The 2022 campaigns owe the voters more than they’re delivering
The 2022 election season is marked by closely fought campaigns rooted in profound differences between the parties. It’s also frustrating because voters are not being shown how different outcomes will yield very different approaches to the way we’re governed.
The obvious problem is that the two parties want the election to be about different things.
Democrats want voters to cast ballots primarily to register their support for abortion rights and to defend our democracy against Trumpism and election deniers. Republicans want voters to express their discontent about inflation, crime and immigration.
I’ll say straight out that I see democracy’s future as the overarching question. The number of Republican election deniers on ballots around the country is shocking. Even more scandalous is the refusal of mainstream Republicans to stand up to them — or face up to the lawlessness of Donald Trump, brought home so effectively on Thursday by the House Jan. 6 committee.
But on so many other questions, this campaign often offers more chaff than wheat. Republicans are inviting angry citizens to cast ballots based on the economy. But what, pray, does the GOP plan to do about inflation, or jobs, or incomes?
The party’s response is a sort of two-step, attacking government spending and talking about “reforming entitlements” but then retreating in horror when Democrats point out that this phrase means cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, was quite candid about what his party has in store. He told Jack Fitzpatrick of Bloomberg Government that “the debt limit is clearly one of those tools that Republicans — that a Republican-controlled Congress — will use to make sure that we do everything we can to make this economy strong.”
Really? How many voters on the basis of the economy think that threatening a crisis over the debt limit will do anything but cause chaos we don’t need and send financial markets into a tizzy?
Our friends in Britain just offered us an object example of the costs of ignoring the practical effect of bold-sounding campaign promises rooted in ideology. Prime Minister Liz Truss won her campaign for the Conservative Party leadership by reaching back to the Thatcher-Reagan era to argue that big tax cuts would promote the economic growth Britain needs.
Her Conservative opponent Rishi Sunak, a former chancellor of the exchequer, tried to warn that Trussonomics was a “fairy tale” and would increase borrowing to “historic and dangerous levels.”
Truss’s supporters called Sunak a “doomster,” but guess what? He was right. Doom arrived. Financial markets went into turmoil, mortgage rates soared, the value of the pound plummeted — and so did Conservatives’ standing in the polls. On Friday, Truss fired her own chancellor of the exchequer and announced a complete policy U-turn.
Where is the economic debate we need? It’s true that President Joe Biden hit the Republicans hard on Social Security and Medicare cuts during his West Coast swing over the weekend while also charging that they would repeal the limits on drug prices Democrats passed.
House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth, D-Ky., warned last week that “holding the full faith and credit of the United States hostage to implement an extreme and unpopular agenda is not governing, it’s desperation.”
Conventional campaign wisdom holds that talking too much about the other side’s issues only distracts from your own. The problem that Biden and Yarmuth implicitly acknowledged: The economy is every voter’s turf.
The larger challenge was brought home to me on a visit to North Carolina last week by state Rep. Brandon Lofton. A Democrat, Lofton thinks his party needs to answer Trumpist culture wars around race and immigration with a broader argument about how a more inclusive society is good for everyone, economically as well as socially.
“What Trump did was use lies and misinformation to tap into the fear many voters feel about demographic and economic change,” he said. “For our part, we largely focused on dispelling the lies and promoting helpful policies. But you can’t fight a narrative with policy alone. We need an Obama-like or Kennedy-like call to action and vision for our future.
“These next few elections are about more than policy,” Lofton added. “They are about the future of our nation and our democracy.”
For those in the trenches of a tough campaign in a polarized country, the future is necessarily measured by a few weeks. From their vantage point, thinking in years, let alone decades, no doubt feels like a luxury.
But if this election is as important as Democrats claim (and it is), they need to do a better job describing the radically different futures at stake. A place to start: Calling out the contradictions of a Republican Party that claims to speak for the values of workingclass voters without valuing their interests. It’s also a way to begin grappling with Lofton’s challenge.