For Midterms, Democrats Need to Find an Anger Vein

Where presidential elections are beauty contests, Congressional midterms are all about anger and rage.
Polls never really show the exact extent of this.  There’s no identifiable or authoritative Anger Poll – a “how angry are you?” poll.   We see numerous polls about preferences and what we do or not like.

 For example, we already know we don’t like doing our taxes, which is the view discovered from above by a Pew Research Center survey showing 56 percent of us hate doing our taxes.  But, that’s probably the folks who end up owing.

Personally, I’d like to see an anger poll.  Not another level of dissatisfaction with Congress poll or how much fam disapproves of President Obama poll.  And even though it’s something like news for the horse race gamblers, some of us get unbelievable headaches from survey after survey measuring how much half the public still detests the Affordable Care Act.
But, an anger poll could go beyond the political divisions and reveal the root cause of electoral anxieties we see in polls and hear on the street.  The deciding factor in this upcoming Congressional midterm isn’t really about which party base is the most mobilized, but it’s more about how angry or anxious certain blocks of voters are.

This is problematic for both Democratic and Republican parties.  However, at this stage, it’s much more problematic for Democrats as the left has proven itself incapable of using voter anger as a valuable resource.  While progressives are writing diatribes and pity party scripts, conservatives are coming up with creative twists on anger.
Defensively, Democrats are earnestly rolling out a wave of populist themes designed to win the hearts and minds of lost base voters.

From the minimum wage to equal pay, the issues seem solid on paper and in polling headlines bearing upbeat assessments of a Democratic Party comeback in this year’s highly consequential midterm election. National Gallup polls over the past 12 months show pretty convincing numbers of Americans supporting a minimum wage hike: 76 percent wanting an increase in November 2013, up from 71 percent just nine months earlier.