Insightful Truth from a Pollster

The New Republic explains that the reason the Democrats had such lousy election results is because they "forgot" the message they won with in 2012. I forget what that message was as well, what was it? It was "we're on your side". Oh, yeah, thanks for reminding me. I guess that why I voted for Romney/Ryan; I've heard that whopper too many times before.

The anecdotal guy waiting for the bus at the beginning of the article is obviously not representative of the wave of people voting in the 2014 mid-terms. Mr. Anecdote credits the U. S. Dept. of Labor for getting him trained for a job. Did Obama establish the Department of Labor? No. Were Romney and Ryan promising to close it down? No. So here is the quintessence of the low-information voter who we usually only see during Presidential elections. (Thank God for mid-terms.)

In the following paragraph, the article quotes award-winning pollster named Mark Mellman explaining why the message doesn't always connect.

But all of the other aforementioned Democrats lost, not least because of their startlingly paltry support among non-college-educated white voters, precisely those who stand to benefit most from policies like raising the minimum wage and expanded health coverage. This is causing great consternation for Democratic strategists and pollsters, who, as Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent noted on Wednesday, blame a “failure to connect with these voters’ economic concerns.” Democrats may have campaigned on issues like the minimum wage and pre-K education, "but these didn’t cut through people’s economic anxieties, because they didn’t believe government can successfully address them." Pollster Mark Mellman told him, “People are deeply suspicious that government can deliver on these problems. And they are not wrong. We’ve been promising that government can be a tool to improve people’s economic situation for decades, and by and large, it hasn’t happened.”

Emphasis is mine. People are deeply suspicious that government can deliver on these problems. And they are not wrong. We’ve been promising that government can be a tool to improve people’s economic situation for decades, and by and large, it hasn’t happened. This is the money quote. What I take away from this article as a whole is that if Democrats can deceive enough people by making them think that they are "on the people's side" then they can win. Otherwise they can't. If all comes down to salesmanship; a slickster like Barack Obama succeeds whereas buffoons like Davis and Udall fail. The second part of Lincoln's famous quote about when you can fool people was operative for the 2014 mid-terms. Fortunately.