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In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Congress eyed measures intended to give the economy a boost, and House Republicans were only too pleased to pitch their ideas. By any fair measure, the GOP bill included little more than tax cuts for corporations that the party wanted anyway. Even the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal conceded the plan “mainly padded corporate bottom lines.”
Democrats, eager to go on the offensive, convened focus groups to help sharpen their message. The party, however, quickly discovered a problem: Voters literally couldn’t believe that Republicans would respond to deadly terrorism by pushing corporate tax breaks. As The New York Times’ Paul Krugman explained at the time, the Republican proposal “was so extreme that when political consultants tried to get reactions from voter focus groups, the voters refused to believe that they were describing the bill accurately.”
More than a decade later, it happened again: A super PAC supporting Barack Obama’s re-election informed focus group participants about Paul Ryan’s budget plan and Mitt Romney’s support for it. As the New York Times reported soon after, respondents “simply refused to believe” what they were hearing.
As Jon Chait summarized at the time, focus group participants were receiving accurate descriptions of real GOP proposals, but the truth “struck those voters as so cartoonishly evil that they found the charge implausible.”
It must be frustrating for Democratic strategists to tell a room full of voters the truth, only to hear in response, “That can’t be right.”
As we’ve discussed, the underlying skepticism is understandable. The public has heard all kinds of outlandish accusations over the years, and it can be tough to know what and whom to believe. When mainstream voters hear about Candidate A or Party B pushing a radical idea, many no doubt assume, just as a matter of course, that the claims come with built-in exaggerations.
All of this came to mind reading the latest column from The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne, who summarized a key element of the Republican Party’s ongoing debt ceiling crisis.
House Republicans decided to hold the economy hostage to slash assistance for low-income Americans while protecting tax cuts for the wealthy. That’s a factual statement, not a partisan complaint.
Quite right. I can’t help but wonder, though, what incredulous focus group participants might say.
To be sure, it doesn’t help when prominent media outlets tell the public that debt-ceiling crises are normal (they’re not), and that if the United States were to default, “both parties“ would deserve the blame (they wouldn’t).
But as much as the coverage matters, there’s no escaping the scandalous radicalism of the underlying extortion plot.
Republicans, abandoning their own country’s legislative process, are demanding drastic spending cuts, which would disproportionately punish low-income Americans and working families, including making it more difficult for the poor to put food on the table. If Democrats refuse to pay this ransom, the GOP says, Republicans will crash the economy on purpose and impose a catastrophe on the world.
Simultaneously, as the extortion plot advances, those same GOP policymakers insist that trillions of dollars in tax breaks for the wealthy must be protected at all costs, and the massive Pentagon budget shouldn’t just be shielded from any budget cuts, it should be even bigger.
What’s more, as a dangerous deadline approaches, Republicans say they’re looking for a “compromise,” but they’ve offered effectively nothing in the way of concessions, and they continue to make radical new additions to their already radical ransom note.
Would participants in a focus group believe these truths, or to borrow Chait’s phrasing from 11 years ago, would they see this avoidable Republican crisis as “cartoonishly evil”?