To beat back a GOP victory my fellow Dems must focus on economy in last days before midterms

For most of the past year, I’ve been shouting from the rooftops that the midterms will focus on the state of the economy, and especially rising costs. In 2022, it seems that voters feel the same way they did exactly 30 years ago. This year, when it comes to how people are going to cast their votes in the voting booth, it is still the economy, stupid. 

Democrats were certainly handed a bit of a break over the summer when voters retaliated against the activist Supreme Court’s decision to overturn almost a half-century of precedent on Roe v. Wade. This decision to return to the states the ability to regulate a woman’s choice over her own body was met with swift rejection in deep red states like Kansas and Alaska and polls across the country tightened. Candidates rushed to focus their television advertisements on the radical abortion views of the Republican Party, and Democrats like me saw a glimmer of a silver lining in the approaching dark clouds. Yet, as we approach the final weeks of the election season, it seems that much of this voter anger on abortion has dissipated, and the focus has returned to inflation, gas prices and the economy. 

Earlier this year, voters ranked economic issues as more important than social issues by a fairly narrow 31%-23% margin. Today, 49% of voters say economic issues are the most important, including 22% who list inflation as their top singular issue. Only 26% say social issues, of which 6% say abortion is the most important. This 6% is the same percentage of voters focused on solving immigration, creating affordable healthcare, and restoring honesty and integrity to Washington. Even worse, 60% of voters now believe that we are in a recession, including a majority of both Democratic and Independent voters. 

DEMOCRATS PUSH FOR STRONGER ECONOMIC MESSAGE AHEAD OF MIDTERMS: 'WE'VE GOT TO DO A BETTER JOB'

Thankfully, there are sole Democrats who are getting it right. In both the Arizona and Ohio U.S. Senate races, Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Kelly and Rep. Tim Ryan have focused almost exclusively on a populist economic message that resonates with Trump voters. This ability to thread the needle and take the fight to out-of-touch venture capitalists like Blake Masters and J.D. Vance, should serve as a blueprint for other Democratic candidates in the final stretch of the campaign.

As is oft-repeated each election cycle, the first midterm for an incumbent president’s party is usually a heartbreaker for those in power. The American voter seems to relish in rejecting the party they just elected: even when that party is, like Biden-led Democrats, one of the most successful in history.  

So, over the next two weeks, Democrats in every corner of the country need to be honest with their voters about economic issues and explain how we got here, and what Democrats have done to fix the mess we were in. Those running up and down the ballot on Team Blue need to stop focusing on too-cute-by-half tweets and instead focus on the kitchen-table issues which will actually decide this election.  

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Each candidate should shout from the rooftops the success we have achieved for the American people: 10 million jobs created by this administration, including 700,000 manufacturing jobs; a 50-year low unemployment rate; and the largest ever one-year decline in the deficit, a $1.5 trillion reduction. Democrats also passed a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill that’s already breaking ground on projects across the country, passed a tax credit for parents that brought child poverty to the lowest point in history, and finally passed a bill allowing Medicare to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs, which will cut health care costs dramatically for Americans.  

On Friday from the White House, President Joe Biden took the fight to the GOP in pointed remarks on the economy, zeroing in on reckless GOP promises to use the debt ceiling as leverage to cut American’s social safety net and Republican goals to reverse popular programs. "Folks, we know what the Republicans in Congress will do if they regain power. They’re telling us. They’re being straight up about it. They’re going to repeal lower prescription drug prices I just signed into law and raise drug prices. They’re going to cut Social Security and Medicare. They’ll pass massive tax cuts for the wealthy, make them permanent — which they’re not now — the individual tax cuts. They’ll threaten the very foundations of the American economy if we don’t meet their demands."

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Democrats should adopt the president’s economic message in the final two weeks of the campaign cycle. There is still plenty of space to paint the GOP as radical in the wake of the Dobbs decision on abortion, which is an animating issue for many Democrats, Independents and even some Republicans, but "feeling the pain" of voters when it comes to current economic hardships and providing a contrasting message for the extreme positions of the GOP. Three decades later, it’s "still the economy, stupid," and Democrats must recalibrate their messaging in the final two weeks to stem the tide on November 8.  

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