Did the ball that dropped in Times Square at midnight on January 1 really signal a new political era?

Headlines in the major media proclaim that a wave of “populism” is building. Inequality and the minimum wage are suddenly front-burner political issues. Cities like New York and Boston have just elected progressive mayors with strong ties to unions and are now being touted as liberal laboratories for testing the limits of the grudging free-market conservatism and neo-liberalism that have been the sun and moon of our political system for decades.

Even the atmosphere within the DC Beltway is subtly altering. The steady decline of the deficit is turning the tables on the massively funded campaign to cut Social Security and Medicare. In December 2013, the corporate-oriented Democratic policy group Third Way launched a campaign in the Wall Street Journal to smear Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic politicians who favor raising Social Security benefits. It backfired ignominiously.

Progressive groups mounted a powerful counterattack. Within days politicians started tumbling off the centrist bandwagon, and the president of the Center for American Progress, perhaps the most important of all the corporate-funded, centrist Democratic think tanks (with perhaps the best ties to the White House) spoke out against efforts to short-circuit discussions of inequality and whether the rich were paying their fair share of taxes.

With evidence like this, you don’t need a weatherman to tell you that political winds are shifting. But we are old enough to remember Nixon attorney general John Mitchell’s famous admonition to “watch what we do, not what we say.” For sure, the new mayors of Boston and New York genuinely hope to usher in real, progressive change in their cities, yet the larger national context gives us pause.

Reality Check

Three facts are crucial in understanding what is happening. Firstly, the national Democratic Party is in deep trouble as it faces the 2014 Congressional elections. The strong media framing of “populist” tendencies reflects a prior White House determination signaled by the President himself to move left to reenergize voters turned off by the serial disasters of 2013, including the economy’s continuing doldrums, public revulsion against surveillance, and the healthcare rollout debacle. Not for nothing has John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s one-time chief of staff and the key figure in the Center for American Progress, returned to the White House, even as he was being touted as Hillary Clinton’s likely adviser on handling inequality as a political issue.

Secondly, after five years, the Obama administration has simply failed to deliver on the economy. Whoever you blame for this — the Republicans for stonewalling, the timidity and mistakes of the President and his advisers, or sheer Washington gridlock —the plain fact is that even with the modest uptick in the economy, ordinary Americans are really hurting. Unlike 2012 (despite all the reminders we will be getting about the Kochs and their allies within the GOP), the Democrats cannot count on running against a Republican nominee who looks, acts, and talks like someone Central Casting selected to caricature the GOP as the party of the superrich. Even now, Stanford’s John Taylor and other Republican economists are mounting increasingly aggressive attacks on the administration’s record. Regardless of how you assess their claims, they are certain to reverberate in 2014.

The most important background condition concerns the facts of political money. Until the campaign reports for the 2013-14 political cycle are filed, the precise facts will be elusive, but the leadership of both major parties appear to be concentrating on activities that are anything but populist. They are beseeching big donors for money at a breakneck pace, while the Supreme Court prepares to take up, and possibly strike down, another of the few restrictions on money in politics left, namely, the limits on total contributions to formal political parties and candidates.

Campaign $$ More Concentrated Than Ever

Despite all the commentary about super-PACs, the situation is even worse than you think. Our analysis of political money in the 2012 elections confirmed that it’s not simply that the apparent relation of money to votes in congressional elections appears to be shockingly direct – indeed, almost a straight line. The larger problem is that campaign donations turn out to be far more concentrated than even we imagined.

Presidential elections probably draw more money and interest from ordinary Americans than other, less visible campaigns at lower levels, where funds from corporate PACs commonly make up much larger shares of the totals. So if you want a guide to what political money in the 2014 congressional elections will look like, the answer is that it will probably look like an even more lopsided version of 2012.

And in 2012, alas, political money was absurdly top heavy. Basically the campaign was a contest between different parts of the 1 percent.

For 2012, we looked at regular presidential campaign committees, plus 527s, super-PACs, and other forms of independent expenditures that supported those campaigns, and combed these sources for every “itemized” contribution by specific contributors. We also tracked down all the lump sum reports of un-itemized contributions — that is, those totaling less than $200 from individual contributors, wherever they could be found, including 527 committees that report to the IRS, not the Federal Election Commission. This allowed us to directly compare revenue streams to candidates and parties from big and small donors alike. (See our full-length study, published by the Roosevelt Institute.)