Four prominent Democratic strategists wrote a memo in late October in the American Prospect urging their party’s candidates to ditch the election strategy they’ve been using.
Since February, Democrats have been laser-focused on the issue of abortion. And even before that, they were constantly talking about the Jan. 6 riot and the supposed threats to democracy posed by “semifascist” Republican voters.
DEMOCRATS PRESS POWELL TO SLOW FED CAMPAIGN TO CURB INFLATION VIA RATE HIKES
As we suspected all along, and wrote about on more than one occasion, nobody cares about these issues. Well, OK, that’s not quite accurate. To put it more precisely, nobody except the completely addicted to politics, hardcore base of each party prioritizes these issues.
Acknowledging this fact, the strategists, including Patrick Gaspard, Stan Greenberg, Celinda Lake, and Mike Lux, urged Democrats to start talking instead about the economy.
Democrats appear to be taking this advice seriously. On Oct. 27, President Joe Biden actually looked into a camera with a straight face and said that if Republicans win the election, they will crash the economy.
And there we see the problem with this new strategy. According to a recent USA Today-Suffolk University poll, 66% of voters believe the United States is already in a recession. Biden is asking two-thirds of the public to believe Republicans are going to crash an economy they believe has already crashed.
The Democratic strategists seem to have something more subtle and intelligent in mind than Biden’s speech. They want Democrats to acknowledge the increases in prices that come with inflation and to talk up obscure legislation such as the CHIPS and Science Act and the bill Democrats cynically named the Inflation Reduction Act. They want them to show some empathy for the struggles voters are having because of the economy and then shift the responsibility to some other perennial Democratic bogeyman — Big Oil, large corporations, price gouging, etc.
This still seems dubious — after all, it’s a bit embarrassing to talk about inflation when you played a large role in creating it. And even if you can convince people it’s not your fault, Democrats have just spent the better part of a year pretending that inflation is transitory or doesn’t actually exist. How do you come back from that?
Even worse for Democrats, though, is that it is far too late to change the focus of their campaigns. They needed to hear this back in August before they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on their old failing strategy of trying to make people care much more than they actually do about the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision and their carefully stage-managed Jan. 6 show trials. They can’t get all that money back to pursue some kind of new economic message, even if they can find one that isn’t incoherent. And they certainly can’t get back the weeks and months it would have taken to mollify the public and assuage their concerns.
These strategists were just laying down their marker now. That way, after the disaster, they get to take credit for being right and Democratic candidates will flock to them. Those are some pretty shrewd consultants — which makes you wonder why Democrats are doing so badly.
