a poll. This is an actual election that confirms what we have been seeing in our data: Something is, in fact, happening among seniors.
In 2009, seniors voted for Republican Bob McDonnell by a 20-point margin, 40 percent to 60 percent. Four years later, Democrat Terry McAuliffe cut that margin by three quarters (down to just +6 for Ken Cuccinelli).

So, while we accept Ezra Klein’s analysis that we should pay attention to the demographic trends apparent in last night’s election, we reject that these trends point to potentially bad things for Democrats in 2014. A strong turnout among seniors may, in fact, be a good thing for Democrats next year.

Republicans are spinning Terry McAuliffe’s margin of victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election as smaller than expected (2.4 percent) and a result of the Democrat’s heavy campaign spending. Fair enough. But Dems can point out that McAuliffe is not exactly Mr. Charisma, as he would admit, and he won, as did the Dems’ candidate for Lt. Gov, while the Dem. candidate for A.G. is behind a few hundred votes out of more than 2 million cast. Some other observations:

As Chris Cilliza and Aaron Blake point out at WaPo’s The Fix, “The Republicans’ un-married people problem: Cuccinelli carried married men and married women by single digits. But, he lost among unmarried people by massive margins. Unmarried men favored McAuliffe over Cuccinelli by almost two dozen points and unmarried women by more than forty.”
McAuliffe won women voters by a margin of 51-42 percent (but lost men by 3 percent). He got 67 percent – two out of three — unmarried women.
In terms of age, McAuliffe’s strongest cohort was those 30-44, who gave him 56 percent of their votes. But he also got 45 percent of the 65 and older voters, which is impressive for Dems in a southern state.
Also, note Blake and Cillizza, “In 2009, 78 percent of the Virginia electorate was white — and Republican Bob McDonnell rolled up a 35 point win over Democrat Creigh Deeds among white voters. Four years later, the electorate was only 72 percent white and Cuccinelli led McAuliffe by 20 points within that demographic group, according to exit poll results. That trend of white voter erosion is nothing new. In the 2012 election, it was on stark display.”
Alec McGilllis points out at The New Republic, “…very few pundits have been framing the race as having anything to say about the state of the gun control cause, despite McAuliffe’s remarkably forthright support for tighter gun restrictions, which included proudly touting his F rating in a debate with Republican Ken Cuccinelli.”

One of the most oft-cited observations about Virginia is that it is unique with the large numbers of federal workers voting in the state, and so the strong shutdown backlash is not likely to be replicated elsewhere. In reality, however, the research triangle of North Carolina is roughly analogous to the northern VA ‘burbs with its liberal bent. Dems face more of an uphill battle in NC. But it is the state where Obama lost by the closest margin, and discontent with Republican voter suppression is energizing key pro-Democratic constituencies. Virginia is trending blue today and N.C. is on deck.

TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore has a post up at the Washington Monthly on “Counter-Polarizing the Social Security Debate,” which explores the ramifications of Dems taking a more assertive position in favor of increasing, not cutting SS benefits. Kilgore explains:

The idea has been kicking around think tanks (notably the Economic Policy Institute) and the blogosphere (particularly Atrios, who’s made this a personal crusade) for a while, but now is getting some serious buzz in the Senate: it’s time not to trim but to expand Social Security benefits.
Unions and progressive activists are uniting around Tom Harkin’s bill to boost benefits by $70 a month for all Social Security recipients (and more for those heavily dependent on benefits for retirement security), increase (rather than decrease, as the “chained CPI” tentatively accepted by the White House as part of a not-going-to-happen “grand bargain” would do) the cost-of-living adjustment formula, and pay for it all by eliminating the regressive payroll tax cap for the program.

Kilgore quotes Sen. Sherrod Brown, via Greg Sragent, on the need for Dems to quit dithering about what to do regarding Republican efforts to cut Social Security, and get out front in a big way: “Why would we play on their playing field? Democrats need to play offense here. Force Republicans to say what it is they really want to do. Republicans just don’t like social insurance.” Kilgore adds that “Brown is talking about counter-polarizing the “entitlement” debate instead of taking a “responsible but flexible” posture to be contrasted with GOP “extremism.” Kilgore concludes,

The actual ace-in-the-hole for the “expand Social Security” message may be less about shifting the frame or changing the playing field than the simple fact that voters, and particularly the older voters on which the Republican Party so heavily relies, are likely to support higher benefits however they feel about “entitlements” as an abstraction, and whether or not they are vulnerable to GOP efforts to wedge them away from younger Americans with some sort of grandfathering provision for current retirees. And as noted earlier, the broader subject of rapidly eroding retirement security is long-overdue for serious public debate.

It makes a lot of sense, especially now, that recent opinion poll data indicates that senior voters are tilting more towards Democrats. Dems calling for better Social Security benefits just might provide the edge needed to secure a healthy majority of this high turnout constituency in 2014.

At Politico you will find a surprisingly excellent update on “The Obamacare Sabotage Campaign” by Todd S. Purdum. It’s surprising, not because of Purdum’s fine reporting, but because Politico has been a little soft on the Obamacare-bashers. Purdum, however, is not giving any free rides:

To the undisputed reasons for Obamacare’s rocky rollout — a balky website, muddied White House messaging and sudden sticker shock for individuals forced to buy more expensive health insurance — add a less acknowledged cause: calculated sabotage by Republicans at every step.
…From the moment the bill was introduced, Republican leaders in both houses of Congress announced their intention to kill it. Republican troops pressed this cause all the way to the Supreme Court — which upheld the law, but weakened a key part of it by giving states the option to reject an expansion of Medicaid. The GOP faithful then kept up their crusade past the president’s reelection, in a pattern of “massive resistance” not seen since the Southern states’ defiance of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
The opposition was strategic from the start: Derail President Barack Obama’s biggest ambition, and derail Obama himself. Party leaders enforced discipline, withholding any support for the new law — which passed with only Democratic votes, thus undermining its acceptance…
…But the bitter fight over passage was only the beginning of the war to stop Obamacare. Most Republican governors declined to create their own state insurance exchanges — an option inserted in the bill in the Senate to appeal to the classic conservative preference for local control — forcing the federal government to take at least partial responsibility for creating marketplaces serving 36 states — far more than ever intended…Then congressional Republicans refused repeatedly to appropriate dedicated funds to do all that extra work, leaving the Health and Human Services Department and other agencies to cobble together HealthCare.gov by redirecting funds from existing programs.

The Republicans have been no less obstructionist in sabotaging the ACA in the states. As Purdum notes, “On top of that, nearly half of the states declined to expand their Medicaid programs using federal funds, as the law envisioned…Then, in the months leading up to the program’s debut, some states refused to do anything at all to educate the public about the law. And congressional Republicans sent so many burdensome queries to local hospitals and nonprofits gearing up to help consumers navigate the new system face-to-face that at least two such groups returned their federal grants and gave up the effort.”
Purdum goes on to document the Republican sabotage, not just in congress and the states, but also the Republican-dominated courts and the media. “When the White House let it be known last summer that it was in talks with the National Football League to enlist star athletes to help promote the law, the Senate’s top two Republicans sent the league an ominous letter wondering why it would “risk damaging its inclusive and apolitical brand.” The NFL backed off.
it’s a shameful litany for the GOP. Sure, they have used lax enforcement of progressive legislation before, most notably with respect to the Motor Voter act in the states they control –they are also huge on obstructing citizens right to vote. But now they are all about full-frontal sabotage of the law of the land on a scale that calls into question their commitment to democracy itself.

The following article by Stan Greenberg is cross-posted from Democracy Corps:
Recent polls tell a story about the political climate in America: People are furious with what the political class has done to this country. While voters are not thrilled with the Democratic Party and the president, they are particularly angry with the Republican Party. In fact, the GOP’s rapidly declining numbers are downright historic.
Our latest battleground poll confirms that an increasing number of Americans have incredibly negative, hostile views towards Speaker John Boehner and the Republican Congress. And in 2014, you can be sure that these voters will make themselves heard:

The following is cross-posted from Democracy Corps:
When all the dust is settled in the off-year elections, we may decide it was seniors who gave the Democrats their chance for a comeback. We have flagged this growing trend before, but the pattern is now too consistent to ignore. When Republicans swept Democrats in the 2010 off-year elections, they won seniors by 21 points. Repeat, 21 points. They lost white seniors by 24 points. Just this past November, Republicans won seniors by 12 points in the vote for Congress.
We will be releasing on Wednesday our congressional battleground poll – in the 49 most competitive Republican districts and 24 most competitive Democratic seats. When we do, pay attention to the seniors. In the Republican battleground, the vote is tied among seniors and the Democratic candidate has gained 5 points among this group since June. In the Democratic battleground, Democratic incumbents lead by 14 points (51 percent to 37 percent) among seniors and by 9 points (48 percent to 39 percent) among white seniors.
This is not unique to the battleground. It reflects the results we have seen in all Democracy Corps’ national polls this year. In the latest national conducted with Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, a Republican candidate for Congress leads by just 6 points (49 percent to 43 percent) among seniors, well below the GOP’s 21-point margin in the 2010 and 12-point margin in 2012 elections.
With seniors some of the most immediate beneficiaries of The Affordable Care Act, President Obama no longer on the ballot, and with Republicans seeking to make Medicare and Medicaid cuts, it is possible seniors are moving to a new place.
Read the post at Democracy Corps and see the frequency questionnaire here.