It’s not us — it’s them.
Facing the prospect of a brutal midterm election defeat and pressure from party operatives to devise a plan to stop it, Democrats are increasingly blaming their problems on messaging, not on the substance of their ideas.
Speaking to donors in Portland, Oregon, last week, President Joe Biden acknowledged his party’s strategy of seemingly abandoning efforts to address the country’s problems in favor of simply spreading Democratic messages.
“I admit to you, what I haven’t done, and the reason I’m getting out on the road again instead of dealing with the day-to-day emergencies in my office, is making the case of what we’ve done,” Biden reportedly said at a fundraiser.
The White House’s focus on spinning its troubles rather than dealing with them head-on has been most apparent when it comes to inflation. Biden and his allies have at various times blamed inflation on the unemployment rate, the supply chain, corporate greed, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
FROM TITLE 42 TO MASKS, COURTS DEAL SETBACKS TO BIDEN’S PANDEMIC POLICIES
But the White House has taken few significant steps to lower prices for people, and its shifting characterization of the problem, from labeling it as “transitory” to downplaying its impact on regular people, has sunk the public’s faith in Biden’s ability to do so.
“I think there’s some disagreement among Democrats,” Brad Bannon, a Democratic strategist, told the Washington Examiner. “I think some Democrats look at the new jobs numbers and feel that we should talk about jobs exclusively.”
Jobs numbers have indeed been encouraging over the past year. The economy added more than 6 million jobs in 2021, bringing the unemployment rate back to pre-pandemic levels.
But polls show voters still feel increasingly pessimistic about the economy, and most haven’t thus far been persuaded by Biden’s frequent focus on the employment picture.
“Democrats shouldn’t overlook the fact that inflation is a big problem and it’s hurting lots of people,” Bannon said.
Some top party aides have continued to blame messaging for Democrats’ plummeting poll numbers on economic issues despite the party having already tried out an array of different messages to address the problem.
John Anzalone, Biden’s top pollster, argued this month that Democrats should simply infuse their economic rhetoric with more populism in order to combat the perception that they are weak on the economy.
“I would so dial up” populist messaging, Anzalone told Politico, arguing Democrats should “control the narrative” around tax hikes to get on better footing with voters.
Charles Lipson, political science professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, said Democrats’ electoral woes run deeper than their talking points.
“It’s more than a messaging problem,” Lipson told the Washington Examiner. “When you hear stories about messaging from a party that works closely with all the major media outlets and social media outlets, you know that they’re pointing their finger in the wrong direction.”
“I can understand why they’re saying it,” Lipson added. “They’re saying it because they don’t have any alternative policies that they’re willing to push.”
One example, Lipson noted, comes from the administration’s messaging around rising gas prices.
Hemmed in by environmentalists on his left and the overarching climate goals of his party, Biden has shied away from taking concrete steps, such as increasing domestic energy production, that could lower prices at the pump in any significant way.
Instead, Biden and other Democrats have resorted to playing a blame game — pinning responsibility on Putin, unsuccessfully, before pointing the finger at oil corporations — in an effort to blunt voters’ criticism of the administration.
On immigration, Democrats have struggled to come up with a unified message amid a wave of defections from the Biden administration’s approach — leading to the use of talking points that seem divorced from reality.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas argued during congressional testimony Wednesday that the Biden administration has “effectively managed” the situation at the border despite a record-breaking number of encounters with undocumented migrants and an anticipated surge in illegal immigration when the White House ends a public health order it was using to expel some migrants.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Republicans tore into the seemingly tone-deaf claim from Mayorkas, which belies deep concern among vulnerable members of the party that the Biden administration has no plan to manage the situation on the border.
Some Democrats blamed messaging in part for Democratic losses in the off-year elections that took place last fall, namely when Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe suffered a loss in Virginia that caught much of the party by surprise.
Rather than address the underlying concerns of parents who swung the gubernatorial race to Republican Glenn Youngkin, some Democrats continued to insist that the party should simply come up with a more persuasive argument that critical race theory, a racially focused curriculum that concerned many parents, does not exist in schools.
