Last Wednesday at the AFL-CIO’s National Summit on Raising Wages in Washington, D.C., Senator Elizabeth Warren stressed that the middle class was still struggling and sharply criticized elites in the capital for celebrating the economic recovery. “[T]he overall picture doesn't tell us much about what's happening at ground level to tens of millions of Americans,” she said. “Despite these cheery numbers, America's middle class is in deep trouble.” Warren’s comments were taken as a rebuke to President Barack Obama, who was on a three-city tour touting the improved economy.

There are certainly differences between the Democratic establishment and Warren Democrats. But it’s also easy to exaggerate those differences. Warren and Obama largely agree on the state of the economy and underlying economic agenda. In the end, they are both playing important political roles within the Democratic Party—and the party is better off for it.

When Obama and Warren talk about the economy, they differ mostly on the conditions they emphasize. Obama travelled to Detroit to talk about the resurgent auto industry, promoted the five percent annualized growth rate in the third quarter and celebrated 58 straight months of private sector job creation. These facts are all true. The economy really has rebounded. Nearly three million people gained jobs in 2014. Plummeting oil prices are acting as an effective tax cut across the country. To diminish these things, as Warren does in her speeches, is to understate the legitimate success of Obamanomics, something that even conservatives are struggling to deny.

And yet, Warren is also right that millions of Americans haven’t shared in the economic recovery. The most important statistic: Real median income in 2014 is still below its 2007 levels. The December jobs report, which the Labor Department released last Friday, showed that wages actually fell 0.2 percent in December and November’s 0.4 percent wage growth was revised down to 0.2 percent. As much as the recovery has improved, the majority of Americans really aren’t experiencing those improvements.

This is the political conundrum facing the Democratic Party, particularly after they were trounced in the midterm elections last November. How do they take credit for the economy’s successes while empathizing with working class voters who haven’t seen those successes? One possibility is to have different party leaders express different sentiments. That’s effectively what Obama and Warren have done over the past few months. Whether that is an effective political strategy for the party is yet to be seen.