Based on the polling, Secretary Clinton should crush Ted Cruz. But polls don’t vote, people do. And right now, the Cruz voters are fired up – and the Clinton voters aren’t. But that isn’t surprising. Democrats have spent 25 years honing a simple, yet wholly uninspiring message – “We are a little less crappy than them!”
IT IS A HORRIBLE MESSAGE THAT HAS FAILED, AND FAILED, AND FAILED. Yet, with that terrible track record, the Beltway geniuses who run the Democratic Party are about to run that play one more time.
the Democrats’ problem is social capital
Notwithstanding the fiasco that is the GOP presidential primary so far, Matthew Yglesias warns, “The Democratic Party is in much greater peril than its leaders or supporters recognize, and it has no plan to save itself. … The vast majority — 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state — are in Republicans hands. And, of course, Republicans control both chambers of Congress.”
A major factor is the turnout gap. That is worse for Democrats in local and off-year elections but will persist in 2016. Today, the pollsters Greenberg/Quinlan/Rosner report that “unmarried women, minorities, and particularly millennials are less interested in next year’s voting than seniors, conservatives, and white non-college men are.”