And They Think YOU'RE Stupid
The Biden White House and their political advisors aren't impressing their pollsters with their late messenging. And they're not impressing voters, either, on abortion.
File this under “you can’t make this up.”
By Alex Thompson, from the useful Democratic party organ, Politico.com:
It’s an article of faith among Democrats that their party is deeply hampered by its inability or unwillingness to tout its own accomplishments.
But what if that conventional wisdom wasn’t just wrong but terribly, harmfully so?
That’s the warning being issued by one of the party’s most seasoned pollsters, STAN GREENBERG. In memos, private communications and interviews, Greenberg has been imploring the party to — let’s put this bluntly — shut the hell up about all the work it’s done. It’s not that voters don’t care. He says voters actively turn against Democrats when they hear it.
“It’s our worst performing message,” Greenberg told West Wing Playbook. “I’ve tested it. I did Biden’s exact words, his exact speech. And that’s the test where we lost all of our leads… It said to the voters that this election is about my accomplishments as a leader and not about the challenges you’re experiencing.”
Greenberg has some authority to speak to non-effective midterm messaging. He was BILL CLINTON’s pollster leading up to the 1994 Democratic blood bath. He famously delivered a scorcher of a post-mortem that laid blame at the feet of BARACK OBAMA and his White House for midterm losses in 2010.
This go-around, he’s offering a pre-mortem of sorts, though similarly blistering.
“I’m stunned about how much of the Democratic commentary is winging it,” he said in an interview. "[Republicans are] hitting us on crime and border and inflation…. That has huge power. And we have the self-satisfied message of how much we’ve accomplished rather than being focused on what is happening to people.”
Asked if President JOE BIDEN himself had it right, he didn’t flinch. “Nope,” said Greenberg. “I saw their visuals when they were campaigning with the West in which they were talking about helping families with high costs. So they’ve made a turn with addressing it but they’re also combining it with a message of how great a job they’re doing.”
Biden’s remarks Friday, which took place after our interview with Greenberg, notably focused more on future battles over the debt ceiling, entitlement programs and which party is best situated to tackle inflation. He’s also called recently for capping the price of insulin for kids and codifying abortion rights soon in the next Congress.
Greenberg’s advice for Democrats is not to completely ignore the legislation they’ve passed, but to present it as useful remedies for tackling the problems of the future. Tout student debt relief and prescription drug price reforms, but only “in the context of how it is helping them with the cost of living, not as a means of boasting about your accomplishments.”
For all his saltiness about the current state of his party’s affairs, Greenberg is not entirely nihilistic about the upcoming election. He described himself as “bearish” but “keeping the door open” to the possibility of a decent night for Democrats, citing intense polarization, the registration wave of women voters and DONALD TRUMP’s lingering presence in the national conversation as factors that would undoubtedly help.
“It’s amazing that this is a competitive election at all,” he said.
You may wonder why the abortion issue has abated in voters’ minds since the Jackson Health vs. Dobbs decision came down from the US Supreme Court, overturning Roe vs. Wade and Planned Parenthood vs. Casey. It seems as if many GOP candidates followed my advice. You’re welcome, but it wasn’t rocket science.
National Review’s Nate Hochman:
U.S. voters believe that the mainstream Democratic Party’s position on abortion is “more extreme” than the mainstream Republican position by a nearly two-to-one margin, according to a new survey from Republican polling firm WPA Intelligence.
The poll of 1,000 voters, which was conducted on October 6–10 and provided exclusively to National Review, presented respondents with two options: “allowing abortions up until 9 months of pregnancy for any reason,” or “restricting abortions to only in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is in danger.” When asked which of the two was “more extreme,” 57 percent of respondents chose “allowing abortions up until 9 months of pregnancy for any reason,” as opposed to just 29 percent who chose “restricting abortions to only in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is in danger.” Fourteen percent said they were unsure which of the two positions is more extreme.
The new survey may help explain at least part of the reason why the GOP’s post-Dobbs political slump appears to be in the rearview mirror. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, with the six Republican-appointed justices in agreement, conventional wisdom dictated that the abortion issue would be a millstone around the neck of Republicans running in competitive races in the midterms. But just a few months later, the GOP appears to be surging back to pre-summer levels of red-wave momentum: “Not long ago, President Biden and congressional Democrats were riding high,” Matthew Continetti wrote earlier this month. “Now it’s autumn, and there is a chill in the air and a change in the political temperature. Republicans, the polls suggest, have a path to a Senate majority. They are on track to take the House. The GOP has recovered from its summer swoon.”
Much of this has to do with the elevation of other issues — crime, inflation, the border and so on — over abortion; in fact, abortion consistently ranks lower on most voters’ list of priorities than kitchen-table, quality-of-life concerns. But it also has to do with the GOP’s having found its footing, after three months of wandering in the wilderness, when it comes to abortion messaging. Republicans running in once-tight Senate races, like J. D. Vance in Ohio and Marco Rubio in Florida, have stuck the landing when the issue has arisen in recent debates — and their polling leads look increasingly comfortable.
The GOP was momentarily flummoxed by the surge of Democrat attacks following the overturn of Roe. But once Republicans recovered from their defensive crouch on the issue and began going on the attack, pointing out that even the ostensible moderate Democrats running in right-leaning areas refuse to support any restrictions on abortion, left-wing attempts to paint the GOP as extreme lost their potency. The shift drives home the broader point that, in contrast to conventional wisdom in certain segments of the Republican consultant class, the way to win on abortion isn’t to avoid or minimize the issue — it’s to go on the attack. Fifty-seven percent of voters see the stance on abortion held by all but one of the candidates in the 2019 Democratic presidential primaries as more extreme than the mainstream Republican one. That’s the textbook definition of a winning issue.