It’s less than six days before the midterms, and a Republican senator, in a way-too-tight of a race, went on C-SPAN and said: "This is one of the best economies I've ever seen in my lifetime."
That was Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas. A mere two days earlier, White House top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, went on Fox Business with: "the affordability crisis — it's a myth!"
It’s gotten to the point where I’m kind of tired of posting on Twitter about how horrifying and out of touch these statements are. But they aren’t really inconvenient gaffes. They’re a two-year pattern of deep, structural political failure, and it’s starting to make me question the whole viability of the Republican party as a vessel for economic populism. I told the White House. I even told the President to his face. But there has been no course correction, or any indication of straying from the pattern of ignoring the existential financial strain most Americans are dealing with, and cherry-picking the most rosy Wall Street / MBA economist globohomo metrics. This is the biggest failure of the Trump administration (NOT IRAN) and Republicans better get smart, fast, or they are going to become the permanent arch nemesis of affordability.
Let's be honest about what's actually broken, because Americans are deeply invested in this, whether or not anyone in DC is. YouGov’s “Is the economy getting better or worse” tracking shows quite clearly that Americans have entered a period of unprecedented economic crisis post-COVID, and the numbers have been impervious to the “official” economic reports. And furthermore, Gallup tracking of which party will keep the country prosperous went from R+14 in 2023 to D+14 in 2026. Such rapid shifts are NOT common in politics, and, with the economic numbers pretty stagnant, it’s clear that what is causing this is almost entirely an issue of leadership and messaging.
If you live inside the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Fox Business green room, life is beautiful. Corporate profits are 14.9% of GDP, the fattest share since records began in 1947. The S&P is north of 7,800. Where is that bottle of Dom? But then there are the numbers that nobody on Capitol Hill reads. Workers' share of national income is 52.8%, the lowest ever recorded. The top 1% now own more of America than the entire middle class. And in my polling, 64% of Americans say the economy works mainly for the wealthy and well-connected, including 51% of Trump's OWN voters. Half the MAGA base thinks the economy is rigged for the very (groomed and finely suited) people the MAGA government keeps putting on TV to tell them how great the economy is!
Nowhere is “capitalism” failing harder than with young Americans. The median first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old. Half of adults under 30 live with a parent. 42% of recent college grads are underemployed. The birth rate is the lowest since the government started counting in 1909. Only 17% of Americans think their kids will do better than they did. Yes, that’s the American Dream, and it is basically room temperature. So young people are shopping for a new economic order, and Gallup has Americans under 35 rating socialism above capitalism, 57% to 43%, while socialistic practices like taxing the wealthy are now overwhelmingly popular among every demographic, including the free market boomers, who don’t want ANYONE touching their entitlements (4% would consider cutting them).
And the biggest problem here isn’t a policy. It’s the President. In two years, Trump has told Americans that prices are hard to bring down once they’re up, that the golden age has begun, that he wants home values to go UP in a country where first-time buyers are 40, that affordability is a “hoax” and a “con job,” that the economy deserves an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus,” and that we broke 50,000 on the Dow. Then he went to Dallas and offered every adult $5,000 if they keep Republicans in charge. Pick one! You can’t tell voters there’s no problem and then pay them to forget about it.
But voters decided early that Trump wasn’t going to usher in economic relief. The YouGov line (60%+ saying the economy is getting worse since COVID) has dipped below 40% exactly twice, once for Biden’s inauguration and once for Trump’s, and Trump’s bump died even faster. Both were gone in a matter of months. The realization that he wasn’t going to fix their situation came FIRST, before his inexorable approval decline, before the reversal of economic issue polling, and definitely before the House popular vote became unwinnable. And now we approach a midterm election where, at this point in a term, you’d have to look back to Nixon’s resignation to find a president who was more underwater. Meanwhile, Democrats are laughing their way to the electoral bank, because all they really had to do was sit back and watch a pro-business, donor-captured party refuse to even attempt to roll back what has become an EXTREMELY influential corporatist oligarchy.
That’s the whole story right there. We could summarize the issue by saying “Trump’s economic messaging was incoherent,” but that’s kind of the symptom, not the disease. The donors own the economic dashboard, the consultants read it out loud, and the President repeats whatever number makes his friends look good. The corporations in concert with the state are the enemy, and the Republican Party isn’t attacking that enemy. Not even close (look at MAHA).
What I told the President last November still stands. Second-term America is desperate in a way first-term America never was, and it needed an economic wartime president: somebody who says things suck, names the enemy, and stays on mission every single day. Troops need to know the general understands who the enemy is, has a well-reasoned strategy, and stays on-mission (NO BALLROOMS!). I told him the base wanted him to smash the oligarchy, not BE the oligarchy. He listened. He asked questions. But then the conversation drifted to Lindsay Graham’s golf game.
The platform is sitting, forlorn in the open, for anyone to pick up. I laid it out this month for a room of young Hill staffers at the Conservative Partnership Institute, and every plank wins with Republican voters. Break up the corporations that dominate tech, agriculture, health care and banking (61%). Tax great fortunes and close the loopholes (62%). Make hospitals and insurers post real prices upfront (91%). Ban Wall Street from buying up single-family homes (74%). And stop handing out corporate tax cuts that never trickle down – nobody thinks that works anymore. Use your imagination! Pretty much anything that holds rent-seekers accountable, flattens the economy, and increases competition is astoundingly popular. Voters are smart (smarter than the Chamber of Commerce)! Unforgiving economic referees, fewer gatekeepers. Call it a new Square Deal. We can’t wait forever until Republicans stumble into Teddy Roosevelt-ism, because at this point Democrats are going to get to FDR extremely quickly.
Until the GOP is aligned on that platform, from the Oval Office down to the last House candidate, no ad buy and no $5,000 check will fix this. Populism isn’t a slogan. It’s an imperative, and we’re getting a Roosevelt either way. There was a Republican Party who once told a desperate country the economy was booming, and they lost more than 150 House seats and didn’t win the White House again for twenty years. Who was president? Hoover.
