Kuttner on TAP: Democrats Finally Start Talking About the Economy

For weeks, the Prospect has been warning that Democrats will lose the midterm if they don’t start talking about Republican threats to people’s economic well-being. Stan Greenberg has weighed in with compelling evidence and strategic insights; I’ve written about the need for Democrats to talk about inflation; and most recently Greenberg, Patrick Gaspard, Mike Lux, and Celinda Lake authored a joint Memo to Democrats that ran on the Prospect site and was broadly circulated.

The conventional wisdom was that since issues like inflation apparently play to Republican advantage, better to change the subject—to abortion or to Republican theft of democracy. Sorry, but that doesn’t work. By all means, keep talking about Republican threats to women’s health and personal liberty, but don’t think that substitutes for a potent economic message.

Over the weekend, these urgent arguments finally broke through. Speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, Nancy Pelosi declared:

The Republicans have said that if they win, they want to subject Medicare, Social Security—health blackmail—to lifting the debt ceiling … They have said that they would like to make it a discretionary spending that Congress could decide to do it or not, rather than mandatory. So Social Security and Medicare are on the line.

She also said this:

The fight is not about inflation. It’s about the cost of living. And if you look at what we have done, to bring down the cost of prescription drugs, to bring down the cost of energy and the rest in our legislation, you will see that that has been opposed every step of the way by the Republicans, and they have no plan for lowering the cost of living or helping with inflation.

This is tricky stuff, as Greenberg keeps emphasizing. Even though Democrats have much to brag about—jobs created, recession avoided, concrete benefits to citizens—unalloyed bragging is the wrong message when most people are feeling lousy about their own economic condition. The right message is the Republican threat to worsen things, and the gains we can make with a Democratic Congress.

Our president still doesn’t get this quite right. Biden has accomplished a lot and can’t resist talking about it. He led a recent speech with deficit reduction, a Beltway issue that most voters care don’t about. But he is starting to extend the argument to the Republican threats. In that October 21 speech, Biden also said:

If [Republicans] get their way, the power we just gave Medicare to begin to negotiate lower prescriptions drugs goes away. Gone.

If they get their way, the $2,000 cap on prescription drug costs, which takes effect next year—maximum any senior would have to pay, no matter what their drug costs are, would be $2,000. It goes away. Gone.

The $35-a-month cap on insulin, which takes effect next year for folks on Medicare—gone.

Maybe we’ll finally get Democratic unity around smart messaging. If you haven’t yet read the Gaspard/Greenberg/Lake/Lux piece, you should read it and pass it along. Nancy Pelosi evidently did.

Is it too late for this message to shift the dynamics of the race? Some pundits think the election is already locked, but a lot can happen in two weeks.