A new poll of 70 swing districts from around the country, conducted for NPR by Democrat Stan Greenberg and Republican Glen Bolger, illustrates a national playing field tilted steeply against Democratic candidates. When presented with distillations of the Democrats’ and Republicans’ messages for the upcoming midterm elections, 52% preferred the GOP message, while only 39% preferred the Democratic message.

There are three central factors to this statistical reality. First and foremost, the US economy is recovering sluggishly—new jobless claims spiked by 12,000 last week—and unemployment remains very high at 9.7%. Voters of all stripes can look around and understand that a lot of people are out of work and many communities and families are suffering. Things are just not going well for America at the moment; this feeling pervades the electorate.

The second of these factors is that this sad state of economic affairs persists despite the enacting of several stimulus initiatives. Economists may tell us that the President’s first stimulus averted a recession; smart columnists have written that we are in for a prolonged stretch of unemployment that no stimulus will do much to alleviate. From this viewpoint, it is unfair to suggest that Congressional Democrats could have done much better with the cards they were dealt.

However, voters are not doling out credit to Democrats for “averting” a depression, no matter how much credit is due. Most voters don’t necessarily know that the President’s first stimulus probably averted far steeper job losses, or care all that much. But that is little comfort to those who are suffering; what they see is that Democrats haven’t done anything about it yet, and consequently the party in power has lost much of its credibility on the economy.

Compounding this perspective is the pervasive impression that stimulus initiatives and the new health care law are big and expensive. The CBO did indeed score the health care law as actually reducing the deficit. But it still is an expenditure of almost one trillion dollars, and the deficit today stands at 1.4 trillion.

The electorate does not form its opinions based on thorough analysis of the varying opinions of professional commentators and academics. Most people, unsurprisingly, do not like or think about politics all that much, anyway. What the general public takes from current circumstances is that the Democratic Congress is spending more than it ever has at a time when everybody else has less money, to little general economic benefit.

Couched in this way, it is easy to see why so many voters are disinterested at best and infuriated at worst. It is also easy to see why many voters believe that progressives and their spending habits should be checked by a counterbalancing force in the form of the only other option: the conservative GOP.

This is the playing field of public opinion that Democrats must deal with. All of this bodes ill for Democratic prospects in the midterms, as unemployment looks to remain high for quite some time, and there is little Democrats can do to alter these basic perceptions. In this context, that President Obama has kept his own approval numbers in mid-to-high 40’s despite such a bad environment for his party bodes very well for his own long-term political health.