So many times a day, my in-box and social-media feeds burble with outreach from the Democratic messaging machine: from democrats.org, say, or the D.N.C. War Room, the D.N.C. Rapid Response Team, the D.L.C.C. (Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee), or even from Organizing for Action, the Obama political-action committee that is a veritable subsidiary of the national party. Looking at them as a whole can be a mind-numbing task as they variously re-plow and re-litigate the same matters over and over. To be fair, occasionally a message will try to stake out new literary ground, as Senator Al Franken and his overworked thesaurus did in June when he referred to Trumpcare as not just “bad,” but also “contemptible,” “despicable,” “execrable,” “heartless,” and “malevolent.” Generally, though, the Democrats want something: often money, sometimes votes, other times participation in something called the Resistance Summer.

These messages provide a pretty clear picture of how the Democrats want to be perceived by the world and what they prefer to talk about with their voters, donors, and assorted camp followers. Not surprisingly, Obamacare repeal is the largest topic (especially on social media), followed not too far behind by a suite of issues that coalesce around the Trump follies—Russia, the firing of James Comey, the appointment of an independent counsel, and various other malfeasances too numerous to catalogue fully here. Then there is voting rights and gerrymandering; the Paris Climate Change Agreement; the many perceived shortcomings of Betsy DeVos, Wall Street reform, the federal budget, and protection of poverty programs, tax cuts for the wealthy, LGBTQ rights, Planned Parenthood and reproductive rights. I could go on for quite a bit. Even the prospect of a new conservative-inspired Constitutional Convention generates several alarmed e-mails and tweets.

All this is to be expected. What is most intriguing, however, is what the Democrats are not talking about: the economy. If jobs are mentioned at all in their manifold messaging operations, it is often generally as a derivative of a different topic, such as the charge that Trumpcare will lead to the loss of health-care-related occupations in rural hospitals. All in all, it is a stunning omission. Economic concerns almost always top the list of the most important issues facing voters; economic problems have, for instance, topped the monthly Gallup issues poll this entire year, with the exception of June when dissatisfaction with government and poor leadership briefly took the crown.

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It is not that Democrats are unaware that the economy and jobs are a centerpiece issue for voters. This is, after all, still the party of “it’s the economy,” and since at least the days of F.D.R., the party that championed unions, social security, college-access programs, and other policies that helped create the American middle class. Two weeks after the 2016 election debacle, Chuck Schumer summed up the loss with a simple assertion: “We did not have a strong, bold economic message.” Joe Biden reiterated the point, characteristically in many more words: “My party did not talk [about] what it always stood for, and that is how to maintain a burgeoning middle class. And the truth of the matter is, you didn’t hear a single solitary sentence in the last campaign about that guy working on the assembly making $60,000 a year, and the wife making $32,000 as a hostess in a restaurant . . . and they’ve got two kids, and they can’t make it. . .” Similar sentiments were echoed after Jon Ossoff went down in defeat in last month’s special election in Georgia’s 5th District. Josh Gottheimer, a freshman congressman who represents New Jersey’s purple-ish 5th District, told me that when you peer inside the party caucuses, economic issues dominate the Democratic conversation. It’s all job creation, reducing regulation on small businesses, and economic development. And that’s what Gottheimer talks about with his constituents, too.

Yet none of that though comes through in Democratic messaging, at least on a national level. Some of this flows from our modern politics. One Democratic congressman suggested to me that this is all the result of our data-driven times. Responses to e-mails and tweets are tracked on a molecular level and what works is repeated; what doesn’t, on the other hand, gets dropped. Stories of Trump misdeeds energize the Democratic base. Plans to expand economic growth from 1.9 percent to 2.5 percent, for instance, apparently don’t. And the media operates on much the same basis, recruiting party officials eager to blab about the latest news-cycle talking points at the expense of covering larger economic trends and policies.