I believe very strongly that the poor showing of Democrats in the 2014 elections owes completely to their failure to sell themselves and their party. With a broad collection of policies favored by voters and a great legacy of economic populism there was no reason to just give it up to the GOP.
A lot of others are seeing it the same way, too. That's good, because Republicans significantly improved their 2016 position with strong gains on November 4. The Democratic Party really doesn't have a lot of time for soul searching and finger pointing. It's time...PAST time really, to do what Democrats have done consistently for the past several generations and recommit themselves to pulling hard for hard working Americans at every level of the economic ladder.
Part of the problem, no doubt, is a messaging one: getting more voters to understand why some of the Democratic policies they support have not come into fruition because they have been blocked by Republicans in Congress. That the minimum wage could be $10.10 an hour, were it not for Republicans voting against it. That the infrastructure bill Democrats have intermittently been pushing, which would have paid for x or y project in the voters’ district and created x or y jobs, was blocked by Republicans on this or that date. Democrats should also be taking more credit for small pocketbook gains they have secured for people, whether it’s reductions in credit card fees in the credit card reform bill of 2009 or lower student loan costs as a result of the administration’s reforms or the slowing growth in health premiums for many private plans under the Affordable Care Act. Some Democrats have a congenital wariness about attaching hard dollar figures to their policies and proposals, and need to get over that if they want voters to grasp what’s at stake. As one former Democratic elected official put it to me this week, “You’ve got to own the shit that you’ve done and make [Republicans] own the stuff they haven’t done.”
But the problem isn’t just messaging. As Harold Meyerson notes at the American Prospect, the Democrats also need to come up with a broader agenda to address voters’ economic anxiety in an age of stagnant wages and soaring inequality:
What, besides raising the minimum wage, do the Democrats propose to do about the shift in income from wages to profits, from labor to capital, from the 99 percent to the 1 percent? How do they deliver for an embattled middle class in a globalized, de-unionized, far-from-full-employment economy, where workers have lost the power they once wielded to ensure a more equitable distribution of income and wealth? What Democrat, besides Elizabeth Warren, campaigned this year to diminish the sway of the banks? Who proposed policies that would give workers the power to win more stable employment and higher incomes, not just at the level of the minimum wage but across the economic spectrum?
Coming up with this agenda, and pushing it in a way that voters comprehend, needs to be the overriding Democratic priority over the next two years. Not only because regaining the “who’s on your side” advantage is, along with higher turnout, the key to winning in 2016, but because it is what the party is supposed to stand for—and because it goes to the heart of the country’s current economic plight.
http://www.newrepublic.com/...
Get after it, Democrats, you have a lot of work to do.