How To Drive Donald Trump's Biggest Flip Flop Home For Voters
One phoned-in cable-news interview isn't enough to animate his intention to cut Social Security and Medicare.
In 2005, George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, an objective he lacked the clout to pursue early in his first term. When he came to office in 2001 he’d been handed the presidency by the Supreme Court after losing the popular vote, and he’d inherited a budget surplus, which obviated the usual Republican pretext for gutting entitlements. Instead, he cut taxes for the rich, which ballooned deficits. Then he “did” 9/11, as we used to say, and became the rare president to be re-elected with more public support than he’d won the first time around.
“I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” Bush insisted famously, “and I intend to spend it."
However, the privatization effort failed and, more than a year later, Republicans lost the 2006 midterm elections in a landslide.
In 2012, Mitt Romney ran for president on an analogous plan to privatize Medicare. To his credit, he didn’t try to hide his intentions, at least not by typical Republican standards. He believed the incumbent president, Barack Obama, was vulnerable to defeat, and wanted to enter office with a mandate to do something dramatic. But one way or another, the gamble did not pay off. Romney lost to Obama, and the federal government continues to guarantee Medicare benefits.
In 2017, despite having lost the popular vote, and despite having failed to produce a health-care plan of his own, and (thus) without any effort to build popular support for an alternative to the Affordable Care Act, Donald Trump tried to rush Obamacare repeal through Congress in his first months in office. That effort also failed, and a year and a half later, Republicans lost the midterm elections in a landslide.
The lesson Democrats drew from these three episodes is that campaigning on Republican efforts to repeal or privatize or cut or devolve popular government programs is a skeleton key to victory.
Unfortunately there’s a flaw in the general theory. The Republican agendas in 2010, 2014, and 2016 also included toxically unpopular plans just like these. Democrats ran against them as they always do. But they lost those elections, two of them handily.
It may be that policy particulars had little to do with the outcomes in any of those elections. Perhaps Bush lost Congress because the country realized he’d invaded Iraq on a fabricated pretext and it had become a quagmire, a metonym for his broader incompetence and cronyism. Perhaps Romney lost not because of his Medicare plan per se, but because his vision for the country matched his stiff, plutocratic, austere persona, in stark contrast to Obama’s charisma. Perhaps Trump lost the House in 2018 because he’s widely loathed, and the country mobilized to check him across all fronts.
That’s more or less what I believe.
But if you believe instead that policy positioning drives political outcomes, you must still concede that the experiences of 2005-6, 2012, and 2017-18 aren’t generalizable. To achieve the level of salience required to shift election outcomes, Republicans have to actually try to gut popular benefit programs, either through the legislative process (Bush and Trump) or in a swing-for-the-fences presidential campaign on an unpopular agenda (Romney).
This is why I worry Democratic exuberance over Donald Trump’s about-face on Social Security and Medicare is premature. Unless he intends to barnstorm the country like Romney defending a specific plan to cut those programs, he still has strategic ambiguity, and the campaign remains thematically varied enough for him to slip past the voting public. At the very least, Democrats need to make Trump’s reversal more stark. And if they can’t do that, they need to stop leaving the lower-hanging fruit of Trump’s election vulnerabilities unplucked.
HITTIN’ DA CHUBB
How to make Trump’s big flip-flop more salient than it’s become after one quick, phoned-in CNBC appearance?