“I don’t enjoy being out of work,” Ms. Hogg said in an interview. “I don’t enjoy having to ask friends to give me rides or get things for me. I want to take care of myself. I’ve been on my own since I was 18 years old. It’s hard for me. It’s demoralizing. It’s hard to ask people for things when you’ve been independent the rest of your life.”

Stronger economic growth may help to whittle the ranks of the long-term unemployed over time, experts said.

“There must have been a lot of workers badly scarred by long bouts of unemployment in the Great Depression,” said Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution. “Even in 1939 we had unemployment somewhere around 14 percent, as we’d measure it today. A lot of people who were jobless had been jobless for a long, long time. But in the space of a couple of years those disadvantages looked like nothing given that employers had voracious appetites for workers.”

But many economists contended that policies to help the long-term unemployed are needed as well, to ensure that they have the skills necessary to compete for the jobs that the economy is adding — turning construction workers into oil-and-gas extractors and administrative assistants into home health care providers, for example.

In Washington, many politicians support measures for the long-term unemployed; few demand them.

Both Democrats and Republicans have proposed or supported revamping job-training programs, giving states more flexibility in using funds for the unemployed and providing credits to companies that hire workers who have been out of a job for more than six months, for instance.

The campaigns have offered their preferred policies as well. The White House put out a range of proposals to aid the long-term jobless as part of its stalled American Jobs Act legislation, a few of which made it into a bill extending a payroll tax cut this year. Mr. Romney has proposed, among other measures, creating “personal re-employment accounts” to give funds to unemployed workers for community college or vocational training.

But experts worried about a lack of urgency. Gridlock in Washington, the focus on cutting rather than spending, even the simple fact that discussing the topic can be depressing might leave the issue by the wayside.