News item: Middle class incomes in America jumped the most last year since at least 1967.

News item: Michigan’s economy, once considered a basket case that would never be the same, has nearly reached its peak years of the late 1990s.

These news bulletins, reported over the past 24 hours, should have voters walking around in a state of perpetual-smile. But the impact of these revelations about economics seems to have little impact on politics.

I’m no big fan of Barack Obama but the president certainly secured numerous bragging points in these new statistics, which show improvement going far beyond the Great Recession of 2008-10.

Here is a sampling from the annual report from the Census Bureau released on Tuesday:

  • In 2015, middle-class families realized their biggest income increases in 50 years. Median household income rose 5.2 percent when adjusted for inflation.
  • There were 5 million fewer Americans living in poverty last year than the year before, a 1.2 percent decline, the steepest since 1968.
  • Another 4 million gained health insurance in 2015, decreasing the nation’s uninsured rate to 9.1 percent, the lowest level since before the Great Recession.
  • The gender pay gap is at a record low, though women still make just 80 cents for every dollar men earn.

All of this comes at a time when President Obama had already seen his approval rating jump to 58 percent in some polls.

If the Democratic campaign strategists are worth their salt, they will use these numbers to great effect. Given Donald Trump’s unprecedented disapproval ratings, the equivalent of a third-term Obama presidency, even in the form of President Hillary Clinton, doesn’t sound too bad.

And the prospect of returning the economy to its status during the last years of the prior President Clinton sound wholly inviting.

At the state level, Republican efforts to maintain control of the Michigan House of Representatives should be buoyed by the announcement on Tuesday that, for the second consecutive month, the state unemployment rate in August stood at 4.5 percent, its lowest point since January 2001.

Beleaguered Republican Gov. Rick Snyder said: “As we move forward and work to continue our comeback, it’s encouraging to see that Michigan’s unemployment rate remains below the national average and more than 10 points lower than its peak in the summer of 2009. Our job creators have added more than 450,000 private sector jobs in five and a half years, and there are nearly 100,000 jobs available today in Michigan on www.mitalent.org. That reminds us of how far we’ve come but how much work we still have to do.”

Here’s the problem for the campaign gurus trying to forge election victories: None of this seems to matter much to voters, even to those who are fully employed and earning salaries comparable to the recent past.

According to The Washington Post, despite all of this, every single poll shows that more than six in 10 Americans feel the country is on the wrong track. A George Washington University Battleground poll published last week, for example, found that just 27 percent think America is moving in the right direction and 66 percent think we’re moving the wrong direction.

The combination of cynicism, pessimism and hyper-partisanship among the American public probably plays a leading role in this dark mood.

The Post talked to numerous political experts about the prevailing “wrong track” numbers and here are a couple of the most interesting responses:

Donald Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, a pollster by training and background: “We noticed a number of years ago that the responses to the wrong track question are not purely economic.  In fact, for many Americans, they are not connected to politics or policy at all. We who work in the polling/media/politics axis mistakenly assume they are. While one’s attitudes toward the state of the nation are related to one’s economic condition, other cultural, attitudinal and situational factors are also in play. Frustration and pessimism seem to have reached a fever pitch for many folks, too.”

Scott Clement, director of the Post’s polling unit, noted that the average American still is making less today than he or she was 15 years ago. Real median household income was $56,500 in 2015, the Census bureau reported, up from $53,700 in 2014. But that’s below the peak median income registered in 1999 — $57,909. “While these reports are ‘good,’ some represent a return to previous economic levels before the recession, not outright improvement,” he said. “A Quinnipiac poll in May asked voters to rate the economy – 2 percent called it ‘excellent,’ 30 percent ‘good,’ 40 percent ‘not so good’ and 27 percent ‘poor.’ That’s better than the single digits seen in the depths of the recession, but it’s still a net negative.”