Mike Lux’s HuffPo post, “That Old-Time Populism Debate ” provides a smart analysis of the recent Third Way study “Opportunity Trumps Fairness with Swing Independents.” Lux faults Third Way for what he considers some pretty extravagant claims in “their latest memo denouncing economic populism as a message.” As Lux frames his concerns about the survey:

When Mitt Romney is denouncing Obama for wanting to end Medicare, and Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are denouncing Mitt for corporate greed at Bain Capital — in a Republican primary, no less — it is hard to see how populism isn’t working as a messaging approach. And given that the entire Democratic Party including the Obama campaign — in spite of their earlier deep reluctance and the president not being a natural populist — is going for a strongly populist approach is further proof that most of the party’s pollsters and message people are in the same place…Suffice to say that there is overwhelming data to suggest that broad majorities of voters, including swing voters, don’t like Wall Street, love Social Security and Medicare (which Third Way has also argued should be cut), love taxes on the wealthy and closing corporate tax loopholes, deeply dislike big business lobbyists and special interests, are appalled by outsourcing, and all kinds of other populist topics.

Lux comes down hard on the study, citing Third Way for “a rubberman type of stretch that is breathtaking in its creativity.” He notes that seniors and working-class voters are underrepresented and the survey sample, while college grads are overrepresented. he feels further that the survey questions were slanted to elicit responses and sees a failure to test “the kind of populist economic growth message they declared so certainly would not work.”
Lux concedes that Dems need a more thoughtful message for swing voters than has too often been the case — “A pure give’em hell eat-the-rich stem-winder of a message may not appeal to them without some nuance in it.’ But, he adds:

…Winning political messages can never work for just one slice of the electorate. Third Way may well have found that segment of swing independents who were less old, less blue collar, and less populist than any other group of voters in the potential Democratic electoral coalition. But your message has to appeal to all different kinds of folks. For a Democrat to win a national election, you need a message that inspires your volunteers and small contributors and fans who will talk to their neighbors about you; a message that generates enough excitement from blacks, Latinos, young people, and unmarried women to get them out to vote; a message that appeals to all those underwater homeowners and people without jobs that voted for Obama last time but may be leaning Republican or too discouraged to vote because of their own hard times; and a message that appeals to a wide array of different kinds of swing voters. If the message can’t do all those things at once, it will not get you 51 percent. That’s what makes economic populism so incredibly valuable: it is the message, if nuanced correctly per the paragraph above, which comes the closest to doing that. Even if I lost all my doubts about the Third Way analysis in terms of the small slice of the electorate they had identified, the message still wouldn’t work strategically because it would fail with all those other voters we Democrats need to have to win.

Any strategy that ignores the broadly-held populist sentiments unearthed by the Occupy Movement is courting a disaster. As Lux concludes, “Democrats, especially Democratic incumbents, who are trying to win elections in times like these when the middle class is being squeezed so hard, need to be willing to take the populist torch and carry it proudly.”

This New York Times editorial explains why women voters may be the political force that sinks Scott Walker in the Wisconsin recall: “..He signed the repeal of a 2009 law allowing the victims of wage discrimination to pursue damages in state court…The principal reason for the original law was to narrow a significant gap in compensation between men and women. At the time the law was passed, women earned an average of 75 cents for every $1 men earned; by 2010, after the law was passed, the average for women had edged up to about 78 cents…Mr. Walker was acceding to the lobbying demands of business groups, including hotel and restaurant trade groups that employ large numbers of women in low-paying jobs and do not wish their wage scale to be challenged in court.”
GOP clown act summons unwelcome ghost of Joe McCarthy.
Dems need a stronger pitch for the votes of 11 million underwater or near-underwater homeowners, as SEIU activist Stephen Lerner reports at The American Prospect: “…In states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Ohio and Michigan–where tens of thousands of homeowners are looking for leaders to make some sense of the last five years–the “homeowner at risk” could well be the “soccer mom” of 2012, a group that demands attention, and will vote accordingly…Many economists believe a second settlement is needed to bolster the housing market and the overall recovery, so in this case the right thing is a win-win for the White House.”
Apparently, the ‘fair and balanced” network has a low tolerance for candor and transparency in the workplace .
In his post, “Understanding Political Codewords,”Richard Brodsky of Demos Policy Shop exposes some conservative euphemisms, wherein “sustainability” = pension benefit cuts for public workers and “fairness” = tax cuts for the rich.
Paul Begala makes a cogent argument that Sen. Rob Portman, a former Bush budget director, will be Romney’s veep choice.
John Sides explains at FiveThirtyEight why Dems shouldn’t crow too loudly about President Obama’s 12-point “empathy gap” edge over Romney: “…Republicans win all the time without closing the empathy gap. This is because Democratic candidates are generally perceived as more empathetic — more likely to “care about people like me” — than Republican candidates, regardless of who wins. Ronald Reagan in 1984, George H. W. Bush in 1988 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 were all perceived as less empathetic than their Democratic opponents.”
If the ‘War on Women” debate comes down to Ann Romney vs. Lilly Ledbetter, don’t bet against Ledbetter as a more authentic voice of working women, as is suggested by this Obama campaign video, via TPM Live Wire.
Poll Analyst Mark Blumenthal chews on a new Pew Research Center poll at HuffPo Pollster and concludes that at least this one poll indicates that registered voters are not all that dumb, as far as assessing differences between the two parties: “…Registered voters answered an average of 12 of the 17 questions correctly, compared to an average of just nine correct answers from the unregistered.” The questions seemed like pretty good indicators of basic political awareness. Even still, 70.6 percent correct answers isn’t all that great for grown-ups. Hard to avoid the conclusion that “low information voters” are still a problem.

Much has been written about the growing power of Latino voters nation-wide. When it comes to the presidential election, however, their influence will likely be felt most in four to six states. Some interesting stats in that regard from Michael Scherer’s post “Predicting the Latino Vote in 2012” at Time Swampland:

In national elections since the early 1990s, Republicans have had a floor of about 20% among Latinos, a group that includes a large population of Cuban Americans in Florida. Democrats have always won at least 55%. So about 25% of the Latino vote is at play in the middle. (In one survey, Romney now polls at 14% among Latinos, though that poll, for the moment, is an outlier.)
So when we consider the impact of Latinos in 2012, we are looking at a swing between about a 20% vote share for Republicans and a 45% vote share. The question that follows is how much of an impact this swing will have on the final electoral college results. The polls that really matter are state-by-state surveys, not national ones.
Latinos are expected to make up about one in ten voters this year, but many of those votes, in big states like Texas, California and New York, will have no impact on the electoral college, since those states are not in play for Romney. But Latinos can have a big impact on the outcomes in Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and Florida, and a marginal impact in states like North Carolina and Ohio, all of which both parties will contest.
The polling firm Latino Decisions, which is the gold standard of Latino-American polling, recently put out a report on the impact of Latinos in these states. They found that for every eight points that Republicans lose among Latinos in states like Colorado and Nevada, the party needs to pick up another single point among non-Latino voters in order to not lose ground statewide.
For example, if Obama gets 69% of the Latino vote in Nevada (ceding to Romney just 31%), then Obama can still win the state by capturing only 47% of the non-Latino vote (ceding to Romney 53%). If Obama gets a little more than 63% of the Latino vote, then he needs to get 48% of the non-Latino vote….

Romney will be walking back a lot of his Latino-bashing primary talk in the months ahead to make even a little dent in the Democratic advantage with this key constituency. As Scherer concludes, “As the Romney campaign rejiggers for the general election, there will be a pivot, at least in tone, to appeal to Latino voters. The tough talk-advocating “self-deportation” and calling Arizona a “model” for the nation-will almost surely give way to more positive talk about the need for fair reforms to immigration law.”

Kos has an interesting analysis of the latest polling from Talking Points Memo’s aggregate data and finds Romney ahead in only 3 (AZ, IA and MO) of 14 ‘battleground’ states, and in one of those (IA) his lead looks awfully close to m.o.e. territory.
Even better, Kos notes, “…the aggregates would look even worse for the GOP if I omitted Rasmussen’s bogus results. Omit the GOP’s favorite pollster, and Arizona is suddenly a 2.5-point Romney lead. Missouri is a 45-45 tie.” He adds “…The end result is still a 341-197 landslide…And with Romney losing Latinos and women by landslide numbers, any effort to turn this slide and claw back some of these states will be particularly difficult–and he still has to hold on to those few states in which he currently leads.”
As for the GOP’s gas prices boogieman, Kos says “So what do Republicans have to say about all this? Gas prices! Gas prices! Gas prices!…Last time I checked, gas prices were high now. It ain’t doing Romney a lick of good.”

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
It’s not rocket science.
The chief goal of our economic policy is to increase per capita economic output — measured by per capita Gross Domestic Product. That’s what allows people to live better next year than they did the year before. That’s what allows our children to live a better life than we do. That is the basis of the American Dream.
Increased per capital economic output is made possible by increases in productivity. When productivity increases, the same number of hours of work generate more goods and services.
But it should be obvious to anyone that if all of the income that results from increases in economic output flow to the top one percent of the population, then the rest of us won’t have that income to buy the increasing number of products and services that result from the increased productivity.
What happens, then, is simple: economic growth stalls. Companies won’t hire people to produce more products and services if no one has the money to buy them, so they lay people off. Taken as a whole, the economy then has even fewer people with the money to buy new goods and services.
Simply put, increasing economic inequality is a straight-forward formula for economic stagnation.
At the beginning of the Great Depression, income inequality, and inequality in the control of wealth, were very high. Then came the great compression between 1929 and 1947. Real wages for workers in manufacturing rose 67 percent while real income for the richest 1 percent of Americans fell 17 percent. 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 percent and the income of the richest 1 percent rose 38 percent. Growth was widely shared, but income inequality continued to drop.
From 1973 to 1980, everyone lost ground. Real wages fell 3 percent and income for the richest 1 percent fell 4 percent. The oil shocks, and the dramatic slowdown in economic growth in developing nations, took their toll on America and the world economy.
Then came what economist Paul 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 percent, while real income of the richest one percent rose 135 percent.
The Republican Congress has staunchly resisted President Obama’s attempts to pass tax policies that require the wealthy to pay their fair share and stem the flow of income to the very top. As a result, economic concentration has continued.
In 2010, according to a study published this month by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez, 93 percent of income growth went to the wealthiest one percent of American households. Everyone else divvied up the seven percent that was left over.
In order for companies to hire new workers, consumers have to have the money to buy their products. This is not hard. But Mitt Romney and the Republican Party don’t get it.
Yesterday the Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff visited Washington and met with President Obama. Last week, I attended a seminar in Sao Paulo on Brazilian economic and energy policy along with my wife, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky.
The most striking thing you come away with after visiting and studying Brazil is that there is a clear political consensus that the top priority of Brazilian economic policy is to reduce economic inequality.
The Brazilians have pursued this policy, not only because it is right, but also because they understand it is critically necessary to their long-term economic growth.
Over the last 20 years, Brazil’s policy of reducing economic inequality has brought 40 million people out of poverty and into the consumer economy. The Gini coefficient of inequality fell from .63 in 1989 to .53 in 2011.
As a result, Brazilian Gross Domestic Product per capita has grown to $13,000 in 2012 from $3,000 in 2002. It has more than quadrupled over only 10 years. The political consensus in Brazil is that the reduction of poverty — decreased economic inequality, creating more consumers and educated producers — is the principal engine of long-term economic growth for the entire society.
Brazil has a long way to go. But it is now the sixth largest economy in the World.
Two examples of Brazil’s policies aimed at reducing economic inequality are particularly instructive.
Brazil just raised the minimum wage by 14 percent. And it indexed the minimum wage both to inflation, and to increase in Gross Domestic Product. In other words, if the GDP goes up 2.7 percent, so does the share of income going to the lowest earners in the society.
Brazil has a program of cash transfers to women in its poorest families. To receive these payments, mothers have to make sure that their children attend school and get medical care. That program alone has converted millions of formerly desperately poor families into consumers. By the way, it has also reduced levels of domestic violence. Men are apparently not so eager to abuse women who have their own sources of family income.
In other words, then, the Brazilians are committed to the economic principles that America once embraced — principles that lead to the creation of the American middle class.
But in the mid seventies, the corporate CEO class and the far right organized a movement to undermine the American consensus that ending income inequality was necessary for our economy. They set to work cutting taxes for millionaires, putting the brakes on spending for education and children, attacking Social Security and Medicare and — perhaps most important — attacking unions whose muscle defended middle class incomes, both at the bargaining table and the ballot box.
In the end, that has increased income inequality in America. That, coupled with the deregulation of the big Wall Street banks and their reckless speculation, led to the Great Recession.
Next week the Senate will vote on the “Buffett Rule” — a bill supported by President Obama and Democrats in the Senate that is aimed at requiring that, at the very least, millionaires should not pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than ordinary people like their secretaries.
The Buffett Rule — named after billionaire Warren Buffett, who is its chief advocate — would be a major first step in eliminating the spectacle of multi-millionaires like Mitt Romney paying an effective tax rate of less than 15 percent, while ordinary middle class people pay substantially more.
It would effectively end the so-called “carried interest” rule where hedge fund managers like John Paulson, who made $5 billion dollars in 2010, pay marginal tax rates of only 15 percent on what they made speculating (and creating nothing of value) while ordinary working people may pay 20 percent, 25 percent or even 35 percent of income earned by producing useful goods and services.
There is simply no excuse for the Republicans in Congress fighting to maintain these kind of tax give-aways for millionaires and billionaires — especially while Republicans argue they are “forced” to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits.
But Republicans like Mitt Romney will throw themselves on the railroad tracks to prevent increased taxes on the top 1 percent. It is their chief political mission. It is why people like Paulson and the Koch brothers give huge sums of money to Republican candidates and super PACs.
They think of their investments in politicians the same way they think of investments in other financial assets. They are looking for a return — in some cases a return of billions of dollars in lower tax bills. And of course, as a guy worth $250 million, Mitt Romney himself would benefit handsomely from his policies.
Of course, the Senate vote on the Buffett rule will not be the last opportunity to turn the economic tide against increased inequality. In the fall election the choice between President Obama and Mitt Romney could not be more stark.
Over the next seven months, we must mobilize Americans to reject economic inequality — to embrace the politics and economics of inclusion — to vote for a society where we all stand together, where we have each other’s backs — and where we return the goal of reducing inequality to center stage where it belongs. And we should do it both because it is right and because it is the only way to create long-term economic growth for us all.

As one of the most effective obstacles to social and economic progress in the U.S., the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has introduced a range of reactionary bills in the nation’s state legislatures, which bash immigrants, suppress voting rights, gut social programs and meddle with women’s reproductive rights, to name a few of their priorities. Regretfully, many of these bills have become law.
A number of progressive organizations have opposed these measures and fought against ALEC’s initiatives with mixed success. Unfortunately, millions of people have suffered because of ALEC-sponsored laws. What has been needed is a concerted effort, a coalition of progressive groups, working together to defend their hard-won legislative gains and put an end to ALEC’s reign. As Katrina vanden Heuval reports in her WaPo op-ed “Deepening the progressive bench.”:

While conservatives are skilled puppeteers, progressives are great at mobilizing people and channeling energy for the big fights, whether it’s putting the crisis of income inequality at center stage, or even electing a progressive president. But ALEC’s astonishing influence exposes the progressive Achilles’ heel: a lack of a similarly entrenched, nationwide infrastructure of state and local policymakers and advocates that can create and support lasting change.
…The progressive movement needs to build a bench that can play offense at the grassroots, local, state and national levels, and one that is positioned to pull every lever of power in our multi-layered political system. Without that, for every big union busting bill defeated, or every progressive president elected, there still will be hundreds of right-wing initiatives percolating through the political system, eroding our rights and unraveling our hard-earned progress.

Despite the ongoing threat of ALEC’s efforts to repeal and reverse progressive legislative gains at the state level, there is now reason for hope, as vanden Heuval explains:

“People are now looking to do what the right has done so effectively — coordinating ideas, narratives, legislators and activists to really push in a progressive direction,” says New York City councilman and Progressive Caucus co-chair Brad Lander. The good news is that this is already happening, resulting in key wins on paid sick leave, the minimum wage and gay and lesbian equality at the state and local levels…
It was in this spirit that Lander met earlier this month with other progressive city leaders from across the country, key allies and groups like Progressive States Network, New Bottom Line and PolicyLink, to discuss the creation of a national network focused on promoting local progressive action by sharing and spreading great legislative ideas. This budding network joins established organizations like the Center for American Progress, Working Families Party, Progressive Majority, and Center on Wisconsin Strategy.
At the same time, Progressive Majority director Gloria Totten and a range of allies are pursuing a complementary project called the Elected Officials Alliance to coordinate state lawmakers across issue and organizational lines. Ultimately, the goal is to link state and local officials to policy organizations, like the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN). All of these groups are aiming to build a counterforce to ALEC.
On the policy front, the centerpiece of the effort is an initiative called the American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange (ALICE), started by Center on Wisconsin Strategy director Joel Rogers. ALICE would offer model laws for both state and local legislators and support citizen-directed efforts like ballot initiatives, all based on the values of equity, sustainability and responsible government.

Once again it’s people power vs. right-wing money, and progressives are today launching a new initiative, “the 99 Percent Spring, a new movement led by a huge coalition of progressive organizations — from MoveOn.org to the UAW” planning to train 100,000 people in nonviolent action “to tell the true story of how the one percent’s financial excess and political abuse destroyed our economy.”
As vanden Heuval concludes “…Political leaders move to where the energy is. If we want to see lasting progressive change, we need to inject that energy, driven by ideas and strategy, into every level of the process. That’s what the growing networks of progressive legislators and the 99 Percent Spring are positioned to do.”
To find out more about the ’99 % Spring,’ click here.

Marty Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center, has a HuffPo article, “You Don’t Mean a Thing If You Ain’t Got That Swing,” underscoring the point that presidential campaigns are not just about swing voters; they are about swing voters in swing states. As Kaplan explains:

Based on history and polling, Democrats can probably count on winning 14 states in November, for 182 electoral votes. (Those are Cook Political Report numbers, which most insiders cite, and they’ll change between now and the election, but as a snapshot, it’s close enough.) Republicans can probably count on 23 states, for 191 electoral votes, though some people think Arizona (11 electoral votes) without John McCain on the ticket is also up for grabs.
So ignore national polls. It’s only the 14 or 15 remaining states that really matter to campaigns. If you don’t live in one of them, your local airwaves won’t be carpet-bombing you with presidential attack ads, and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney won’t be heading your way unless there’s money to be raised. Sure, they’ll have field offices in every solid and likely state, and they’ll say they’re taking nothing for granted, complacency is their biggest enemy, blah blah blah, but it’s not your vote they’ll be ardently wooing.
About 50 million presidential ballots were cast in the 15 swing states in 2008. By October, it’s a good guess that the voting populations in those states will be closely divided, with Romney and Obama each getting about 45 percent. It’s the 5 million lucky duckies who say they don’t know who they’ll vote for in November who’ll be getting the most campaign love.

Targeting those 5 million swingers in swing states is not so easy, so presidential campaigns target “subsets,” as Kaplan explains:

…The Obama campaign, for example, has scenarios that start with the 246 electoral votes that John Kerry won in 2004, and then to reach 270, they have a “west path” (add Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Iowa); a “south path” (add North Carolina and Virginia); a “midwest path” (add Ohio and Iowa); and a Florida path.
Sure, there’ll be an intense effort by both sides to mobilize the highest percentage of their partisans in those states that they can. But getting 50.1 percent of the swing voters is the name of the game. In a big state like Florida, that’s around 420,000 people. But in Colorado, 125,000 voters may swing the election; in Iowa, about 75,000; in New Mexico, fewer than 45,000; in New Hampshire, fewer than 4,000. You get the idea. The presidential election could easily be decided by a crowd that wouldn’t fill the Rose Bowl.

As for the swing states swingers, Kaplan notes that they are not necessarily “ideologically centrist” and “their views are all over the map.” Many are emphatically not political junkies. “Unlike you, that’s not their idea of a good time.” But they are persuadable. Hence the never-ending search for messages that will resonate with them, especially in the final weeks of the campaign when most of them start tuning in.
Kaplan doesn’t say so directly, but he suggests that many of these highly-prized swing voters are, in fact, low-information voters. That raises the possibility that campaign resources might be better deployed in turning out the base.

GOP political strategists Ed Goeas and Ed Gillespie have a memo, “The Disillusioned Obama Young Voter” which merits consideration by Dems charged with formulating a strategy to secure a strong pro-Obama youth vote in November. As the authors explain:

As part of our Target Voter Series, Resurgent Republic sponsored four focus groups among Generation-Y voters ages 23 to 30 in Raleigh, North Carolina and Columbus, Ohio. These voters self-identified as Independents, voted for President Obama in 2008, but are undecided on the generic presidential ballot today. Conducted by The Tarrance Group, the focus groups were split between voters ages 23 to 26 (those in college or new to the workforce in 2008) and 27 to 30 years old (those beginning their professional career in 2008).
In 2008, President Obama won two-thirds of 18-to-29 year olds (66 to 32
percent). This was following President Bush’s 9-point disadvantage among this age group against John Kerry in 2004 (45 to 54 percent) and a near tie between President Bush and Al Gore in 2000 (46 to 48 percent). Despite President Obama’s strong performance in 2008, young voters today tend to be the most negative about the direction of the country. Indeed, recent public polling reports 68 percent of 18-to-29 year old voters think the country is headed on the wrong track – a higher percentage than supported Obama four years ago

The authors concede that “young voters’ ongoing frustration does not mean that they will outright abandon Obama, as was evident in the Ohio groups, but it should call into question their reliability to turnout for him this November barring any changes.” They cite the differences in unemployment experienced by youth in Ohio and North Carolina and note a litany of predictable economic concerns shared by the young voters.
Looking toward the future, Gillespie and Goeas see trouble ahead for Dems regarding young voter concerns about rising gas prices and “a candidate who presents a solid plan backed with substantive change.” They may be overstating the case since other polls show President Obama enjoying solid support from young voters. But the memo serves as an informative preview of the GOP’s coming campaign to win/neutralize a critical mass of young voters.

James Hohmann has a perceptive post up at Politico, which sheds some light on the presidential preferences of swing voters. Noting a new poll of “swing Independents” in a dozen ‘battleground states’ by Global Strategy for Third Way, Hohmann explains:

The majority of those who call themselves politically independent typically lean toward one major party or the other, but about 15 percent of the total electorate (roughly 40 percent of independents) are thought to authentically swing between parties.
Obama won 57 percent of this group in 2008. In this poll, which took place in mid-March, he led Romney 44 percent to 38 percent. those who prioritize growth and ‘opportunity’ against those who prioritize redistribution and ‘fairness.’
Yet when asked to assign a number on a scale of one to nine (one being liberal, nine being conservative and five being moderate), the swing independents put themselves at an average of 5.2 — slightly right of center — ranking Romney at 6.1 and Obama at 3.9.

Hohmann ads that “Obama is viewed favorably by 57 percent. Only 41 percent of the swing independents said the same for Romney.” But he also notes an edge in generic ballot for Republicans over Democrats and a 39-35 percent margin favoring Republicans among “swing independents.” Hohmann also discusses the differences over Democratic messaging among “those who prioritize growth and ‘opportunity’ against those who prioritize redistribution and ‘fairness.'” Hohmann explains further,

The independents were angriest about congressional gridlock, the national debt and Wall Street bailouts — in that order. But a higher percentage said they were “worried” about the next generation’s ability to achieve the American Dream and America falling behind its global competitors than Wall Street bailouts.
…In surveys and focus groups, Third Way has consistently found that independents in the battlegrounds see “fairness” differently than elites inside the Beltway. Asked what was “the most fair” of three options, 36 percent of swing independents said making the wealthy pay higher taxes, 33 percent said making everyone pay a flat tax and 27 percent said it would be fairest to make everyone (no matter how little they earned) pay something in taxes.
Asked whether fixing the budget deficit or reducing the income gap is more important, swing independents preferred the former 57 percent to 38 percent. Even emphasizing that the focus on income inequality is “to help the middle class” did little to move to the needle in the poll.

Hohmann quotes Lanae Erickson, the deputy director of Third Way’s social policy and politics program, who says of President Obama “He really needs to pivot and make sure that he’s focused on the opportunity message much, much more than the fairness message if he’s going to get it heard by these folks.”

The following article, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I wrote a book that came out in early 2009 called, “The Progressive Revolution: How The Best In America Came To Be,” that talked about the history of the American political debate. One of my fundamental arguments was that conservatives are using the same arguments against modern day progress that their ideological ancestors used against the progress we made throughout history. What I underestimated, though, is how fiercely and broadly the modern conservative movement is trying not only to block advances in progress, but to actually roll back the gains of our history. Things that had seemed long settled only a few years back when I wrote that book are now being fought over anew, and not by trivial people on the fringes of our politics but by most of the leaders in the Republican Party.
Over the last couple of years, we have seen the Supreme Court overturn 100 years of precedent in dramatically expanding corporate political power, and have seen Supreme Court Justices imply in oral arguments that Medicaid might be unconstitutional; we have seen leading Republican presidential candidates openly calling for the repeal of child labor laws, argue for letting the states ban contraception, and say that Social Security is unconstitutional and a Ponzi scheme; there was a Republican governor and presidential candidate, Rick Perry, who opened the door to his state seceding from the union; there is a Republican senator who called for a repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (although he later pulled back from that under intense pressure); and the Paul Ryan budget, passed twice by the Republican House and unreservedly endorsed by their presumptive, ends Medicare and Medicaid as we know them, and calls for a 95 percent cut in domestic spending over the next four decades.
This was the stuff of the extremist fringe — the John Birch Society, the militia types, the neo-Confederacy fan boys in the South, the Ayn Rand apostles, the Christian Dominionists — until fairly recently. But this group of outside-the-mainstream ghouls has become the twisted heart and soul of the 2012 Republican Party.
President Obama’s speech this week went after the extremists who control the Republican Party hard, and he nailed it. As a history buff, and someone who wrote at length about the original Social Darwinists in my book, I was glad to see him explicitly tie Ryan and Romney to their Social Darwinist ancestors:

This congressional Republican budget is something different altogether. It is a Trojan Horse. Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism. It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it; a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class. And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last — education and training, research and development, our infrastructure — it is a prescription for decline.

Just to give you a flavor of the original Social Darwinists, their intellectual founder was British writer Herbert Spencer, who happily applauded the divine right of Kings and “anyone who can get uppermost”. He attacked democratic forms of government, as well as trial by jury, where “12 people of average ignorance” would dare to sit in judgment of great corporations or wealthy people. In the U.S., the leading Social Darwinist was a Yale professor named William Graham Sumner, who said that every society had a choice between only two alternatives: “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest” or “un-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest.”
It is ironic that the modern Republican Party is a place where most of its adherents reject Charles Darwin’s ideas on science yet have embraced them fully on economics. Here’s the problem, though: Darwin was a scientist, not an economist. His ideas have been accepted, and have thoroughly stood the test of time, in the realm of science. But when applied to economic policy in the U.S. in the 1880-90s, the 1920s, and the Bush era at the turn of this century, they have caused economic depressions and the massive destruction of the middle class every time.
President Obama’s messaging on this is right where it needs to be. This paragraph is beautiful:

In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few. It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class. That’s how a generation who went to college on the G.I. Bill, including my grandfather, helped build the most prosperous economy the world has ever known. That’s why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so they could buy the cars that they made. That’s why research has shown that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.

This is an election where it is very clear that people are going into the voting booth unhappy with the economy and with both parties. For the most part, they aren’t going to have faith in anyone on the ballot, and they aren’t going to be feeling optimistic about winning the future. They are going to need to see a clear contrast. On the one hand, they need to understand just what the Republicans are offering: a Social Darwinist, Ayn Randish future where all the benefits go to the wealthiest, who got that way because they are the “fittest” — where only the wealthy “job producers” get any benefits at all from government. On the other, they need to see Democratic candidates from the presidential level on down who they believe will fight without pause or fear for the middle class and those trying to climb the ladder up into it. From the looks of the president’s speech Tuesday, that is exactly what we will get.