After more than a half-hour of ideological warfare, billionaire Tom Steyer brought the Democratic debate stage back to the reality of the upcoming general election. President Trump is running for reelection on the economy, Steyer noted, and unless Democrats fight him on those terms, he will win a second term in the White House.
Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor whose quixotic bid has catapulted him to front-runner status in New Hampshire primary polls, had no reason to stir the pot. And yet, in his attempt to issue a milquetoast refutation to Steyer, he presented one of his most out-of-touch answers of this election cycle.
The former South Bend, Indiana, mayor noted that while Trump may talk about the economy, Democrats will excoriate Trump for behaving dishonorably at the National Prayer Breakfast! They will lambaste Trump for dodging the Vietnam War draft! They will rake Trump over the coals for lying about caring about Middle America!
Yes, Trump is a chronically dishonest vulgarian who often spews rhetoric unbecoming of the Oval Office. But not only have people already become desensitized to this fact, their personal distaste for Trump will pale in comparison to the salience of their satisfaction in their own personal economic prospects if things continue apace until Election Day.
Sure, we’ve reached a half-century low unemployment rate in the midst of the longest bull market in history to instigate the first real wage growth in a decade. But those gains have been dispersed across the masses, with the greatest gains in wage growth going to the lowest-income workers, new unemployment records met for minorities, and a record amount of people reporting satisfaction in their personal lives and optimism in their financial prospects.
With metrics like those, many voters will conclude, so what if Trump tweets horrible things? The average worker is taking home a higher paycheck to support a more fulfilled home life than ever before. The only way for a Democrat to combat that is on the economy, and Andrew Yang made clear that he’s the only one recognizing the paradigm of the discussion, let alone a halfway solution.
Yang is now famous for his $1,000-a-month universal basic income branded as the “freedom dividend.” But unlike his counterparts on the debate stage, Yang doesn’t traffic in grievance politics or socialism. Instead, he’s pointing out that automation will eventually leave creative destruction in its wake, and Democrats cannot beat Trump’s short-term success without a long-term solution to the changing economy.
And if Trump’s tuning into the debate tonight, he should feel fairly confident that the front-runners simply don’t have one.
