Oddly, many voters prefer the policies of Democrats to the policies of Republicans. They just don’t trust the Democrats to carry out those promises.

“We don’t have a representative government anymore.”

The article continues:

If they are to win trust, and votes, Democrats must show they are as determined as the Tea Party movement to change the rules of the game. In our surveys and media work for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, we found that only if people thought a candidate was going to change government in fundamental ways...

But that was the key message of the Obama campaign - "Change you can believe in."

The problem is:
1. Nothing has changed. Everybody can see that its still business as usual in DC, and so the Democrat's message lost its punch.
2. The Democrats basically told their base to "suck it up" during the midterms. Real compelling.
3. The right started working before the election was over on it's mid term strategy, and it successfully exploited patriotic imagery and partisanship to built a winning message for the mid term elections.

As unimpressed as I am with the Tea Party at least they are actually doing what they said they were going to do. Of course it has brought the country to the edge of bankruptcy, but its what they said they were going to do. The negative consequences associated with actually doing those things have always been obvious. But most people don't understand those consequences. They are getting what they paid for and there is something to be said for that.

The article goes on to list a series of policy prescriptions that I found somewhat uninteresting.

The issue is that the Democrats told everyone they were going to make big changes, and then didn't, and so now they can't even run that claim anymore. The current strategy is basically "Yeah, we're fucking you over, but at least we're not crazy."

I don't know how you dig out of this hole.

Tuning Out the Democrats - NYTimes.com