It’s not “Democratic Decline.” It’s a crisis of faith in the system.
by David Atkins
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.
There’s no guarantee, of course, but it seems quite likely that 2016 will see a reversal in which Democrats recapture the Senate and probably hold onto the White House, at which point the media will start sounding the death knell of the Republican Party, asking if the GOP will ever be relevant again. The press will try to point to some policy event that took place between November 2014 and November 2016 to account for the “shift”, as if it weren’t simply a turnout seesaw in an increasingly polarized and angry electorate, with the very few actual undecided (and mostly ignorant) voters simply bouncing back and forth trying to see if something different will work for a change.
It’s not that Democrats are in decline, so much as that trust in the entire system is in decline. Everyone can feel the economic uncertainty in their bones. Liberals and conservatives both feel like the country is sliding into a morass, even as the world is changing faster than they can process it.
I’m not saying this to let the Democratic Party off the hook for its failures. Introspection and a bolder economic progressivism is absolutely necessary to revitalize the Party and increase base turnout (to say nothing of actually solving the country’s problems.) But the constant negative focus on the Democratic Party is an distraction from the broader problem that turns the country’s deep, gnawing challenges into a horse-race narrative about public perception of the two political parties. It wasn’t more than two years ago that pundits were pounding nails into the GOP’s coffin. In two more years they’re probably be doing the same thing. It’s an easy way to avoid talking about the fundamental issues for which neither political party is actually providing any serious solutions.
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