Harold
Meyerson, editor of “The American Prospect,” takes a close look at the election
results and concludes that the
Democrats lost because they failed to govern as Democrats.
They
did not take action to increase economic prosperity, and consequently, did not
turn out their base of voters.
Republicans are even less likely to produce
policies to increase economic prosperity, but in a contest to turn out your base,
the Democrats had nothing to offer their base, and a sizable chunk of the base
didn’t bother to vote.
It
would be wrong, he writes, to conclude that the electorate turned more
conservative, because wherever offered the chance to raise the minimum wage, the
voters did.
He
writes:
Tuesday’s verdict makes clear that the Democrats
cannot win by demographics alone. Republicans failed to improve their dismal
performance among Latino and African American voters or among the young, but
these groups’ low turnout helped doom Democrats in blue states particularly.
Voters ages 18 to 29 constituted just 13 percent of the electorate, down from
19 percent in 2012. Latinos favored Democrats by 62 percent to 36 percent, but
they constituted just 8 percent of voters, the same level as in 2010, despite
their growing share of the population. Tuesday’s electorate tilted white and
old — which is to say, Republican….
Yet the same factors that lowered the turnout of
the Democratic base also cost the party votes among whites: the failure of
government to remedy, or even address, the downward mobility of most Americans.
Democrats who touted the nation’s economic growth did so at their own peril:
When 95 percent of the income growth since the recession ended goes to the
wealthiest 1 percent, as economist Emmanuel Saez has documented, voters view
reports of a recovery as they would news from a distant land. Even though it
was the Republicans who blocked Democrats’ efforts to raise the federal minimum
wage or authorize job-generating infrastructure projects or diminish student
debt, it was Democrats — the party generally perceived as controlling the
government — who paid the price for that government’s failure to act.
But with the exception of Sen. Elizabeth Warren
(D-Mass.), who has been plenty outspoken about diminishing the power of Wall
Street, the Democrats have had precious little to say about how to re-create
the kind of widely shared prosperity that emerged from the New Deal. The
regulated and more equitable capitalism of the mid-20th century has morphed
into a far harsher system, just as Americans told the exit pollsters, and the
Democrats, whose calling card to generations of voters was their ability to
foster good economies, are at a loss for how to proceed.
Educators
had little reason to come out to vote; in many states, the Democratic candidate
was indistinguishable from the Republican candidate, and both took campaign
contributions from the same Wall Street sources. Education should have been the
Democrats’ strong suit, given that there are at least five million professional
educators, and many millions of public school candidates. But this was an issue
that the Obama administration gave to the Republicans by acting like
Republicans, by embracing the Republican education agenda of testing, punitive
accountability, and choice.
The
lesson of this election should be clear: Democrats can’t win by acting like
Republicans.