After a “Wave Election” like we just experienced, the losing party usually goes through a period of Monday morning quarterbacking along with some serious and justified recriminations. Both Mary Burke and Sue Happ were excellent candidates who ran in a tough year for Democrats and have a good future in Wisconsin electoral politics if they choose to run again. The consultants and political experts, not so much.
When you decide to run for office, you assemble a team that usually includes media and messaging consultants. Obviously you try to hire the best and the brightest who have some victories under their belts, but unfortunately there aren’t a lot of differences in a party’s stable of advisors. For statewide races, the consultants are usually out-of-state national consultants who have never lived in Wisconsin, don’t really understand the state and probably never ran for office themselves. Their advice usually comes down to telling the candidate to work the phones and raise money, while they develop the message and buy the advertising. They encourage the candidates to be very risk adverse and not to take strong stances on issues, but rather dance around anything controversial. The political party leadership often agrees with that strategy so the result is a candidate without any compelling message, giving the average voter very little reason to go out to vote. Actually, relative to candidates across the rest of the country, Burke and Happ were stronger on their message than many of their peers.
Democrats pretty much across the country do a poor job of messaging, letting the voters know why they are running for office and what they plan to do if elected. Voters need to vote for something, not just against the other candidate. For example, the U.S. economy is growing at 3 to 3.5%, which is a very respectable rate of growth. The U.S. is currently the engine of the world economy. China’s growth is definitely slowing, Europe’s economy is teetering and potentially falling back into another recession as the E.U. countries fight over how to stimulate their economies. The U.S. economy is pulling the rest of the world along, but if you ask the U.S. voters, they think President Obama has failed with the economy. Considering the total opposition from Republican leader Mitch McConnell to any additional stimulus and weak demand from the rest of the world, the U.S. economy is doing an amazing job. Why hasn’t that message gotten out? There are 10 million more Americans with health insurance because of the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare, and most people are quite happy with their coverage and its cost according to all of the surveys. Again, why hasn’t this message gotten out? People want to see greater economic fairness. In all of the referenda that dealt with raising the minimum wage for the lowest-paid workers, a rise in the minimum wage won, including the minimum wage referenda in some very red states.
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The Democrats across the country had a great issue in 2014, which is the rising economic inequality. A recent report showed that the richest 85 individuals have more assets than the poorest 3,500,000,000. Yes that is 3.5 billion people, or about 11 times the population of the U.S. Despite the fact that the Great Recession ended in 2009, by professional economist’s definition of recession, the vast majority of Americans don’t see that in their communities and their lives. One of the reasons that we may read that the economy is growing, but we aren’t seeing that growth translate into the jobs and higher salaries, is the gross income inequality. It is one thing to argue that people who take risks or work hard should be rewarded; it is another thing to see the tremendous growth in the income and assets of the 1%, while the lower 90% see stagnant or falling real wages. This is a winning issue despite what the overpaid consultants tell their clients. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is one of the most popular U.S. senators because she has the courage to passionately discuss the economic inequality question. So until the Democrats get a bold, compelling message, stand up for issues that affect the average working person, take a stand against rising income inequality and craft articulate policies to bring about greater fairness, we will continue to see low voter turnout and Democratic losses.
