Why didn't the Democrats run more aggressively on the economy this year?

[Indy Texas]

Unemployment continues to go down; the stock market is charging ahead at breakneck pace; inflation hasn't gotten out of control as the goldbugs have been insisting for the past five years that it would. Why didn't the Democrats make this a selling point in the midterms? Republicans insist that America under Obama is a job-killing, anticapitalist totalitarian state even as some of the largest IPOs in history have happened and an energy boom is fueling exactly the sort of well-paying blue collar jobs both parties make such a fetish of - and making red state millionaires richer in the process.

Things aren't perfect. Wages have basically been flat. A broad swath of the country still hasn't made up lost ground in their personal balance sheets - they lost a large chunk of their house-derived wealth and they missed the boat on the bull market in equities.

But things weren't perfect when Ronald Reagan ran on Morning in America in 1984. He had gotten inflation under control and cut taxes for millions of Americans. But the Rust Belt was hemorrhaging jobs; the Upper Midwest was beginning to fall victim to falling crop prices and urban life had taken on a disturbing, post-apocalyptic air in many northern cities.

Why aren't the Democrats willing to unapologetically say that things are going well - even when they aren't for one hundred percent of the country (which is all the time)?

[Indy Texas]

Incomes have fallen for years, and Democrats cannot take a victory lap on the economy without surrendering every last bit of what it means to be a Democrat by any definition relative to the economy and social economic matters. I mean for heavens sake you got hacks citing the stock market, the F-ING stock market to justify taking a victory lap on the economy in an election cycle. And you wonder why none-minority working class voters don't give a damn for you anymore. Its like Romney in 2012, only getting those working class voters he could win on social issues and coal, Dems in 2014 could only get minority ones.

Minority voters are actually far more optimistic about the economy and their personal prospects, going by exit polls, than white voters are. They were often among the hardest hit in the housing crisis, but their long-term (intergenerational) trajectory has been an upward one in terms of their incomes and their opportunities for jobs.

Working class whites have a negative view of the economy, but so do wealthy whites, which is downright bizarre and suggests less charitable reasons for being pessimistic about the economy.

As for the stock market, your party cannot have it both ways. If you're so upset that "Wall Street is doing better than Main Street" then pass some legislation to actually help the people who work on Main Street instead of doing everything you can to deregulate Wall Street and give those who make their money that way another tax cut. And no, Big Oil is not Main Street. Some rural Southern slaughterhouse/factory demanding more "flexibility" to keep their workers less safe and less protected against discrimination is not Main Street.

Your party ran on how bad the economy is and has offered zero ideas for tangibly improving the lives of "real Americans." Defunding the EPA isn't going to put more money in their pockets. If it does, that money will go to asthma medication and copays for cancer treatments. A "flatter" tax code is going to result in people like them paying more to the government so that the people who write checks to your party can pay less. Look at Kansas and see how well that worked out over the past few years. The Republicans already want to reduce the Earned Income Tax Credit - you want one of your first actions in total control of the legislative branch to be to raise the net tax bill of poor Americans so that you can really stick it to those "moochers" and "takers."

The Democrats didn't do much better, not just for the reasons I stated above but because they offered an agenda that doesn't help most Americans. A higher minimum wage is great for the small slice of the country whose wages are so low that it would actually make a difference for them. Is a middle-aged family with kids supposed to be swayed by the prospect of cheaper, easier access to birth control?

[Indy Texas]

3-something. I supported regulating wall street, I have been railing against big oil for almost a decade, big agra on subsidies and big business in general on immigration. I also support raising the minimum wage in conjunction with a likwise increase in EITC, medicaid expansion (though the program has long term structural problems that need to be fixed)...

The problem on here unfortunately is that many posters argue against the GOP platform rather than the conservative they're talking to. I can't tell you how many times Link said something like "but conservatives don't believe in government action" to me back when he was still here.

I don't keep a notebook of the policy positions of everyone who posts on here. By choosing to have a blue avatar or a red avatar, you are implicitly endorsing the views of the national party as a whole. I honestly don't understand why some of you even bother associating with whichever party you have in your avatar. I can assure you that if you went to my precinct's GOP meeting and said you want to raise the minimum wage and EITC, you'd be drawing comparisons with Mao Tse Tung.

[Indy Texas]

3-something. I supported regulating wall street, I have been railing against big oil for almost a decade, big agra on subsidies and big business in general on immigration. I also support raising the minimum wage in conjunction with a likwise increase in EITC, medicaid expansion (though the program has long term structural problems that need to be fixed)...

The problem on here unfortunately is that many posters argue against the GOP platform rather than the conservative they're talking to. I can't tell you how many times Link said something like "but conservatives don't believe in government action" to me back when he was still here.

I don't keep a notebook of the policy positions of everyone who posts on here.

Policy positions my foot.  You've been here for years. You ought to know that Yankee =/= Rush Limbaugh.

No, but Yankee = John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, et al by choosing the partisan identity that he does. So do you, for that matter.

I get really tired of, "Well, I happen to disagree with my party on [basically every major issue]." If you don't want to have to apologize for what your party says and does, then find a different one or better yet none at all.

[Indy Texas]

The only reason I have an R avatar is because of abortion(particularly when it comes to judges), guns, and to a lesser extent, coal/oil.   While I can't speak for them, DC Al Fine and Yankee probably are similar in that respect.  Plenty of Republicans do support a minimum wage increase and expanding Medicaid based on ballot measures.  And there are GOP officeholders who do as well, though they're at the more moderate/populist wing of the party.   In the past, plenty of Southerners identified as Democrats even though they disagreed with many  national party planks.  It can be the same thing. 

The GOP avatar (which for me is a new one) reflects a fairly-recent conversion I've had
I could easily make a corollary  case with you.  You seem to  side with the Dems in nearly everything (though your PM score seems to disagree, weirdly enough) at least rhetorically; you might as well furnish a D avatar. 

To be honest, you seem awfully anti-GOP given your Political Matrix score.  It seems like you'd have some common ground with them given your E score........people with significantly lower S/E scores seem more forgiving of the GOP than you, IndyTX.

I don't want a red avatar because I don't agree with the Democratic Party's platform wholesale and do not want to be in the position of having to defend it. My criticism of the GOP and its elected officials is low-hanging fruit - the fact that I think their party is full of bigoted, small-minded fundamentalists who can't come to terms with things like climate change and a non-Biblical treatment of government social policy does not mean I am enthralled with the Democratic Party. It simply means that as an American - particularly as a Texan - in 2014, I find myself mainly voting for Democratic candidates because the alternatives are so unpalatable. This year, I voted for Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians in the various races on my ballot.

If my rhetoric does not seem to match my PM scores, it's probably because my centrist, neoliberal New Keynesian economic views are by and large shared by most Democrats whom I have voted for - including President Obama and Blue Dog Democrats like Chet Edwards. They are shared by an increasingly dwindling segment of the Republican Party - people like Kay Bailey Hutchison, Jon Huntsman and others whom I have voted for in the past.

The problem with the Republican Party is that they want to have an argument that their side won years ago - the Bush Sr./Clinton era, to me, is evidence that the center-right consensus had the last laugh. They act as though our current crisis is a debate between free market capitalism and authoritarian communism when it's really just a debate between people who understand that we are facing an economy whose greatest challenges are insufficient aggregate demand and inequality-induced instability (the mainstream Democratic Party), and those who are still living in 1978 and think the problem is that taxes are too high and inflation is out of control (the mainstream Republican Party).

Even if the GOP were to resolve that issue, there is a four-letter word that I'm not sure I can ever forgive them for and that word is I-R-A-Q. They deserve a generation-long punishment for that, not unlike the generation-long punishment the Democratic Party got for the Vietnam War.