Saturday, November 8, 2014

Democrats can’t win by acting like Republicans


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:

Sixty-three percent of respondents told pollsters they believed that the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy, while just 32 percent said that it is fair to most. And a wave of ballot measures to raise state or city minimum wages carried wherever they were put before voters — from deepest-blue San Francisco and Oakland to solid-red Nebraska, South Dakota, Arkansas and Alaska…..

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.