Did Democrats Lose the 2102 Election in Wisconsin?

In the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election in early June, Republican Governor Scott Walker easily won the right to continue in office.  Democrats cited his outsized funding advantage from Super PACS, but turnout was high on both sides, and many voters including those from union families apparently approved of Walker’s stripping the (mostly) teachers’ unions of collective bargaining rights or disapproved of the use of recall to decide the issue.

What lessons might we take?

One is that popular mass movements should not waste their energies on political campaigns, which in this case took the Occupy Wisconsin movement that inspired Occupy Wall Street many months later and subjected it to “corporate co-optation by the Democratic Party.”  The Democratic candidate was the same as in the regular election in 2010 who lost a second time to Walker by the same margin.

A second is that there is no way that Republicans backed by Super PACS are not going to out-spend Democrats by large margins.  If the Democrats are to win in November, it will be by addressing the concerns of undecided voters while persuading minorities and unregistered millennials that voting is worth their while.

Finding the means through executive action to further the purpose of the stalled DREAM Act in Congress by suspending deportation of illegal immigrants brought to this country as youths and making them eligible for work permits was a very popular move by Obama.  If now he could find the executive means to alleviate the harshly discriminatory terms of student loans by, say, lowering the cap on maximum loan payments or broadening the definition of loans to which the cap applies, he might persuade those who bear the burden of one trillion dollars of student debt to show up on election day while also stimulating the economy.

Addressing the concerns of undecided voters is more difficult.  I met one while campaigning recently who favored Obama in 2008 but was undecided about 2012.  A man in his forties, he’d had a job since he was 12 and made sure that he had one now with good insurance to provide for his wife and children and himself.  He was negative about unemployment insurance because, he said (speaking from his own experience), there are jobs out there for people who go after them.  He was also dead set against the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, which he was sure he would end up paying for.

Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who maintains that liberals and conservatives don’t understand each other, singles out the Tea Partiers’ concern for justice, which Haidt calls karma—if you work hard, you should be rewarded; if you duff off or screw up, you should suffer the consequences.  The Tea Party movement sprang to life when the government bailed out the banks that created their own (and our) problems, and then, according to Rick Santelli on CNBC, started “promoting bad behavior” among mortgage holders: “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”

As my undecided voter put it, if someone tells you that you can afford a mortgage and you don’t do your own math, who can you blame but yourself when it turns out that you can’t afford it?

In articles asserting that white working people with jobs increasingly identify themselves as Republicans, Haidt claims that Democrats promise to care for the elderly, young, students, the poor and the middle class, “but most Americans don’t want to live in a nation based primarily on caring.  That’s what families are for.”  In fact, almost half of all households receive government benefits based on 2010 statistics, but most of the benefits go to the elderly (65 or older—53 percent), disabled (another 20 percent) or members of non-elderly, non-disabled working households (18 percent).  Only 9 percent goes to non-elderly, non-disabled people without jobs.

The 9 percent, of course, includes unemployment insurance for people who have lost their jobs in the recession.  The economy shed millions of jobs after the housing and credit bubbles burst, and not everyone who lost a job was going to find a new one.  Unemployment insurance, which dates back to FDR’s original Social Security Act of 1935, is considered a countercyclical automatic stabilizer of the economy.  FDR hated doling out money or even paying people for government work as much as anyone, but he knew that the economy couldn’t recover when so many consumers were not spending money because they weren’t earning any.

What Democrats really stand for—or should—is first and foremost the restoring of an economy based on full production and full employment such as we last saw in the Clinton years.  While taxpayer-funded programs like unemployment insurance may be appropriate policies to achieve such an economy, Democrats need to listen to the concerns of working voters who don’t like paying for others they think of as free riders and explain their reasons if they want to win their votes.

Democrats need also to explain the purpose of the ACA, which is to provide taxpayer- subsidized, community-rated, private health insurance to citizens and legally resident aliens who don’t obtain such insurance through employment and don’t qualify for Medicaid.  Community-rated is what allows people with current health issues to be covered and requires people without them to participate.  But as Princeton’s Uwe Reinhardt points out, ACA is just copying employment-based health insurance, which is also taxpayer-subsidized and community-rated.

ACA is polling terribly right now, although the Massachusetts Act, aka Romneycare, on which ACA is based seems to be quite popular among the residents of that state.  I suspect that if it survives to 2014, when most of its provisions kick in, ACA will in time join Social Security and Medicare as programs the public doesn’t want to give up.