It’s not “Democratic Decline.” It’s a crisis of faith in the system.
David Atkins with some good analysis and excellent advice. Time to stop handicapping horse races and start focusing on what we can do.
Charlie Cook has come out with what seems like the thousandth version of the “Declining Democrats need to give working-class voters something to believe in” story. That’s all well and good, of course: that the Democratic Party needs to embrace big ideas that restructure the economy in favor of the 99% is obvious and old hat by now at Hullabaloo and most other progressive venues.
But there’s something that sticks in the craw about the notion that the 2014 election represents a “decline” in the Democratic Party. Both the 2010 and 2014 elections were symptomatic of a newly sharpened trend in which Democratic voters turn out for Presidential elections but not midterms; 2014 combined this phenomenon with a very unfavorable Senate map and an economy that is still sour for nearly everyone but the top tier of incomes.
What we do know is that 2014 was an awful year for voter turnout generally. That’s not surprising considering that Americans trust their elite institutions less than they ever have, and that Congressional approval ratings are at or near all-time lows. People are discouraged and angry across the board; it just so happens that we came out of an electoral cycle in which more rabid conservatives turned out to the polls than staunch liberals did, with a particularly heavy impact on the Senate in conservative-leaning states.
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