Success, the reason Democrats fail.

Why do the poor and middle class vote for Republican candidates when the policies they support go against the best interests of the poor and the middle class? This question baffles Democrats but the answer is probably quite obvious to Republicans. It all boils down to what the voter hopes for and what they see the two parties offering.

Democrats don't want to make the rich poor, but they see a world in which too many don't have enough to survive while a few have more than they could ever need. They want to change things just enough so that no one falls through the cracks. They want to see the success of the few spread around just enough so that no one has suffer any more than necessary. They won't promise you great wealth, but they will try and make sure that we all have what we need to survive in today's world, food, shelter, education, health care. This is, without a doubt, more in the best interest of the poor and the middle class, especially those in the middle class who live on the edge of poverty.

Republicans don't offer any hope of survival. They will allow you to fail miserably. They will allow you to go hungry, to be homeless, to be un-educated, they will even allow you to die just because you can't afford the health care that you need. SO why do the poor and the middle class vote for so many Republican candidates? While they don't offer any promise of survival, they do offer hope for great success. The Republicans hold out the promise that if you succeed they won't stand in your way. They offer up the great American myth of success, that anyone who works hard enough can be successful beyond their wildest dreams. They highlight the few examples of this that they can find and tweak the biographies of those who are close enough to being good examples of the American dream to turn them into people who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. The Republicans offer a lottery ticket like chance of great success to those who haven't experienced it.

So the Republicans offer the chance to succeed while the Democrats offer the chance to survive. Given these two options is it really such a mystery why so many poor and middle class voters support Republican candidates? Of course it isn't. The real mystery is why the Democrats haven't changed their message to show how the Republican vision of success is limited to just a few and how severely the odds are stacked against the average person in a country run under Republican rules. The Democrats can offer hope of greater success to more people, they can offer a vision of making smart investments in our country. The Democrats can offer a vision of an honest path to the American dream instead of one based on billion to one odds. Instead they focus on the facts and figures of survival.

The Democrats seem to be waiting for the poor and middle class voters to wake up and face reality. It may be the Democrats who need, instead, to embrace the myth.