The left’s behavior in the months leading up to this year’s midterm elections reveals far more than mere anxiety about their results.

There is real concern that they might be losing their grip on African-Americans, their most reliable constituency.

They should be worried. African-Americans who, more than any other group, were promised “hope and change” in 2008 have seen plenty of reasons to lose hope, because the changes seen during Barack Obama’s first six years have done them serious harm.

Democrats have gotten used to counting on well over 90 percent of blacks voting in their favor. If that figure had come down to even 75 percent in the 2012 presidential election with those abandoning ship voting for Mitt Romney, Barack Obama’s 3.5 million popular-vote margin would have vanished.

One activist recently lamented that blacks “think the president is a savior.” Well, that’s what many blacks believe they were promised. This lady clearly thought so six years ago:

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The guess here is that the woman interviewed still has to worry about putting gas in her car. Even after the recent fall in prices, it’s still almost twice as much per gallon as it was in late 2008.

Actually, to my surprise and surely the left’s chagrin, my guess was right. It turns out that in July 2014, the once euphoric Peggy Joseph was very disappointed in what had since transpired:

“(The) mortgage got worse and gas prices got higher.” “During that time, we needed a change. But a change for the better, not for the worse.” … “The man behind the curtain is not who we thought or expected him to be.”

The black community’s suffering is deeply baked into the economic numbers.

Black employment per the government’s Household Survey has increased by 1.4 million since the recession officially ended in June 2009. The good news ends there. Unfortunately, analysts at Sentier Research, working with Census Bureau data, tell us that during that same period, black household income fell sharply, and by far more than in any other ethnic group:

Looking at household wealth, “virtually no progress has been made” in narrowing racial disparities. On average, almost everyone is poorer, and those who were poor already with less to lose have been hardest hit.

Speaking of being poor, the African-American poverty rate in 2013 was 27.2 percent. That’s a 2.5-point increase since 2008, and 1.4 points since 2009. At 12.3 percent, the white poverty rate in 2013 was less than half that of blacks, and had fallen to where it was in 2009.

It has long since become obvious that the left can’t credibly argue that their policies have provided African-Americans any kind of tangible economic benefit. This has forced them to resort to the politics of perpetual outrage.

This explains why the race-baiting industry, with fundamentally dishonest establishment press assistance, tried — and spectacularly failed on substance — to make a national case out of Trayvon Martin. It explains why they have turned Ferguson, Missouri, into a virtual urban battleground. That effort, primarily an attempt to railroad a cop who was by most accounts defending himself against his attacker instead of letting the attacker kill him, also appears to be on track to fail.

The need for perpetual outrage also explains why the Obama administration continues to litigate against requiring identification to vote and to cast anyone who dares oppose them as presumptively racist. If anything, identification requirements aren’t strong enough, given recent evidence that tens or even hundreds of thousands of non-citizens are illegally voting.

But the merits of their bogus attempts at prosecution or their legal arguments really don’t matter. Only fanning the outrage does.

By their actions, the left is betraying its belief that the only way to keep African-Americans in a failed economy marching in lockstep on the liberal plantation is to deliver a continuous stream of disinformation supposedly showing that the system is irretrievably stacked against them.

Just wait until the plantation’s inhabitants figure out that the people doing the stacking are the very people who pose as their best friends.

Most people believe that President Obama’s deferral of unilateral — and unconstitutional — executive action on immigration was done to avoid a serious backlash in the midterm elections. I believe that it was primarily a targeted decision.

Allowing the euphemism known as “a path to legal status for millions of undocumented workers” will suddenly create a tidal wave of competition for low-paying jobs at law-abiding employers. Disproportionately low-skilled African-Americans are already having a hard enough time finding jobs. A much fiercer fight for low-paying jobs will keep wages depressed. If the Obama administration were to somehow get its way and enact a $10.10 per hour minimum wage, that would only leave more disgruntled job seekers on the sidelines.

I believe that Obama’s immigration deferral was largely done to keep black voters on the plantation this time around, and to buy Democrats some time to figure out how to brainwash those they are shafting. As a result, the party will probably keep or win a few House, Senate and gubernatorial elections which are currently too close to call but would have become certain losses without the immigration deferral.

Once Obama opens the immigration floodgates, the chances of a serious backlash in the black community, which has already endured so much and received so little in return, are far from small.

I sense an historic opportunity here to open up African-Americans’ hearts and minds. Are sensible, free-market, compassionate conservatives up to the challenge?

(Artwork based on a modified Shutterstock.com image.)