Here are a few observations I defy anyone to contest:
In just nine months, Donald Trump has done severe damage to the U.S. economy.
Democrats are most comfortable—perhaps only comfortable—politicking on economic policy issues like health care, and the broader cost of living.
However, Democrats frequently struggle to fix public attention on these issues, because they are not inherently salacious or dramatic.
Trump never accepts responsibility for his failures and often refuses even to stipulate to inconvenient realities.
Instead, he either denies them, or blames them on others, or (sometimes, somehow) both at once.
These are important things to keep in mind at all times, but particularly now, as an impasse in Congress might cause many government services to lapse less than two weeks from now.
The public knows the economy has deteriorated. Voters are unhappy about it. We think they mostly blame Trump, insofar as his economic approval polling is well under water. He is thus at pains to slough off responsibility for the pain he’s caused. For the months since LIBERATION DAY, when he threw the global trade system into chaos, he’s disputed bad economic data or blamed it on Joe Biden (see bullet point number five), but those excuses were never credible and have only become less so with time.
Trump thus needs to point at something new, something more topical. If the government shuts down next week, that will likely be what he latches on to. And because most people can neither intuit the macroeconomic impact of a government shutdown, nor remember that none of our past shutdowns have wrecked the economy, it will scan as a credible claim to many people: Democrats shut down the government, the shutdown wrecked the economy, ergo it’s their fault.
Democrats will know to dispute the first half of that claim; I’m not certain they’ve anticipated the second. The best way to head it off is by driving home the point that the economy is already swirling down the bowl, establishing in people’s minds that Trump’s singularly responsible for the economic deterioration all around us.
They can’t do that without embracing new attention-driving tactics, and doing so with haste. Fortunately, we have a template: It’s the one Republicans used to help convince a majority of voters that the strong economy of the Biden years was actually weak. And the nice thing about it is that everyone can participate.
MEAT, IN THE MIDDLE
Remember egg prices?