Midterm elec­tions are, above all, mid — a mile mark­er plunked between the two main-event pres­i­den­tial con­tests. Some­times, the pun­dit class declaims, they act as a ref­er­en­dum on the present occu­pant of the Oval Office. But beyond that, they’re viewed as exer­cis­es in major-par­ty house­keep­ing — oppor­tu­ni­ties to pick off a vul­ner­a­ble seat or three, and per­haps to nudge local polit­i­cal tal­ent clos­er to the nation­al stage.

Still, the 2014 midterm cycle looks espe­cial­ly mid — and dis­tinct­ly sub-mid for Democ­rats, who not long ago com­mand­ed siz­able majori­ties in the House and Sen­ate. Things look so grim that the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty lead­er­ship is chal­lenged in sim­ply main­tain­ing a sur­face appear­ance of uni­ty. As the New York Times report­ed in mid-August, even long­time con­gres­sion­al allies of the Oba­ma White House such as Sen. Claire McCaskill (D‑Mo.) freely con­cede that the pres­i­dent has lit­tle to no inter­est in work­ing close­ly with House and Sen­ate lead­ers. Mean­while, House Minor­i­ty Leader Nan­cy Pelosi, who is sup­posed to be main­tain­ing a samu­rai-like focus on regain­ing her Speak­er­ship in the next Con­gress, has told reporters she’d read­i­ly sur­ren­der the lead­er­ship post for the sake of pass­ing immi­gra­tion reform.

On one lev­el, the chal­lenge for the Democ­rats might be stat­ed sim­ply: Where are the Eliz­a­beth War­rens of 2014? Sen. War­ren (D‑Mass.), of course, was the pre­sump­tive nom­i­nee to head the Oba­ma White House’s new office of con­sumer finance over­sight. When the GOP Con­gress deemed her too brash­ly pop­ulist for the post — i.e., too prone to actu­al­ly reg­u­late the indus­try — War­ren was denied the nom­i­na­tion. Instead of seek­ing out a lob­by­ing sinecure in the tra­di­tion of most cashiered D.C. reg­u­la­tors, War­ren got fight­ing mad, and was elect­ed to the Sen­ate in 2012. She’s now rid­ing a wave of pop­u­lar­i­ty that may por­tend an insur­gent pres­i­den­tial can­di­da­cy that would dis­rupt the neolib­er­al coro­na­tion of Hillary Clin­ton as the party’s 2016 nominee.

There are a few scat­tered War­ren-like signs of life this cycle — notably Ruben Gallego’s pop­ulist cap­ture of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tion for Arizona’s 7th con­gres­sion­al dis­trict, back­ing a gov­ern­ment- admin­is­tered pub­lic option for uni­ver­sal health­care and spot­light­ing income inequal­i­ty. But such wins are a long way from trans­lat­ing into a win­ning House strat­e­gy. Gal­lego will like­ly cruise to vic­to­ry in Novem­ber, because his dis­trict is heav­i­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic. But to put more House dis­tricts in play means the Democ­rats would have to suc­cess­ful­ly har­ness a pop­ulist eco­nom­ic mes­sage to reach con­stituen­cies that haven’t late­ly bro­ken Demo­c­ra­t­ic — low­er-mid­dle-class white fam­i­lies, rur­al vot­ers and the like. ​“By def­i­n­i­tion, if you want to go from the minor­i­ty to the major­i­ty, you want to win over a group of vot­ers from the oth­er side,” says Michael Lind, pol­i­cy direc­tor of the New Amer­i­ca Foun­da­tion, a D.C.-based think­tank. ​“You can win over the pro-New Deal cre­ation­ists, or the social­ly lib­er­al Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives. But by def­i­n­i­tion, those peo­ple are not going to agree with you on your own per­son­al issues.”

That the Democ­rats should be this far away from hom­ing in on any sort of majori­tar­i­an mes­sage is an unusu­al sit­u­a­tion. His­tor­i­cal­ly, midterm cycles have been cru­cial for shoring up pow­er on the Demo­c­ra­t­ic side of the aisle. In 1982, for exam­ple, a resur­gent House Demo­c­ra­t­ic major­i­ty fresh from major gains in the midterms passed the Boland amend­ment, for­bid­ding Amer­i­can aid to the Nicaraguan Con­tras — and there­by laid the ground­work for the Iran-Con­tra scan­dal that ham­strung the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion and came close to endan­ger­ing the pres­i­den­cy itself. Sim­i­lar­ly, the 1974 ​“Water­gate class” of reformist Democ­rats passed the first wave of cam­paign-finance leg­is­la­tion to curb the ugli­er abus­es of the elec­tion sys­tem by mon­eyed interests.

Over and above such sig­na­ture reform move­ments, Demo­c­ra­t­ic Con­gress­es were inte­gral to the New Deal and Great Soci­ety eras of law­mak­ing, whose pop­u­lar ini­tia­tives in turn solid­i­fied what became known as the Demo­c­ra­t­ic major­i­ty — the coali­tion of union mem­bers, move­ment lib­er­als, and urban white ​“eth­nic,” black and brown vot­ers that com­prise the back­bone of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. These vot­ers sus­tained and nour­ished the lat­er Demo­c­ra­t­ic Con­gress­es that extend­ed the basic terms of New Deal gov­er­nance via land­mark leg­is­la­tion such as the GI Bill, Medicare, Med­ic­aid, the Vot­ing Rights Act, the Civ­il Rights Act and the raft of work­place and envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tions leg­is­lat­ed into being from the 1970s onward. The vot­ing majori­ties behind the post­war Demo­c­ra­t­ic dom­i­na­tion of Con­gress should have, on paper, con­tin­ued to expand in tan­dem with the vital expan­sions of income sup­ports and civ­il-rights pro­tec­tions that these Con­gress­es man­aged, how­ev­er nar­row­ly, to enact. While the civ­il rights leg­is­la­tion did famous­ly sac­ri­fice big blocs of Demo­c­ra­t­ic white vot­ers in the for­mer­ly sol­id South, the par­ty was well-posi­tioned to build on the New Deal coali­tion in the House — the cham­ber of Con­gress most respon­sive to pop­ulist gov­er­nance. Con­di­tions should have been ripe for an endur­ing, if not per­ma­nent, Demo­c­ra­t­ic major­i­ty — which would have helped sus­tain the party’s pop­ulist image as the defend­er of ordi­nary work­ing Amer­i­cans against the big-mon­ey agen­da of the GOP. Instead, the Right knit­ted togeth­er the over­lap­ping insur­gen­cies of the small gov­ern­ment tax revolt and the mid­dle- and work­ing-class infantry of the evan­gel­i­cal cul­ture wars.

But such his­tor­i­cal shifts don’t ful­ly explain how the Democ­rats went from huge House and Sen­ate majori­ties as recent­ly as 2008 to the glum prospects they face in 2014: almost cer­tain loss­es for an already belea­guered House minor­i­ty and a like­li­hood that a more uni­fied GOP will take back the Sen­ate. The way to com­bat a bad elec­toral map is via a robust majori­tar­i­an strat­e­gy, and the Democ­rats have none.

The Pollyan­nas of Capi­tol Hill

Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty elites of course won’t con­fess to the bleak­ness await­ing them on Novem­ber 4. Their job is to stoke the dream of an 11th-hour come­back for their team, so as to raise turnout and (more impor­tant) cam­paign dol­lars right up until Elec­tion Day. As a result, pre-elec­tion fundrais­ing appeals from the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Leg­isla­tive Cam­paign Com­mit­tee lurch between apoc­a­lyp­tic brow beat­ing — ​“Pres­i­dent Obama’s impeach­ment could soon be a real­i­ty if we don’t step up in a BIG way” — and tor­tured expla­na­tions of GOP con­nivance: ​“They want us to get so dis­cour­aged that we stop fight­ing back.” Are the Repub­li­cans pow­er-mad impeach­ers, or lame psych-out artists? Were these nearhourly email shake­downs tak­en lit­er­al­ly, the mod­el Demo­c­ra­t­ic donor would be a para­noid megalomaniac.

One could dis­count such oscil­lat­ing out­cries as off-the-rack fundrais­ing rhetoric seek­ing a con­tri­bu­tion by any means nec­es­sary. But the actu­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic agen­da in Con­gress suf­fers from a sim­i­lar harum-scarum inco­her­ence. Par­ty lead­ers gin up disin­gen­u­ous ​“pop­ulist” appeals to goose up turnout, but then revert by instinct to the New Econ­o­my com­pla­cen­cy of the party’s actu­al donor base — a con­geries of Sil­i­con Val­ley, Wall Street and cor­po­rate back­ers that dif­fers from the GOP donor base main­ly by pro­mot­ing more pro­gres­sive social attitudes.

For instance, in July, Demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­ers trot­ted out a slap­dash Demo­c­ra­t­ic ver­sion of the Con­tract with Amer­i­ca— the leg­isla­tive com­pact that per­mit­ted the right-wing Gin­grich insur­gency in Con­gress to suc­cess­ful­ly mar­ket its own agen­da in pseu­do-pop­ulist terms 20 years ago. Called the ​“100-Day Action Plan,” this leg­isla­tive pack­age spelled out some unob­jec­tion­able, unam­bi­tious eco­nom­ic stim­u­lus pro­pos­als that House Democ­rats would intro­duce on the off-chance they regain their major­i­ty. They would, for exam­ple, increase fed­er­al spend­ing on infra­struc­ture repair, push for an increase in the min­i­mum wage, allow more col­lege grads to refi­nance their stu­dent loans at a low­er rate and spend more on ear­ly child­hood learn­ing programs.

Telling­ly, the lead con­gres­sion­al back­ers of this pack­age did not depict it as a vin­di­ca­tion of the griev­ances of dis­en­fran­chised work­ers, debtors, home­own­ers and stu­dents. No, by sheer force of habit — and in point­ed con­cert with the pri­or­i­ties of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party’s big­money donor class the media roll­out of the 100 Day Action Plan brimmed with the smug and tech­no­crat­ic argot of Sil­i­con Val­ley and Wall Street. As Pelosi non­sen­si­cal­ly announced to the assem­bled Belt­way press: ​“This is a trib­ute to Amer­i­can entre­pre­neur­ship [and] a recog­ni­tion that inno­va­tion begins in the class­room. Our agen­da for women and fam­i­lies is when women suc­ceed, Amer­i­ca succeeds.”

Indeed, the Action Plan was fur­ther spun as an effort to ​“jump­start the mid­dle class” — there­by evok­ing an unfor­tu­nate­ly omi­nous and clin­i­cal image of this lumpy cross-sec­tion of striv­ing Amer­i­cans as a sort of slum­ber­ing Frankenstein.

This sug­ges­tion that we need more Demo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­ers to pow­er the elec­trodes rais­es, in turn, the awk­ward sup­po­si­tion that the same body of leg­is­la­tors were large­ly respon­si­ble for allow­ing the mid­dle class’s bat­ter­ies to die out in the first place.

That impres­sion is not far off the mark. Demo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­ers have col­lab­o­rat­ed on lav­ish give­aways to the Sil­i­con Val­ley ven­ture cap­i­tal crowd such as the laugh­ably mist­i­tled 2012 JOBS Act (that would be JOBS as in ​“Jump­start Our Busi­ness Star­tups”). But when it comes to either com­bat­ing the scourge of eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty or hold­ing the nation’s plu­to­crats to account, the House Demo­c­ra­t­ic cau­cus, with a few excep­tions, has been large­ly AWOL.

Pro­gres­sive staffers on Capi­tol Hill have watched this abdi­ca­tion in a mix­ture of anger and dis­be­lief. ​“The Democ­rats don’t want to gov­ern,” says one Demo­c­ra­t­ic House aide, who request­ed anonymi­ty in order to speak freely. ​“Look, in 2006, when they were elect­ed into the major­i­ty on the basis of end­ing the war in Iraq, the first thing they did was to fund Bush’s surge of forces in Iraq. They just don’t want to gov­ern. They don’t see that as their job.”

Then, the aide notes, came the his­toric 2008 finan­cial melt­down, which coin­cid­ed with an elec­tion cycle that returned the biggest Demo­c­ra­t­ic majori­ties to Con­gress in 15 years. ​“There was an oppor­tu­ni­ty to reor­ga­nize our whole polit­i­cal cul­ture after the 2008 cri­sis. Even under those con­di­tions, there was still no will­ing­ness to do much.” A dra­mat­ic case in point, the aide says, was the failed strug­gle from 2008 to 2010 to put teeth in the Dodd-Frank bank­ing reform pack­age. ​“Rather than break­ing up the banks or writ­ing clear law or pros­e­cut­ing bankers, Democ­rats deferred to bank-cap­tured reg­u­la­tors. Then they play-act sur­prise when bank prof­its return to record lev­els. It’s Kabuki.”

The same goes for the White House’s on-again and (usu­al­ly) off-again effort to rem­e­dy the run­away increase in income inequal­i­ty. In his 2014 State of the Union address, Oba­ma cit­ed income inequal­i­ty as the defin­ing chal­lenge of our time and announced his inten­tion to increase the min­i­mum wage for fed­er­al con­trac­tors. Then he chal­lenged busi­ness­es in the pri­vate sec­tor to do like­wise. The glum epi­logue, as the aide notes, has been no appre­cia­ble boost in wages in 2014 for U.S. work­ers. The aide con­cludes, ​“There’s this huge irrel­e­vance gap between what Demo­c­ra­t­ic elites say, and what any out­come will be.”

Thomas Fer­gu­son, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts polit­i­cal sci­en­tist who pio­neered the invest­ment the­o­ry of cam­paign fund­ing in his 1995 book Gold­en Rule, argues that such fee­ble feints at eco­nom­ic reform are pol­i­cy pay­offs for a Demo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­ing appa­ra­tus that’s grown depen­dent on big-mon­ey out­lays from the finan­cial sec­tor, the barons of Sil­i­con Val­ley and oth­er assort­ed plutocrats.

“These guys are liv­ing out the lega­cy of the enor­mous fail­ures of 2009,” Fer­gu­son says. ​“Every­thing still stands in the shad­ow of 2009. Had Oba­ma done a prop­er stim­u­lus then, had Dodd-Frank actu­al­ly brought bankers to jus­tice, the Democ­rats would not be in this sit­u­a­tion now.”

Speak­ing of Kabu­ki, Fer­gu­son, too, has an edi­fy­ing min­i­mum wage anec­dote. ​“A friend of mine on the Hill was telling me this sto­ry that, when Reid was try­ing to get a vote going to raise the min­i­mum wage, Pelosi said out­right, ​‘I know that Har­ry Reid doesn’t want a vote on this.’ That’s where we are today,” he says. ​“This is the fund­ing of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, togeth­er with the even more top-heavy fund­ing of the White House, ensur­ing that the sta­tus quo holds. And when you par­a­lyze the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dent from act­ing even a lit­tle bit like a Demo­c­rat, Democ­rats are not going to be cred­i­ble voic­es of reform… This is part of an all-time his­toric col­lapse of gov­ern­ing that will cast a shad­ow for a decade or more.”

Of course, Democ­rats face oth­er obsta­cles in advanc­ing a win­ning strat­e­gy to reclaim the House in Novem­ber — the fac­tors that elec­tion wonks call ​“struc­tur­al,” such as the ger­ry­man­der­ing of safe Repub­li­can dis­tricts by Repub­li­can dom­i­nat­ed state leg­is­la­tures. But struc­tur­al forces are, by def­i­n­i­tion, the very fac­tors that effec­tive majori­tar­i­an strate­gies are craft­ed to over­come. The GOP over­came much the same set of obstruc­tions in its suc­cess­ful takeover of the House in 2010 — the year that the Tea Par­ty, and its cor­po­rate back­ers, stepped into the polit­i­cal lime­light. What’s more, ges­tur­ing at the implaca­ble pow­er of GOP-run state leg­is­la­tures rais­es the ques­tion of just how the Democ­rats — the his­toric grass­roots par­ty of the peo­ple, oper­at­ing with the enor­mous advan­tage of a crip­pling reces­sion occur­ring on the Repub­li­cans’ exec­u­tive watch — have been unable to sum­mon their own majori­ties in so many state leg­is­la­tures. (That answer — yet again — resides in a decid­ed GOP tac­ti­cal advan­tage root­ed in long-term con­ser­v­a­tive orga­niz­ing ini­tia­tives at the state and grass­roots levels.)

Mean­while, when it comes to the allo­ca­tion of resources with­in the par­ty, the top-heavy nature of Demo­c­ra­t­ic cam­paign fund­ing once more dis­torts the party’s pri­or­i­ties. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Con­gres­sion­al Cam­paign Com­mit­tee ​“sucks in terms of their tar­get­ing,” says a vet­er­an Demo­c­ra­t­ic Hill aide, who also request­ed anonymi­ty. ​“Just look at how few races the DCCC tar­gets, and how much mon­ey is lav­ished on those hap­py few can­di­dates who are tar­get­ed, in many cas­es far more than can be wise­ly spent. [Par­ty lead­ers are] wast­ing finite dol­lars that could more wise­ly be spent try­ing to devel­op races that might prove winnable, and once in that cat­e­go­ry, might actu­al­ly be won.”

If this com­plaint sounds famil­iar, that’s because it is. Before the 2006 Demo­c­ra­t­ic wave, the head of the DCCC, Illi­nois House mem­ber Rahm Emanuel, was locked in bat­tle with Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee chair­man Howard Dean over Dean’s ambi­tious ​“50-state strat­e­gy.” The Dean plan sought to put Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates into com­pet­i­tive play every­where, as opposed to the tra­di­tion­al coastal, urban and upper-Mid­west­ern strong­holds of Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­gres­sion­al pow­er. Emanuel, a mem­ber of the invest­ment-bank­ing fra­ter­ni­ty who had been charged with shep­herd­ing in bun­dled big-mon­ey dona­tions, con­tend­ed that such far-flung orga­niz­ing efforts were unre­al­is­tic — and thus a strain on the party’s bulging cam­paign cof­fers. He got the bet­ter of the argu­ment, and after the 2006 cycle, the 50-state strat­e­gy was shelved — and Dean was sent packing.

Eight years lat­er, it’s hard not to con­clude that the par­ty would be far bet­ter off if it had fol­lowed Dean’s lead and pressed its already for­mi­da­ble advan­tages in 2006 into dis­tricts that now look like near­ly per­ma­nent ​“red state” pow­er bases. A 2013 study in Gov­ern­ing mag­a­zine found that even the par­tial imple­men­ta­tion of the Dean plan yield­ed quite encour­ag­ing results for the Democ­rats. In the 20 red states cov­ered in the sur­vey, ​“Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates chalked up mod­est suc­cess­es, despite the dif­fi­cult polit­i­cal ter­rain,” the Gov­ern­ing team found. ​“Then, after the project stopped, Demo­c­ra­t­ic suc­cess rates cratered.” In oth­er words, in heed­ing Emanuel’s coun­sel to fol­low the big mon­ey, Democ­rats are get­ting exact­ly what they paid for.

The ‘100-Day Action Plan’ was spun as an effort to ‘jumpstart the middle class’—thereby evoking the unfortunate image of this cross-section of striving Americans as a sort of slumbering Frankenstein.