Barring a recession, Donald Trump’s best asset in 2020 will be the strength of the U. S. economy. Thus, Democrats will need a robust counter-message. Fortunately, they already have one: wages are too low, and health-care costs are too high.
In fact, since Washington’s deficit and inflation hawks go silent whenever a Republican president takes office, Trump has actually managed to strengthen the recovery by passing a giant fiscal stimulus, and cowing the Fed into going (appropriately) easy with rate hikes.
Of course, all expansions must die. Global growth is slowing, much of corporate America looks over-leveraged, and the stimulative impact of the Trump tax cuts are starting to fade (if not backfire). Economic winter is coming. But the most recent indicators suggest it won’t come soon enough for the Democratic Party. Since the Fed backed off of interest rate hikes earlier this year, leading stock market indexes have rallied to new heights, while GDP growth has remained solid, and unemployment near historic lows. Many top analysts have thus downgraded the risk of an imminent recession (“inverted yield curve,” be damned).
“We don’t really have a robust national message right now” on the economy, said Celinda Lake, a leading Democratic strategist and pollster. “We will tend to talk about things like paid leave and equal pay — and those things are all very popular policies. But they don’t add up to an economic message that is robust enough to win the presidency and beat Donald Trump, who talks about a very robust economic policy.”
She said, “You may agree or not with it, but you know what [his message] is. And Democrats, you don’t know what it is. And that’s a recipe for disaster in 2020.”
… “Our view is that Democrats would be very wise to recognize how steep the mountain is on the economy,” said Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way. “There are things about this economy that are very popular — low unemployment, a lot of jobs, there’s been some real wage increase. We attribute zero, zero percent of that to good Trump policy… But he will claim credit, as he does for the sun rising and everything else, and we have to be aware that could be potent.”
He said, “What that means is that we need a very clear economic narrative that resonates deeply with the voters that we have to win, and we better not be caught up in our own blue bubble world.
