Barack Obama has put the plight of the ‘squeezed middle’ at the heart of his re-election campaign, finds Robert Philpot

Twenty years ago next month the American right’s lock on the White House – which had seen Republican victories in five of the previous six presidential contests – was finally unpicked.

One of the key architects of Bill Clinton’s 1992 win was little-known academic-turned-pollster Stan Greenberg. Greenberg’s understanding of why only one Democrat in a quarter of a century had made it to the White House was shaped by a series of conversations with the party’s former supporters in Macomb County, Detroit, which began after Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1984.

These ‘Reagan Democrats’, Greenberg found, believed their party no longer understood ‘the simple things – a mortgage and taxes, family and neighbourhood, a good job and a strong America’. But even while voting overwhelmingly in the 1970s and 1980s for Republican presidential candidates, the people of Macomb felt economically vulnerable, feared their living standards were dropping, and were resentful of a government that gave handouts to the poor and tax breaks to the rich.

Clinton’s presidential campaign focused unapologetically on this ‘forgotten middle class’. It married a traditional Democratic message about expanding opportunity and increasing investment with a ‘New Democrat’ promise to demand responsibility from those at the top and the bottom. Critically, Greenberg’s research during the course of the campaign revealed that only if it made the case to voters that government had encouraged excess and irresponsibility and failed to reward hard work would it be possible to win an argument against the right about the merits of investment and a more activist government.

Twenty years on and Greenberg believes progressive parties need to put the needs of the middle class front and centre once again. Recalling the Clinton campaign’s laser-like focus on the economy – encapsulated by the famed ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ poster which hung in its ‘war room’ – Greenberg and James Carville, the colourful strategist who shot to fame in the 1992 campaign, have entitled their new book on the subject It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!

Greenberg’s key message is that, in both Britain and the US, low-to-middle income ‘squeezed middle’ voters are not as focused on the economic crisis and the recovery from it as politicians and the media are. Instead, they view the economy through a much wider lens – one of falling household incomes, insecure jobs , and a growing gulf between the middle and those at the very top which began much earlier than the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and continues even as the US economy slowly recovers.

Obama’s recognition of this feeling, suggests Greenberg, accounts for a shift in the president’s message over the past year, from talking up the progress of the American economy – ‘America is back’, as the president repeatedly claimed over the winter – to a focus on ‘an economy built to last’ and reversing the erosion of well-paying middle-class jobs.

Of course, some of this is simple politics. In February, Greenberg’s polling company asked voters to assess four different ways of describing the US economy. Two concentrated on the long-term plight of the American middle class, while two claimed recovery was under way. The two that did best argued: ‘This is a make-or-break time for the middle class, and for all those trying to get into it.’ The least popular used Obama’s ‘America is back’ phrase.

Given the slow pace of job creation and continuing high unemployment, Obama would undoubtedly lose if voters made a simple judgement on the performance of the economy on his watch. Even his strongest arguments – the fact that an economy that was losing 800,000 jobs a month when he was sworn in is now creating 100,000 a month – are still difficult to make when the overall unemployment rate is higher than it was in January 2009. Such arguments also lack the simplicity of the Republican question: ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ To which the answer, for most Americans, is by no means an unqualified ‘yes’. Moreover, as with Clinton in 1994, Obama saw in the 2010 midterm elections the harsh verdict an electorate can deliver upon an incumbent attempting to trumpet an anaemic recovery.

David Cameron will, of course, be following Obama’s fate closely. Like the president, he can plausibly claim that the crash did not happen on his watch. And while the coalition has pursued a very different economic strategy from the president’s – one which, unlike in America, has led to a double-dip recession – the prime minister may, like Obama, have some form of recovery to lay before the voters in 2015. But Greenberg’s certainty that Obama would lose the argument with voters if he used his record to appeal for ‘four more years to finish the job’ should give Cameron pause for thought.

Moreover, with his talk of the ‘squeezed middle’ and ‘responsible capitalism’, Ed Miliband is familiar with the terrain upon which Obama hopes to win. It is also territory upon which Cameron is inherently uncomfortable.

Greenberg has a warning for Labour, though. Voters, he argues, remain cautious about Keynesian arguments for stimulus spending to boost the economy. Faced with a long-term debt problem, the language of austerity retains a strong appeal. Crucially, the centre-left also need to tackle perceptions that government is in hock to special interests, fails to reward those who work hard, and is wasteful. As in 1992, the right is failing to provide answers to the economic challenges faced by middle-class voters. But for the alternative to be heard, progressives need first to reassure such voters that it respects their values, will spend their taxes wisely, and will focus as much attention on reforming government as reforming the economy.

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Robert Philpot is director of Progress

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Photo: Charis Tsevis