Voters have anxiety about the state of the economy and Obama’s leadership. Economic anxiety dominates 2014

AUGUSTA, Ga. — If Democrat Michelle Nunn is going to defy the odds and win a Senate race in the deep South it’s going to be because of people like Elizabeth Grubbs, a 30-year-old Waffle House waitress and student who feels stuck and anxious in the troubled American economy.

Grubbs says she is inclined to vote for Republican nominee David Perdue. But Nunn’s relentless attacks on Perdue’s record of outsourcing as a corporate executive clearly hit home. “Republicans are supposed to be the party of American business and the economy and all that, but he’s moving jobs overseas. It isn’t right,” Grubbs said this week while nursing a coffee at a sidewalk cafe in this faded Southern city.


So will she vote for Nunn? “I don’t know. Won’t she just be an Obama clone?” Grubbs said, mimicking the barrage of Perdue ads making just that claim. “And I don’t want to hear anything about how the economy is getting oh so much better under this president because it isn’t. It’s still crap.”

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That sentiment — a raw anxiety about the state of the economy and President Barack Obama’s leadership — courses beneath the entirety of the 2014 midterm elections in ways that clearly tilt the landscape in favor of the GOP picking up the six seats they need to retake the Senate while adding a handful of House seats. But the fault lines run much deeper than one relatively desultory midterm election campaign and present risks and opportunities to both parties that will shape politics in 2016 and beyond.

In over a dozen interviews in Georgia and neighboring North Carolina, where incumbent Democrat Kay Hagan is struggling to hang onto her seat, undecided voters spoke of their disgust with Washington gridlock and their frustration over stagnant wages, limited job prospects and general dismay over the direction of the country.

For now, this grim outlook mostly hurts Democrats who are tethered to an unpopular president with dismal ratings on the economy. Tight races in Colorado, Alaska, North Carolina and elsewhere appear to be trending away from Democrats in large part because of this abiding malaise.

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But that is not the case here in Georgia, where things are actually much worse than the nation as a whole. The jobless rate is the highest in the nation at 7.9 percent, fully 2 points above the national rate of 5.9 percent. And Nunn seems to have found a way to turn Perdue’s top selling point, his record as business executive, against him.

She continues to hammer Perdue on the stump, in debates and in TV ads for his work at North Carolina textile manufacturer Pillowtex and other companies involved in outsourcing. She regularly invokes a Perdue quote from a 2005 deposition, first reported by POLITICO, in which the GOP candidate said he spent “most of my career” involved in outsourcing. More recently, Perdue faced a story about a million-dollar investment fund he owns managed by a Swiss bank.

Nunn, in an interview after an event in Decatur this week, called Perdue “out of touch” with Georgia citizens. “I was surprised at his response, and I think most Georgians have been whether by starting out by saying he was proud of his career in outsourcing or then moving forward and saying that Georgians didn’t understand business.”

Many of the attacks on Perdue — which his campaign criticizes as unfair and taken out of context — mirror the successful approach Democrats took to undermine Mitt Romney’s business credentials in 2012. In this case, outsourcing stands in for Romney’s record in the private-equity industry, which included shutting down some failing companies but creating jobs elsewhere.

That is the Perdue response in Georgia. Pillowtex was dead no matter what Perdue did, the argument goes, and that most of his “outsourcing” work was to find cheaper production methods and materials abroad to maintain jobs in the U.S. “David Perdue has spent his entire career taking on tough business challenges, growing American companies like Reebok and Dollar General, and creating and saving thousands of good jobs here at home,” Perdue spokeswoman Megan Whittemore said.

Fair or not, the outsourcing attacks — coupled with the fact that Nunn is the daughter of popular former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn — pushed the Democratic candidate into a deadlocked race with a real shot at winning. Should Democrats take Georgia away from the GOP, Republicans would then need to net seven seats to take the Senate, a tall though not impossible task.

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Nunn, like Democrats nationwide, is struggling to overcome a drag from Obama while also counting on the party machine to turn out the kind of big African-American vote she will need to win on Nov. 4. She will need that turnout effort even more if neither she nor Perdue hit 50 percent on Election Day, as seems quite possible, pushing the race to a Jan. 6 runoff that could decide control of the Senate.

But Democrats face their own economic headwinds, and that’s also on display in Georgia. Nunn rarely mentions her party affiliation and regularly chides Obama over not building the Keystone pipeline and having lousy relationships with corporate America.

Perdue ads constantly conflate her with the president. And Obama hasn’t made things easier for her or other vulnerable Democrats, first with his comment about how his policies were definitely on the ballot and then his remark that while red state Democrats don’t want to be seen with him, they will continue to vote with him. GOP operatives rejoiced at both Obama statements, viewing them as perfectly packaged attack ad sound bites.

In North Carolina, Hagan supporters have unleashed tens of millions of dollars in ads roasting state House Speaker Thom Tillis, the GOP nominee, for not supporting a minimum wage hike, “equal pay” laws for women or abortion rights. The Democratic incumbent has clung to a narrow lead in recent polls, though Republicans believe the race is breaking Tillis’ way as the election nears.

Hagan has also tried to hit Tillis as an “outsourcer,” looking to tap into some of the momentum Nunn gained in Georgia. But it has proved less effective because she cannot point to specific companies where Tillis engaged in the practice. In an interview in Charlotte, Hagan cited as examples of Tillis’ support of “outsourcing” that he would “not support some of the tax incentives that we want to bring more advanced manufacturing back into this country” and that he “now disagrees with the Export-Import Bank.”

None of that seemed to resonate much with undecided voters interviewed for this story who almost uniformly said they could not overcome their distaste for what they described as Hagan’s close ties with the president.

But it’s not as though these voters expressed great enthusiasm for Tillis either or felt he had a deeply compelling message on the economy and jobs.

At a recent event in Greensboro, Tillis spent the first 10 minutes ripping Hagan over her Ebola response, her husband allegedly benefiting from the 2009 stimulus bill and other issues . Toward the end, Tillis switched to a perfunctory segment on “the future” and “the optimism.” In an interview, Tillis rejected the idea that he was not giving voters enough of a positive message on the economy, noting that he speaks often about building Keystone, doing more offshore drilling and reducing regulatory burdens on small business.

“We’ve got to do regulatory reform and get rid of some of these big obstructions going back to Sarbanes-Oxley all the way through Dodd-Frank,” he said. It remains unclear whether changing the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley accounting law will warm the hearts of undecided voters.

What won’t do it, according to Jeff Bolyard, a 39-year-old labor contractor in Charlotte, is more of the constant attacks both candidates are launching at each other. “Kay Hagan’s been there, she’s had six years and things really aren’t any better,” Bolyard said this past Sunday while eating lunch and watching the Carolina Panthers game. “But I’m not hearing anything I really like from Tillis either. I wish there was somebody else.”

That desire for “somebody else” is percolating across the national political landscape in ways that threaten both parties and portend a volatile reorientation heading into the 2016 presidential race. A recent POLITICO poll found that 64 percent think the nation is “out of control” and just 36 percent think the country is in a “good position to meet its economic and national security challenges.”

Those are the kind of percentages that can blow up political conventional wisdom and lead to plausible outcomes next month including Democrats winning the governorship in Kansas and Republicans winning in Connecticut. Incumbent governors are at risk across the nation, meaning the outcome on Election Day could suggest that voters are disgusted with anyone in power and hungry for real, concrete plans to bolster the economy. That will have enormous repercussions for 2016 when Republicans will be defending a much larger field of competitive Senate races and trying to block Hillary Clinton from winning the White House, assuming she runs.

Clinton herself has faced significant challenges convincing people that her freshly made millions from the book writing and speech making circuit and her close to Wall Street don’t leave her out of touch with struggling middle- and lower middle-class Americans. Clinton however will likely — though not certainly — have the advantage of not getting beaten up over her wealth in a bruising primary.

Republicans, on the other hand, have largely failed so far to trim down the size of their field or otherwise take steps to limit the kind of pre-general election damage inflicted on Romney in 2012.

The restive nature of the electorate is ripe for a candidate like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky who breaks with GOP orthodoxy on economic issues and tries to connect with previously unfriendly audiences. But Paul will be one of possibly a dozen or more Republicans vying for the nomination. And whoever gets it will eventually have to convince people like Richard McAllister, a 71-year old retired Boeing technician from Peachtree City, Georgia, who was struggling over coffee at the local Starbucks over whether to vote for Nunn, his first preference, or Perdue, because of his business background.

“I really just want to know who is going to be able to bring the real jobs, the ones that can support a family, put the kids through school,” McAllister said. “And right now all I see are two people yelling at each other and making all kinds of claims and really I just don’t know what to think.”