People who are not seeing the effects of those positive economic percentages are more likely to vote and they are more likely to vote for the people who will tell them how they are going to fix their most pressing problems.
Trump lied when he said he would bring people's jobs back. Of course he won't tell you that he lied, he was just using a "euphemism". He lied. He said what people wanted to hear.
Perhaps out of all the "mature large industrialized democracies" or spreadsheets look better, but if you ask the average middle class person in those countries what they get from society (jobs, school, healthcare, etc...) Most of them will tell you that they get almost all of what they need to be content.
It isn't about a percentage of the population that is employed, it is about whether that job provides enough income to purchase necessities and some leisure time. It is about whether that job is secure, or can it be closed up or shipped away at any moment. It is about how society as a whole balances work and personal time.
It is pretty evident historically that Democratic Party governments have done better economically than Republican Party governments. Where we as Democrats have lost our way in some sense is that we are not actively pushing for a more equitable distribution of the great advancements we have made economically over the last 30 years. President Obama has spoken about it, but other Democrats had tried to distance themselves from that populist, progressive platform. If the Democrats want to be the party of the working people, the poor, and the marginalized, then we have to go all in with them and really talk about why people aren't feeling the benefits of low unemployment and decent GDP growth. Then we need to talk about how we are going to fix that, which means we are going to piss off some more recent funding sources like banks and Wall St. firms.
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