The income of the typical American collapsed during the Great Recession. And in the two years of recovery since 2009, median income has … declined another 4.1%.

Given such a record, how can the "out" party possibly manage to be losing in the polls? Apparently those families have decided that the out party offers them a future that looks even worse than the recent past. If so, that's a shocking indictment of GOP strategy. Would it really have been so impossible to devise a platform that offered the typical American family something beneficial from a change of administration? As is, they get only a promise that cutting the taxes of the wealthiest few will translate into opportunity for them - a promise that their own experience of the last round of tax cuts renders non-credible. In 2001 and 2003, the GOP cut taxes at the top, and incomes at the middle stagnated. Why would a voter at the middle expect anything different from another round of the same medicine? And this time, the tax cuts at the top come joined -not to an increase in Medicare spending as in the Bush years - but to a promise of dramatic Medicaid cuts straightaway, and dramatic Medicare cuts after that.

Update: The ten tweets that inspired this post are embedded below.