GOP candidates mum as Dems blast tax cuts
NEWARK, Ohio — His Republican opponent doesn’t say much publicly about the Trump tax cuts, but on a warm night in a small-town union hall an hour outside Columbus, Danny O’Connor was happy to talk about them — a lot.
“We just saw, this last December, a $2 trillion swipe of the national credit card, a giveaway to big corporations,” O’Connor, the Democrat in a special election on Aug. 7 for an open congressional seat here, told the crowd, drawing nods. “That doesn’t do anything for us. It doesn’t do anything for working people.”
That seems to go against what Republicans intended. Party leaders in Washington talk frequently about the tax cuts and a “Trump boom” that will doom the “blue wave” this election year — or at least shrink it to a ripple. News Friday that the economy grew at a robust 4.1 percent between April and June seemingly supplied more ammunition to a message centered on tax cut-fueled prosperity.
But so far, that is not how it is playing out on the campaign trail.
With little more than a week to go before voters here go to the polls, the airwaves are dominated by more general promises to create jobs and, from Republicans, by darkly tinted wedge issues such as immigration, meant to rally the conservative base. A Republican super PAC is blitzing the Ohio airwaves, warning that electing O’Connor will mean “more crimes, more drugs.”
“Danny O’Connor would join the resistance,” the Congressional Leadership Fund ad concludes, with the Democrat flanked by three women: Hillary Clinton, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and
Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Republicans have reason to doubt the efficacy of an economic message in hotly contested midterm campaigns, which have historically been referendums on the sitting president. The last time the economy grew 4 percent in a quarter came in the middle of 2014, under President Barack Obama, just before Senate Democrats lost nine seats — and their majority — that fall.
For their part, Democrats are weaponizing the tax law — which is mired in only middling popularity — against Republican opponents in some key races. Their critiques have been fed by government statistics showing wages for typical U.S. workers have not risen over the past year, after adjusting for inflation, even though Republicans promised the tax cuts would unleash rapid wage growth.
That’s true in Ohio’s 12th District, which stretches from mostly affluent suburbs of Columbus where residents probably benefited a good deal from the tax cuts to the foothills of the
Appalachians, where they haven’t. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s first ad in this special election opened with a hit on the Republican, Troy Balderson, for supporting “a massive corporate tax break that helps rack up $2 trillion in debt.”
O’Connor and his allies have spent more money attacking the tax cuts than Balderson and Republican groups have spent extolling them, even though the Democrat is being outspent overall, 2-1.
Balderson’s campaign did not respond to repeated requests for an interview on tax policy and his advertising decisions. But other Republicans say the messaging strategy reflects a judgment over how best to motivate their core supporters to vote in the Aug. 7 election to replace Rep. Patrick J. Tiberi, a Republican who helped author the House version of the tax bill and who retired this year to lead the Ohio Business Roundtable.
Many Republicans said last year, as the tax cuts were speeding through Congress, that the new law would excite their base and help preserve their congressional majorities in the midterms. The law permanently reduces the corporate tax rate to 21 percent, from a high of 35 percent. It doubled the standard deduction for individuals and cut individual tax rates, although those provisions expire at the end of 2025. Party leaders predicted that as Americans began to see the law’s benefits, its popularity would rise.
Instead, polls suggest support for the law peaked shortly after it was passed and has declined slightly since. A July online poll of 9,767 people by the research firm SurveyMonkey, conducted for the New York Times, found slightly more Americans oppose the law than favor it, 48 percent to 47 percent. Opposition was higher among college-educated voters.
O’Connor said many of the voters he talks to feel like they are still not getting ahead, even with low unemployment and accelerating economic growth, and that even affluent voters in his district see the law as unfair.
“Income inequality is high, wage growth is low,” he said. “Folks doing well still want to have an economy that works for the middle class.”
As they turn to November, Democratic candidates across the country are echoing that message. They are working critiques of the tax bill into a broader argument about stagnating real wages and rising health care costs, to portray Republican rule under Trump as primarily benefiting the wealthy and leaving U.S. workers to pick up the tab.
“Democrats are right to press this,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for American Bridge, a liberal opposition research group that is helping Democrats in the midterms. “Republicans ran on populism in 2016, and their policies delivered the opposite.”