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WASHINGTON — Just outside the Capitol, two Democratic senators running for re-election stood last week before a few dozen labor-aligned supporters and local high school students with posters declaring “America Needs a Raise” to make another pitch for increasing the minimum wage — a cornerstone of the party’s midterm economic message.
The event generated little momentum for the issue and little coverage for Senators Al Franken of Minnesota and Jeff Merkley of Oregon. But it did emphasize a larger, unintended point: The Democrats’ strategy of making an increase in the minimum wage a midterm election rallying cry has been drowned out by world events. The party continues to talk about it, but it appears that few are listening.
“It is because of what is happening in the Middle East,” conceded Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, a third Democrat present and a longtime leader on progressive labor issues.
Events overseas have undermined Democrats’ strategy to tie their midterm prospects to an economic theme that includes calls for a higher minimum wage, reducing income inequality, pay equity for women and help with college tuition. Instead, the public and Congress have been overwhelmed this summer by a border crisis, an Ebola outbreak in Africa and, most notably, the terrorist threat from the Islamic State, also known by the acronym ISIS.
Democrats, pointing to President Obama’s effectiveness in drawing an economic contrast with the Republican Mitt Romney in 2012 and to the 2006 midterm races in which they took over the House and the Senate, still believe the strategy is sound.
“I think the Democrats’ economic message has a lot of resonance, but it has been difficult to break through the focus on foreign policy issues,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee and a former head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
While Democratic candidates in some contested states are still seen as making headway with the economic argument, its diminishing punch nationally is threatening to make the final two months of the campaign more about Mr. Obama’s droopy approval ratings — a risky proposition, particularly for Democrats defending seats in red states where the president’s standing is abysmal.
“His ability to project those issues in these races has been limited by the competing realities,” Mark Mellman, a top Democratic pollster, said of Mr. Obama’s faltering focus on economic issues. “The press is much more interested in what he’s saying about ISIS than what he is saying about the minimum wage.”
Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to the president, agreed that the urgent need to deal with the terrorist threat this summer had largely derailed the president’s push, which began in earnest last spring, to help Democrats define the election as a choice between two competing economic visions. He said the president’s Democratic allies in the Senate had also struggled to stick to their game plan.
“There is no question that the national conversation has been around issues other than the national economic condition,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “It makes it harder to get the debate on the economic issue.”
Six months ago, strategists in the West Wing and their counterparts on Capitol Hill had high hopes for a coordinated, poll-tested plan to use the president’s national megaphone and the Democrat-controlled Senate to repeatedly put Republicans on the defensive on what Mr. Obama and his allies call pocketbook issues. They saw few other options given controversy over the health care law and little movement on other big proposals.
The idea was to schedule a series of economic-themed speeches by the president, closely timed with Senate votes on the same subject. On April 30, Mr. Obama gathered an audience in the East Room of the White House to deliver an aggressive attack on Republican opposition to increasing the minimum wage. At the same time, the Senate forced a vote on an increase to $10.10 per hour — a proposal that was immediately blocked by Republicans.
“Either you’re in favor of raising wages for hardworking Americans, or you’re not,” the president declared in April, taking aim at Republicans in his event. “They won’t raise wages for millions of working families when three-quarters of Americans support it? That makes no sense.”
But Democrats also saw signs that the issue lacked potency back in March when a major internal research project for House Democrats found that the push on the minimum wage was not by itself a sufficient contrast with Republicans.
Yet even now, Democrats say economic issues are working in some races, though not on the national stage. Embattled candidates in Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana and North Carolina have pushed the pay equity message particularly strongly in an effort to build on their advantage with female voters. And in Iowa, Democrats have successfully used ads about the minimum wage to blunt a surge by Joni Ernst, the Republican Senate candidate, according to Democratic strategists.
But the Democratic candidates are largely on their own, weighed down by an increasingly unpopular president who is now mired in questions of war and terrorism. Instead of helping to create a national environment that plays to Democratic strengths on the economy, Mr. Obama is the focal point of a serious and uncertain political topic.
Mr. Pfeiffer said it remained unclear how the president’s call to wage a new war against militants in Iraq and Syria would affect Democratic candidates this fall. He said that Mr. Obama had little choice but to shift his focus away from the elections.
“When you’re president, challenges come and you have to meet them,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “You don’t get to pick the cards you are dealt.”
Republicans say they see no evidence that the economic push by individual Democratic candidates is delivering the results that Mr. Obama needs to make sure that his party hangs on to the Senate this November.
“I think it has pretty much fallen flat,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican. “People see it as an election-year stunt, and it is.”
On Monday, White House officials commemorated the sixth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which set off the economic collapse of 2008, with a little-noticed blog post. And White House officials said the next several weeks would be dominated by a focus on foreign policy as the president travels to the headquarters of the Central Command in Tampa, Fla., to discuss his plans for battling Islamic militants and next week attends the United Nations General Assembly.
Officials still maintain there will be plenty of time for Mr. Obama to make the economic arguments, and they said he had never been scheduled to campaign aggressively for individual Democratic candidates until October.
Democrats say they will push ahead with the themes, and Mr. Harkin, who is retiring this year, said he hoped the Senate would hold at least one more minimum wage vote.
“I think the voters have the right to know as they go into the election on this vital issue who is for raising the minimum wage and who is not,” he said.
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