Democrats fear that President Donald Trump’s winning economy may spell electoral doom for them in 2020, Politico reports, citing at least one top Democrat pollster.
“Republicans have long believed that if only the economy held up, President Donald Trump could win a second term,” Politico’s David Siders wrote this weekend in a piece filed from Las Vegas, Nevada:
Following another spate of positive economic news — and without a cohesive economic message of their own — many Democrats are starting to fear he might. Anxiety on the left reached new heights last week, with the government reporting that the nation’s economy had grown at an unexpectedly fast pace in the first quarter of the year. While Trump took credit for the surging economy, Democratic presidential contenders were immersing themselves in the Mueller report and debating whether incarcerated felons should be allowed to vote.
The piece quotes Democrat pollster and strategist Celinda Lake admitting that the Democrats do not have a coherent overarching national economic message, other than their arguments for a hodgepodge of a variety of policies, such as paid leave and “equal pay,” and that Trump does–and it may hurt the Democrats significantly.
“We don’t really have a robust national message right now [when it comes to the economy],” Lake said. “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.”
“You may agree or not with it, but you know what [his message] is. And Democrats, you don’t know what it is,” Lake added. “And that’s a recipe for disaster in 2020.”
On Friday, the government announced that under President Trump last quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) had risen to 3.2 percent. This news was music to Trump’s team’s ears, as expectations predicted that GDP last quarter would come in potentially under 2 percent. This latest GDP number and lasting low unemployment in virtually every demographic, along with rising wages and many other positive economic statistics, have Trump’s team buzzing with optimism heading into 2020.
“They don’t have a message because they have all said from day one that if Donald Trump was elected the Dow would fall by 50 percent, unemployment would go through the roof, because they never believed that he would win–but what we’ve seen now is the deregulatory environment coupled with the historic tax cuts that he put in place have hit a hyper-growth for this economy right now,” Corey Lewandowski, President Trump’s former campaign manager, said on Breitbart News Sunday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel on Sunday evening. “We’ve got the lowest unemployment for African Americans, for Hispanic Americans, for Asian Americans, for women … ever recorded,” he said, stating he was speaking “literally.” He continued, “In some places, we have the lowest unemployment in 50 years as people who are looking for jobs. This economy is on fire. We are the fastest growing economy in the world right now because of the environment that this president has created, and the Democrats have no message.”
Politico went on in its piece to quote another leftist, Matt Bennett of the “center-left group” Third Way, to say that Democrats should heed warning when it comes to attacking the economy under Trump because there are many popular elements of it–but the group did not give Trump credit for delivering those.
“Our view is that Democrats would be very wise to recognize how steep the mountain is on the economy,” Bennett said, adding:
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 that could be potent.
Lewandowski, in his Breitbart News Sunday interview, blasted leftists for refusing to credit Trump for the economic successes of his administration.
“They don’t want to give this president the credit he deserves for being successful, for coming into the White House as a business executive and doing exactly what he said he was going to do, which was to bring back seven million new jobs, 600,000 manufacturing jobs, all when the previous administration told us they were gone forever,” Lewandowski said. “That’s why people love the work that Donald Trump is doing, and the economy is reflective of that.”
But even though he will not give Trump credit, Bennett of Third Way admits that Democrats are failing to sell Americans on their policy vision for the economy.
“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,” Bennett added, according to Politico.
As of now, though, Democrats do not have such an economic narrative designed to appeal to those voters who delivered Trump the presidency. Many Democrats were hoping that former Vice President Joe Biden’s entry into the race would spark that working class rust belt community to come back their way in 2020, but leading Trumpocrats–lifelong working class Democrats who broke with their party in 2016 to support Trump in 2016–say Biden is not fooling them, and they are sticking with their man Trump.
“I think that there’s a facade there [in] Lunchpail Joe from Scranton, blue-collar Joe,” Trumpocrat Billy Bova said of Biden on Breitbart News Saturday this past weekend. “The Democrats [and] Democrat establishment — the Wall Street, the corporatists, the Hollywood elite, the Silicon Valley elites — are trying to get a candidate — and maybe they see Joe Biden as that candidate — who can walk the streets of small towns in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan and Wisconsin and Kentucky and West Virginia and carry a black lunchpail and identify with the average working class — fighting their way into the middle class — voters’ hearts. I think they see that in Joe Biden.”
Bova added during that interview that Trump is the working class guy, and American workers are sticking with the president.
“Our exports are increasing every month,” Bova said. “The trade deficit is coming down with these other nations. … That means jobs for Americans and American business, industry, and plants, and factories. It means better wages and wage increases for the workers and the employees. It means there’s more in their pocketbooks [and] bank accounts. They feel more better and more secure about themselves, their children’s futures, and their economic well-being. They’re feeling pretty good about that right now with Donald Trump being a fighter, who they think is a fighter on their side, and it’s playing out.”
Biden’s status as former President Barack Obama’s wingman–and Obama’s looming presence over the Democrat Party as a whole–may come back to haunt Democrats in 2020, especially given Obama’s claims in 2016 that no president could do what Donald Trump has done with the economy. Obama infamously claimed that to do what Trump was promising he would do would require a “magic wand.” Trump allies now mock that line, as Donald Trump Jr. said in a previous interview with Breitbart News: “Abra Cadabra!”
“He did say that,” Lewandowski said when asked about Obama’s magic wand comments on Sunday evening’s program. “But you have to remember, all he did for the first two years of his administration was complain about how the Bush administration left him a terrible economy. But now for the first two years of the Trump administration, all Obama is doing is taking credit for what Donald Trump has done. I mean, this is what always happens. These guys live in a false sense of reality. The fact is under Barack Obama the new normal of our growth was 1.2 to 1.4 percent. What we saw once again under this president [Trump] in the first quarter was another three on the board. When they were expecting a high one-and-a-half or maybe a low two, he puts a three up on the board because our economy is booming. We have so many open jobs. We have more open jobs today than we have applicants. People who have had jobs for a long time know that they’ve got economic stability, can go and look for another job to better themselves, and the people who are at the lowest rung of our economic ladders have more economic opportunities today than they’ve ever had in their life.”
LISTEN TO COREY LEWANDOWSKI ON BREITBART NEWS SUNDAY:
Politico argued that part of the Democrats’ inability to focus on a coherent economic message stems not just from their leaders on Capitol Hill being obsessed with impeachment of Trump and the failure by special counsel Robert Mueller to find any evidence of collusion or obstruction, but also the diverse Democrat field and all the competing voices trying to break through for attention on the presidential campaign trail.
“In part, Democrats’ inability to advance a focused message on the issue is a function of the breadth of the primary field — a presumably curable condition once the party selects a nominee,” Politico’s Siders wrote. He added:
Every top tier Democratic candidate speaks frequently about significant parts of the economy, from income inequality to the cost of health care and higher education. And most progressive Democrats advance those concerns as part of a broader call for a fairer economy. But with its diffuse voices, the party has not yet tied it all together in a disciplined and specific economic argument designed to counter Trump.
Jason Miller, President Trump’s former communications director, mocked the Democrats on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel this weekend for having two elderly white men–Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont–at the front of the Democrats’ 2020 pack in most polls, both of whom bring no new or exciting ideas or any coherent national message on this front to the table.
“Maybe the new ‘woke’ is not being ‘woke,'” Miller joked. “I don’t know. I’m not quite up to speed on ultra-‘wokeness.’ But I don’t think that the Biden candidacy is particularly ‘woke.’… If you talk to Democrats out there, if you talk to Democratic strategists, here’s the thing that they will tell you: Joe Biden is the best surrogate and best wingman that any candidate in the Democratic field or anyone running for Democratic office could have.”
LISTEN TO JASON MILLER ON BREITBART NEWS SATURDAY: