It’s Still the Economy, Stupid

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, July 13, 2023

 

‘The Republican Party holds a 12-point advantage on economic policy,” reports Pew. That’s nice. Has the GOP considered acting like it?

 

There are political issues on which conservatives win, there are political issues on which conservatives lose, and then there are those rare, golden political issues that, if addressed in the correct manner, tend to crowd all the other issues out and yield substantial wins for the Right. Chief among those issues is the economy, on which Republicans currently trounce the Democrats by twelve points. Another major issue is crime, on which the Republicans currently beat the Democrats by ten. In addition to these, there are certain bolt-on issues that can help the GOP top up its support — foreign policy, the federal budget deficit, and, in certain circumstances, social policy — but that do not move the needle much on their own. Getting the balance between those issues right is an art rather than a science. At the national level, at least, the Republicans are at severe risk of getting it wrong in 2024 and beyond, with disastrous consequences for their fortunes.

 

Pretty much everybody in American politics seems to have drawn the wrong conclusions from the results of the 2022 midterms. The Democrats have decided that their ridiculous, unpopular, incompetent president is actually “Dark Brandon,” the Republican-slayer. The Republicans have concluded that Joe Biden was not as weak as previously thought, that the economy and crime aren’t key after all, that Donald Trump’s election-trutherism didn’t hurt, and that the way to win the next round is to talk more about the sorts of issues that appeal to the loudest members of the party’s base. Neither of these interpretations is correct. In 2022, Joe Biden’s fundamental weakness was, indeed, exposed. Unfortunately for Republicans, it was made clear at the same time that, however weak Biden may be, the public prefers him and his party to Donald Trump. In 2022, the GOP offered up two invitations. The first was the party’s economic promises, which were popular. The second was Donald Trump’s vow to dishonestly relitigate the last presidential election until everyone has expired from sheer boredom, which was not popular. In the Senate, Trump’s liabilities slightly outweighed the GOP’s broader advantages. In the House, the Republicans prevailed by a whisker.

 

Where Trump’s noise was not on the ballot, the Republicans’ message romped. In Georgia, Brian Kemp won going away because he talked about only two things: his stewardship of the economy, and his rejection of Donald Trump’s lies. In Florida, Ron DeSantis won by 20 points because he ignored Trump and focused instead on the booming Florida economy and his role in preserving it during the pandemic. In Ohio, Mike DeWine outperformed J. D. Vance by nearly 20 points by sticking to what people actually cared about — the economy — and refusing to indulge the MAGA fluff that is toxic with rank-and-file voters. When Republican candidates were associated with the party’s economic message and opposition to “Defund the Police,” they did well. When they were associated with Trump’s relentless lunacy, they lost.

 

It has become fashionable of late to sum up the Republican Party’s entire economic philosophy as “tax cuts.” There is some truth to this; while low taxes remain important, some members of the GOP do have a bad habit of talking about the issue as if all of the party’s successes on that front since 1980 never happened. But there’s still a reason that the public trusts the Republicans on the economy by a twelve-point margin, and that reason is that the GOP has much to boast about in its economic stewardship. The president does not run the economy, and, typically, he is not the reason for its successes. But he — and Congress — can ruin it. So, indeed, can the states. The Democrats’ absurd post-Covid spending binge — which Republicans opposed — was responsible for a great deal of the inflation through which Americans just lived, and would have been even worse if President Biden had gotten his own way and succeeded in shepherding “Build Back Better” through Congress. The states tell a similar story, with Democrat-run states such as Illinois, California, and New York resembling basket cases, and Republican-run states such as Florida, Texas, Georgia, and New Hampshire attracting newcomers from all across the country. American voters understand this.

 

On paper, at least, the GOP’s next move should therefore be obvious: It ought to jettison Trump and his sycophants and focus hard on Biden’s responsibility for our present inflation, his over-spending. Florida ought to be held up as a model, California as a lesson. One does not need to be a paranoiac to worry that Republicans seem set at this stage to do the opposite — that, despite the warnings and despite the polls and despite the evidence from the last go-around, the party intends to go into 2024 having renominated Donald Trump, who will spend his time talking about his own grievances and a bunch of fringe issues, rather than playing the party’s strongest hand. At heart, politics remains a simple game. Movements that forget that tend to lose — and keep losing until they remember.