Memo: A Fall To Do List for Democrats - COVID, A Growing Economy, Climate, Immigration
This memo was released before the shocking SCOTUS Texas Roe decision. In a new memo we discuss how that decision makes the need for Democrats to aggressively lean into the dangerous radicalization of the right far more urgent.
4 Items On The Fall Dem To Do List - Over the past few weeks NDN has written a series of pieces on how the Democrats can approach the busy Fall ahead. At its core we believe the President must clearly articulate what the nation gets from refocusing its blood and treasure away from Afghanistan, and frame the coming fights as steps to move forward, not retreat. We strongly believe the President can win this argument in the coming months, get his agenda passed and help the nation refocus its energies on far more compelling challenges - with defeating COVID being job #1.
Perhaps our greatest worry for Democrats in the days ahead is that the size and ambition of the President’s agenda makes it hard to sell. Most elected officials can only successfully sell 2-3 big ideas, policies or stories to their electorate each cycle. What in this enormous package is most important to sell? As much attention needs to be given now how to sell this big agenda – infrastructure plus reconciliation plus American Rescue Plan – as what goes into the final details of the legislation itself.
Last Friday’s Navigator Research poll offers some clues about how Dems can prioritize their agenda for voters. The poll asks (q22) what are the “top four issues that you feel are most important for President Joe Biden and Congress to focus on?” For Democrats they are COVID (55%), health care and climate/extreme weather (36%) and jobs and the economy (33%). For independents it’s COVID (38%), jobs and the economy (36%), health care (25%) and then several issues are all bunched up within a few points of each other a few points lower – Social Security and Medicare, immigration, government corruption, climate change/extreme weather.
It’s also important to note that this poll breaks out “taxes," ”wages” and “inflation” as separate issues, and none of these three broke into the top tier of issues for Democrats or independents. But adding them to the jobs and economy total pushes the economic basket of issues to the very top for both.
What this data suggests is that Democrats should emphasize that their agenda does four big things – defeats COVID/improves health care, invests in broad-based prosperity, tackles climate change and modernizes our immigration system. We put immigration fourth as it is our expectation that the enormous Afghan refugee resettlement project along with ongoing struggles to manage heavy flows at the border is likely to keep immigration/refugees a top tier issue through the election, and one we think Democrats need to lean into much more. Some 2022 candidates may want to focus a bit more on Social Security and Medicare given their districts or states, and in general we think Democrats would be wise to more purposefully counter the big government/radical left/wasteful government narrative which will be so central to the GOP attacks this election cycle and most election cycles since the 1960s.
So this polling tracks the priorities we laid out for Democrats in our recent memo – focus now on defeating COVID/improving health, creating an economy which works for all, tackling climate change and modernizing/fixing our immigration system. Individual candidates can tweak this formula, but broadly, if Democrats next year can tell voters that these are the things that we did – not just legislated against - we should be competitive in what is likely to be a tough election next year.
Like many, we’d also like to see the President flesh out an important part of his agenda not covered here, his commitment to fight the global and domestic battle of democracy vs autocracy. Perhaps his coming United Nations General Assembly speech would be the right place for such an address. Certainly many of us here in the US are worried about the unceasing radicalization on the right, and would like to understand how it fits into his broader agenda.
Moving Beyond Tactics, Lowering Costs, Tax Cuts - Finally, we’d like to offer an in-depth critique of/meditation on some of the current efforts to sell the President’s agenda. First, the emphasis on lowering costs and targeted middle class taxes are tactics, not strategy. They are a means to the end, and the end is the 4-5 priorities above. We should be focusing on the outcomes, the strategy in our initial top line messaging, not how we get there. It feels like we’ve gotten too tactical too quickly. Folks need to know more about our overall goals and objectives before we drill down. It’s like starting a campaign with an issue ad rather than a bio ad. There is basic work we haven't done yet before getting to the narrower bits.
Second, it is very hard for down ballot Democrats to sell programs whose benefits are targeted to specific groups rather than universal, for everyone. Most campaigns can only convey 2-3 things to voters during the course of an election, and the more universal the benefit the easier it is to sell (as it reaches more voters). Its one reason why the infrastructure package is polling so high right now – everyone benefits from it, so it’s easier to sell. Yes, modern campaigns can micro-target communications to specific groups but selling a series of targeted benefits is beyond the financial and operational capacity of all but a very few 2022 campaigns. This is an instance when bigger is not necessarily better.
Third, a new series of ads by the pro-Biden group Building Back Together suggests there may be challenges with selling direct benefits to voters. Watch this particular ad. Clearly the research behind the ad found hesitancy about proud working people accepting government benefits. This seems important, a red flag even. Do voters, families, all of us – want more help from government or more opportunity to make more money, earn it ourselves? This ad suggests that folks want help but they don’t want welfare, “handouts.” And this is no small matter for it means that folks may get the benefit but will not be happy or grateful about it, and thus it may not work as a matter of politics regardless of the efficacy of the program itself.
Given that the American Rescue Plan passed in March has already implemented large direct payment programs, including the Child Tax Credit, and both the President’s overall job approval and economic job approval have gone down, there is a question about whether this strategy of putting so much emphasis on targeted, direct payments to people is the right course in the months ahead. As a matter of political strategy, it is hard to argue that it's working so far. This is an area which needs some intense discussion inside the Democratic family.
Fourth, promoting universal rather targeted benefits does one other really important thing – it reminds us that we are all in this together. It is implicit rejection of the rancid tribalism Trump brought to our politics. Restoring a sense of national common purpose should also be one of our highest priorities – for there is probably no other more powerful way to move beyond the darkness the former President brought.
Fifth, we know that some of these ads are already talking about how the big tax increases coming will only hit people making $400,000 or more. That’s fine, but it feels like a data point that needs to come later in the conversation with voters We will get far more acceptance on the tax increases from people, particularly those paying the taxes whose votes we need, if there is a broad sense across the country that the money will be well spent, that the need is urgent, and important things for all of us will come from it all. We need to establish the virtue of the whole package first, before we can get to more granular matters, like targeted benefits or even who is paying it for all. Establishing the virtue of the President's entire domestic agenda - America Rescue Plan + infrastructure + reconciliation - seems to be the most important marketing work ahead now and perhaps all the way through the election itself.
Leading with an agenda that does a few big things to make all of us better, stronger, more prosperous surely is easier to sell than one that does dozens of smaller things for targeted groups. To be clear - we are not advocating abandoning the targeted programs in the coming reconciliation package, but we are suggesting that it may be difficult to build an electoral or political pitch around them. And we end by acknowledging that we are not seeing all the research team Biden is seeing, and that all of this well intentioned friendly counsel is way way off the mark.
