Vic Fingerhut Campaigns

 

 

TO:           Democratic Leadership and All Democrats

FROM:       Vic Fingerhut

SUBJ:         Political Positioning (and Messaging) on the Jobs Issue for Democrats (as Independents and Swing Voters Desert Our Side in Droves)**

DATE:        December 2009

 

** Two days after this was written, the AP released a poll showing that, for the first time (in their polls), Obama had dropped below 50 percent in his approval ratings…as a result of a sharp drop-off in Democratic support from Independents and non-minority, non-college voters — that is, from regular working people — the historic basis of Democratic electoral victories.

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At the moment, the Administration is getting the worst of both worlds – and it is getting worse each passing month.

Underlying this are some basic realities:

Keynesian economics is hard, if not impossible, to explain to ordinary American voters.

The result:

A half-hearted recovery program that leaves us with a deficit, hard-to-see results, and high levels of joblessness and economic insecurity…a losing combination of factors for our side.

In this context, it is important that the White House and Democrats generally see the current political reality and the underlying distribution of voter attitudes clearly…or they may well continue to move too cautiously (and ineffectively), and thus fail to do what they must do massively — and soon — to save ourselves from political disaster in 2010 and even 2012!

And let’s be clear about the very serious situation we are currently in, in terms of public opinion, leaving aside the deluge of “feel good” polling reports that have told us in recent weeks how much voters still like Obama, how much they dislike the Republicans and how divided they are, how a plurality of voters still blame Bush, rather than Obama for the recession and joblessness…and how Corzine was going to win in New Jersey!!

And yet…

A  recent Rasmussen poll had the Republicans seen as “better than the Democrats” on ten of ten major domestic and international issues, including two (healthcare and social security) that for decades have had massive Democratic margins.

More immediately, the generic Democratic/Republican House contests for 2010 shows the largest GOP lead since Obama took office (7 points), according to Rasmussen.

The loss of our traditional party-related strengths in the perceptions of swing voters is not just serious for the upcoming congressional elections next year – it is potentially fatal for Obama in 2012.

Note:  And even the findings of friendly, pro-Democratic pollsters like the Democracy Corps (who predicted a Corzine victory up to the very end) found in their recent November poll that a plurality of voters are now saying that “President Obama’s economic policies have run up a record federal deficit while failing to end the recession or (even) slow the record pace of job losses.”

And while the Democracy Corps sample is about six percent more Democratic than the actual electorate (based on their own question of respondents’ votes in 2008), a massive 18-point national plurality says that “if unemployment is still over 10 percent a year from now, then President Obama and his policies would be more responsible for the state of the economy.”  Only a 38 percent minority (mostly Democrats) would still blame Bush and his policies.

The bottom (political) line to all this is abundantly clear.

Think 1930 and 1932.

Obama had the misfortune to get elected in the first year of the serious economic downturn, while FDR had three years for the GOP administration to “get the blame.”

That “blame” (correctly, I think) cost the Republicans elections for the next 20 years.

Obama is now in 1931…he was elected (with less than 53 percent of the vote) in part because of the beginning of the economic downturn…NOW he must act…and act dramatically…or begin to look a little like a pale imitation of Hoover (I wouldn’t actually say this at the Summit, but that’s the reality).

In fact, it must made clear that if the Administration doesn’t act aggressively (and massively) on the jobs front immediately, the Democrats are in serious danger of losing their decades long (seven decades to be exact) margin of being the “party that represents the economic concerns and interests of ordinary working and middle income people in America.”

(Since that is the Democrats’ strongest electoral suit in the eyes of swing voters, the electoral consequences of losing that historically powerful, positive association are so massive that I will leave that for another time.)

 

A Word on Which Voters Are Already Deserting Us in Droves

While, not unexpectedly, traditional self-identified Democrats are still holding in support for the Democratic Administration, the past few months have seen a significant desertion of Independent and other critical swing voters from our side.

This is disastrous for us.

This is precisely what allows the GOP to be either close or even leading us in generic polls on the upcoming congressional elections and party-related issue evaluating questions, even while there are more Democrats than Republicans in the electorate, i.e., we are getting clobbered by the swing Independent vote.

It is also the kind of political shift that will (erroneously) convince the Blue Dogs (and possibly some in the Administration) that it is politically dangerous to support the key elements of labor’s agenda, whether it be healthcare or EFCA, or anything else on labor’s agenda for that matter.

 

Who are these folks who are now deserting us in droves?

Unfortunately, they are not a monolithic crowd that is amenable to a simple one sentence description.

They are a mélange of different voter types…all the way from the Wallace voter, to the anti-everything Independent (anti-union, anti-corporate, anti-government) to the apoliticals, to a (very small) group of (greatly overstated in the textbook image) highly-informed, non-partisan “independent” and soft partisans.

Note:  This Independent “swing” voter in the electorate as a whole exhibits many of the same attitudinal characteristics as the Independent swing voter within the labor movement.

However, it is the vastly larger number of these swing voters in the electorate as a whole that we must deal with to ensure the survival of our side politically….and therefore of the labor agenda.

And while — as noted — this is both a mixed and varied group with strong underlying anti-government, anti-corporate and, sadly, often anti-labor impulses…what is clear is that for the largest group of them, it is the populist impulse (often directed at a variety of conflicting targets) that is most predominant.

We must shape the direction (and target) of that impulse or pay the political consequences.

Think Wallace voter…think Tea Party attendee…think the kind of voter who came out this year to sink us in Virginia and New Jersey.

We have done it in the past (from the national TV campaign that turned public opinion by 20 points against Gingrich’s Contract with America to (interestingly), more recently, the national election in Australia…when we got these folks back on our side for the Australian Labor Party.

(See the link below to view the TV spots we ran in the recent Australian general election…Enjoy!!)

I will not overload this memo with reams of data, but polls for years have shown that this group of swing Independent voters believes the Democrats have zero competence in dealing with the deficit – something that the Mondale campaign sadly found out – despite repeated warnings.

(Despite the huge Reagan deficit (the largest since WWII), swing voters still thought the Republicans were more reliable on the deficit issue by an almost 5-1 margin – so every time the Mondale campaign ran a TV spot on the deficit issue (and they ran millions of dollars worth of them) and thereby raised the salience of the deficit issue, they actually pushed swing voters into the GOP column!!)

(This is not a new debate within the Democratic Party and among Democratic consultants and pollsters.  If you are interested, I can send you a copy of the National Journal article at the time in which the Mondale pollster and I respectfully put forth sharply different positions on the deficit issue following my sharp criticism of what I regarded as the monumental foolishness of Mondale’s deficit-based campaign strategy.)

If the deficit hawks (or “realists” as they see themselves at the White House and Treasury) among Democratic strategists prevail, we will be left with both:

*        a truncated recovery (with high levels of joblessness), and

*        the prospect of facing the electorate in 2010 on the disastrous budget issue (for which we have zero credibility)… now linked not only to perceived massive spending, but a failed recovery to boot.

Put simply and most directly, if the positioning choices for our side in the coming elections are:

A)      A modest reduction in the size of the budget deficit for 2009 and 2010, and continued high rates of unemployment….we lose.

B)      A significant increase in the budget deficit (fought by the Republicans) and a visible increase in jobs, we win.

Progressive Democratis must convince the White House that with an aggressive jobs program, the deficit will, indeed, go up…but so will their numbers!!  (Read: “Roosevelt” here.)

We can talk all we want about how this short-term deficit will actually produce growth in:  a) productivity;  b) GDP;  c) taxable income, and thus;  d) a long-term decline in the deficit.

That’s fine…and in polls, putting in this kicker in abstract (i.e., non-party-related) terms does help our side.

But the reality is that most people in the electorate aren’t listening to the Sunday talk shows, and don’t have the time (or interest) to figure out the intricacies, or even the basics of, Keynesian economics.

The underlying long-term attitudinal reality of the American electorate, documented by four decades of overwhelming data, is that the swing voters don’t believe the Democrats could balance their check books, no less the federal budget.

But, at the same time, the single (overwhelmingly) most important reason that more Americans (still) identify themselves as Democrat (by a factor of 4!!) is the belief that the Democrats represent ordinary working and middle-income people, particularly on jobs/economic issues.

It is also the single most important element – by far – that Independents and swing voters (in all regions of the country) cite (in open ended questions) as to “what they like most” about the Democrats.

This, then, is our strength.

If we blow it, in the midst of this particular recession, we will be blowing a strength that has taken us decades to develop!!!

Americans — in a clearly visible way — must start finding jobs in substantial numbers by next Summer…or all our fancy economics talk (however, true and valid) will be for naught.

 

Why listen to Vic?

Many of you know and have benefited from Vic’s seasoned analysis and judgment for years.

Vic has developed the strategy for many of the sharpest and most dramatic pro-progressive and pro-Democratic shifts in American public opinion over the past several decades, including:

(1)      Designing the last minute populist strategy that triggered the three week, 15-point, 8- million-vote Humphrey rally in the final three weeks of the 1968 presidential campaign, and produced a near dead heat.  In that rally, Vic developed a populist message strategy that got 7 of 8 of the deserting Wallace voters (largely anti-union, racist) to go for the liberal Humphrey, not Nixon.

(2)      Designing the strategy that reversed a 28-point, 64-36 pro-Jarvis margin to a 39-61 defeat of Howard Jarvis’ right-wing Proposition 9 “tax cut” in California, less than two years after progressives in that state had been routed by Jarvis’ Proposition 13.

(3)      Working with the Steelworkers, Machinists, and UAW, Vic designed a poll for swing voters that got the Dukakis campaign to jettison its useless “competence” theme and insert a “which side are you on” message that rallied 10 points to Dukakis in the final 10 days of the presidential campaign, reducing Bush’s lead to a 53-47 percent margin, and probably saving Democratic control of Congress that year.

(4)      It was Vic’s national TV campaign (quarterbacked by AFSCME and supported by many other unions) that dropped national support for New Gingrich’s so-called “Contract with America” by over 15 points (in less than three weeks), and which Gingrich personally blamed for the defeat of his Contract.

(5)      Vic was asked to come to Australia in 2005, following the fourth straight victory of right-wing, anti-labor Prime Minister John Howard, and asked to design a campaign by the Australian labour movement to defeat Howard in the next federal election.  Vic developed a strategy and designed the media campaign that ended with Howard’s upset defeat at the hands of the Australian Labor Party in November 2007.

(Anyone interested in a more complete description of any of these events and Vic’s role in them can simply GOOGLE “Vic Fingerhut”)

Vic can be reached at his email: vic@vicfingerhutcampaigns.com or at: 202-276-0858.

P.S.    If you’d like to see a few of our TV spots that we ran in the recent Australian general election…that led to the defeat of four-term Prime Minister Howard’s right-wing government, you can view them here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xvRhDESWaM

Enjoy…

 

 

 

A “Transformative” Election?  

By Vic Fingerhut 

 

The journalistic coverage of past days has been flooded with commentary describing the 2008 presidential election as “transformative.” 

The meaning attributed to that term has been varied, and quite frankly, often obscure and garbled. Most widely, the “transformative” aspect has been interpreted to underline the historical uniqueness, indeed, significance, of the first election of an African-American president. 

And no one can take issue with that. 

But — beyond that — what does a “transformative” election really mean in terms of the enduring frame and structure of American politics? 

 

To begin, this isn’t the former Yugoslavia. 

And, while much of the world will see this election in largely ethnic (i.e.) racial terms, the fact is that (largely traditional) party identification — not race — is the driving force in the votes of 90 percent of White voters.   When all the votes are counted, it appears that Obama will get over nine-in-ten self-identified Democrats, and McCain will get almost nine-in-ten self-identified Republicans.  

Ethnicity, while very important, has not been the exclusive point of division in American politics, even in this election.  

The two largest demographic voting groups in America — White Protestants and White Catholics– were both divided this year along lines not very different from their normal ranges…and clearly within the ranges found in past years — whether they were very good election years for the Republicans (Ike in 1952 and 1956, or Reagan in 1980 or 1984), or good years for Democrats (like LBJ in 1964). 

Obama, of course, will receive the overwhelming majority of the African-American vote, but that is nothing new for a Democratic presidential candidate…and there is little reason to believe that Hillary Clinton (or John Edwards) would not have received nearly similar percentages — although the African-American turnout undoubtedly would not have been nearly as large (nor as enthusiastic) as it is for Obama. 

And this is clearly a great year for the Democrats at other levels as well, not unlike the first post-Watergate election of 1974 (or like 1994 for the Republicans), with the victorious party rolling up new margins…particularly in the lower House. 

 

This is all very significant, but not necessarily “transformative.” 

The key question for a “transformative” election is whether the election represents a dramatic and significant shift in the party identifications and long-time partisan loyalties of Americans. 

This has clearly not yet occurred. 

Such a transformation, if it occurs, will be the result — not the fact — of an Obama election. 

It will be seen in whether an Obama Administration (or Administrations) will increase the percentage of Democrats in the electorate…and re-shape the distribution of relative party strength in the nation…and, by so doing, re-shape the nation’s politics. 

“Transformative” elections do occur — such as FDR’s — which transformed a nation that had been largely Republican since the end of the Civil War (only two Democratic presidents – Cleveland and Wilson) into a predominantly Democratic nation – in which the Democrats would win control of the House of Representatives for 29 of the next 31 elections and thus control the House for 58 of the 62 years between 1932 to 1994. 

It is easy to forget that fundamentally “transformative” elections have been widely (and falsely) trumpeted in many elections of the recent past, whether it was Peggy Noonan’s “Reagan Revolution” or the “transformation” of American politics widely proclaimed in the late ’sixties and early ’seventies, linking the rhetoric and early political successes of the “new politics” of (Eugene) McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy and George McGovern. More recently, and even more dramatically, was the similar hailing of Bill Clinton’s election (in 1992) being “transformative,” indeed, the very basis of a “new Democratic coalition.” The “new Democratic coalition” proclaimed on the immediate heels of Bill Clinton’s 1992 election was a particularly strange (but amazingly widespread) interpretation and analysis based, as it was, on Clinton’s mere 43 percent share of the vote.  

In fact, contrary to the widespread consensus of the time, the Clinton years actually proved to be a negative for Democratic strength.  The Republicans had not won two successive House elections since the (pre-Depression) elections of 1926 and 1928, but beginning in 1994 — the first off-year congressional elections held after Clinton became president — the Republicans won and the Democrats lost — no less than five successive House elections (1994-2004)! Some enlarged Democratic coalition… This is not to say that Obama’s election will not ultimately emerge as a “transformative”
one — one that will indeed build a new, enlarged Democratic Party ID advantage inthe electorate. 

It’s just important to point out that if it happens, it will happen in the coming few years…it hasn’thappened yet. 

 

 

And the elements for such a transformation under an Obama presidency are there. 

As in 1932, today’s economic situation (though not yet as serious as the early 1930s) has significantly weakened the GOP brand – opening up new party building opportunities forthe Democrats. 

Additionally, the flow of young voters is often a key source (and indicator) of new party strength,  and Obama has certainly shown his muscle in this area (much as Reagan’s strength among young voters in the early 1980s created a significant number of long-term GOP identifiers among voters who entered the electorate in that decade). 

Whether Obama’s personal popularity will be transferred into enduring loyalties to the Democratic Party (as FDR’s was) remains to be seen. 

 

While American history has had only few examples of fundamentally transformative elections producing major shifts in party identification (the most dramatic one of the 20^th century being the Roosevelt revolution), what evidence we have suggests that such transformations involve not just the temporary or even the enduring (like Ike’s) popularity of a national leader, but actions that affect the day-to-day lives of millions of persons. 

Ending slavery and the war to save the Union (for Lincoln) created the GOP dominance of the 1860-1930 period…and the vast changes of the New Deal generated the 15-point Democratic margin in party identification that underwrote the long-term Democratic dominance of 20^th century American politics. 

The historical evidence thus strongly suggests that dramatic and widely-felt action in such critical areas as health care or jobs, for example, by an Obama presidency — rather than his election in itself — will be the determining factor of whether the 2008 presidential election is truly a “transformative” election in the enduring and serious meaning of the term. 

(Updated May 2008) 

Don’t Ignore Democratic strengths, particularly among the swing voters you need to win in 2008.

While so much of the attention of Democrats in Congress (and elsewhere) is focused (rightly or wrongly) on the War in Iraq, the simple fact of the matter is that the critical swing voters we need to win (in both 2007 and 2008) have a considerably more pro-Democratic valence on a variety of other issues!!

While there is a widespread view that the war in Iraq has been a big mistake — among almost all Democrats, many Independents, and some Republicans — there is less clarity, particularly among swing voters, about which party is the most capable of ending the war in the best way possible.

(If there is a moral imperative to do the most effective thing possible to end the war, then there is an associated moral imperative to do the most effective things possible to elect a Democratic President and Congress in 2008.)

And to do this we must avoid the mistake (that is in the process of being made) of overlooking the issues that have the most pro-Democratic valence among the critical swing voters in almost every constituency throughout the country, including urban, suburban and rural; blue collar industrial and service…and white collar professional, and so on.

And the data is remarkably consistent (and clear) here about what those issue complexes are.

They include (but are not limited to):

– dealing with health care issues in a way that helps regular working and middle-income families — and not the giant drug companies,

– protecting social security and Medicare for our parents and grandparents,

– standing up for American jobs against the big multi-national corporations who want to outsource our jobs to low wage workers overseas and then bring in those products from abroad — and take more jobs from American working families,

– standing up for us — and our loved ones — at the workplace.

 You should make sure to include the words: “working people or working families” in almost everything you say, every press release, every TV or radio spot.

 Failing to do that gives away 25-30  points (unnecessarily) in believability to your Republican opponent.

 For example, when asked “which party is best for handling the economy?”, swing voters say the “Democrats” — but by only a modest 3-5 point margin.

 When you ask the same voters, “which  party is best for handling the economy in a way that helps ordinary working families?” the Democratic margin jumps to 30 points — a gain of 25 points.

 Think about that when you design your radio or TV spots….

 You can also call Vic for a free half hour consultation when thinking about your media campaign and how you are going to frame your overall campaign message(s).

 Vic can be reached at 202 276 0858, or leave a note on the website.

 Good luck!!