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As the midterm election cycle enters its final week, The Wall Street Journal had a good report over the weekend on the one issue that’s likely to deliver big gains for Republicans.
Economic pressures are weighing on voters as they lock in decisions for next month’s elections. ... Voters often punish the party in power in Washington when financial conditions are challenging, and the economy is shaping up as Democrats’ biggest liability in the final stretch of campaigning. Lowering inflation and boosting the economy — top issues for voters all year that polls show are more trusted in the hands of Republicans — are pulling further ahead of other concerns in importance.
The article quoted a Cleveland-area educator, who voted for President Joe Biden two years ago, but who’s leaning toward supporting GOP candidates this year.
“I feel like at this point I have to vote with my pocketbook, which I hate saying,” said the 44-year-old father of three, whose wife also works in education. “There’s no reason that we should be living paycheck to paycheck with two jobs.”
For Republicans, quotes like these are a validation of months of political strategizing: Here’s a Biden voter who’s prepared to back the GOP, not because he necessarily agrees with the party, but because he feels like his pocketbook has to outweigh other considerations.
For many Democrats, the standard response to voters like these tends to be, “We hear you, and obviously inflation and the economy matter, but we’re also asking you to care about democracy, reproductive rights, the climate crisis, health care, gun violence, and the future of Social Security and Medicare.”
At face value, this might seem sensible, since all of these other issues are, of course, significant, especially now.
But just below the surface, there’s a problem: Parties telling voters that they should rearrange their priorities doesn’t work. People are going to find important what they want to find important, and they tend to tune out those telling them their concerns are somehow out of whack.
Just as importantly, as a tactical matter, Democrats don’t need to tell voters to change their priorities because they have a better message at their disposal: Republicans won’t help their pocketbooks.
It’s like some folks saying their top concern is fire safety, so they’re turning to candidates with a history of arson, running on a platform of playing with matches.
Let’s review the basics:
Republicans barely even pretend to have an economic agenda: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy unveiled his party’s “Commitment to America” blueprint last month, and it was vague to the point of comedy on economic policy. What's more, party leaders occasionally make clear that the GOP has no credible plan to address inflation.
Republicans have one economic goal, and it’d make things worse: The only economic priority GOP officials are prepared to fight for is making permanent Donald Trump’s ineffective tax breaks for the wealthy — which would make inflation worse, not better.
Republicans are running on a platform of economic instability: To the extent that GOP leaders have made their plans clear, the party is threatening a debt-ceiling crisis and government shutdowns, which would risk making economic conditions in the United States vastly worse.
Republicans are sorely lacking in credibility: The New Republic’s Timothy Noah wrote a great piece in May noting that by literally every relevant metric — economic growth, job creation, median household income, et al. — the U.S. economy has fared better over the past several decades during eras of Democratic governance.
As we discussed soon after, this is unambiguously true. In fact, over the past three decades, there have been three recessions — one under each Republican administration. Simultaneously, effectively every GOP prediction about the economy has been wrong: Republicans said Bill Clinton’s economic agenda wouldn’t work (it did), George W. Bush’s tax breaks would work wonders (they didn’t); Barack Obama’s agenda wouldn’t end the Great Recession (it did), Trump’s tax breaks would produce an economic utopia (they didn’t), and Joe Biden’s agenda couldn’t possibly lead to the creation of 10 million new jobs and an unemployment rate matching a 50-year low (but that’s precisely what happened).
It’s easy to understand why many Americans intend to vote with their pocketbooks. But Americans expecting Republicans to improve voters’ economic conditions are very likely to be disappointed.