Way back in 1992 or so, when Bill Clinton was running for president as a fairly obscure governor of Arkansas, there is the story that someone in his entourage kept a sign prominent in campaign headquarters as a reminder to the candidate and others about how one gets elected president.
We remember that message, of course -- "It's the economy, stupid!"
By focusing on the economy, the story went, and not wandering off into arcane policy issues or responding to the allegations of rape and abuse of women, Clinton could indeed win the White House. And, as history showed, he indeed won the White House.
Now we are engaged in what we refer to as the "midterm" campaign, in which control of the House and Senate is up for grabs. The Republicans hold the House of Representatives and the speakership, but every single House seat is up for election. The Republicans also hold the Senate, but only by a tiny margin, far too low to stop the filibuster, and a third of the Senate seats are up for election.
In a typical midterm, especially after an election where the president is new and of a different party from his predecessor, the party in power loses seats in the House -- lots of them. There is less precedent in the Senate, because there are three different election cycles and they happen to have differing numbers of Democrat and Republican incumbents -- this year, many more Democrat senators are up for reelection, and many of them are in states won by Donald Trump in 2016.
The conventional wisdom is that the Republicans will keep the Senate, and even gain seats, because of the election math -- very few vulnerable seats now Republican, and lots of Democrat senators in Trump-won states. But that "wisdom" is also that the Democrats should gain a lot of seats in the House, possibly enough to gain the majority and make Nancy Pelosi the speaker, may God forgive the words I just typed.
I reject that "wisdom", and not just because I would prefer that Republicans actually gain seats in the House and get up to 60 senators. I reject it because that Clinton aide who put that sign up was absolutely right. It is indeed the economy, and if a candidate ignores it, he or she is quite stupid.
By every measure, the economy that stagnated for eight years under the overtaxing, regulation-heavy Obama Administration has been freed, suddenly and dramatically, to where the 3% growth that was never achieved in the Obama era is the norm -- and the forecast for the next reported quarter could very possibly reach 4% annualized. Unemployment is next to nothing, as labor participation rates return from Obama-era lows. Tax cuts have led to better wages and bonuses and high retail sales.
The economy is where it is because Donald Trump is the president. There is no real argument or debate on that. Taxes and regulations are lessened, so businesses and manufacturers can hire and grow. There are, literally, more job openings than there are unemployed Americans. And there is nothing -- NOTHING -- that affects the American voters more than whether they can pay their bills and have money to spend.
That's what it meant 26 years ago when "It's the economy, stupid" was a catchphrase of the Clinton campaign. It means the same now. The American voter, for the most part, couldn't care less about the whole Russian collusion story and probably assumes that, if there were anything to it, we'd have known long ago. It does not really affect the American voter if illegals cross the border away from entry points and have their children held to ensure that the parents show up for their court date.
But the economy, ah, the economy.
Unless we're talking about some California district that is so far left that it actually elects a geriatric limousine leftist like Nancy Pelosi, the voters in every district in the nation are in better shape than they were at the end of the Obama years, and they know it. The Democrats can claim "conventional wisdom" for the midterms, but the conventional wisdom and every other factor fall away if the economy is so positively reflecting the Trump effect.
And yet ... last week, President Trump came out of the White House for a Q&A with a host from Fox News, which was followed by an open, impromptu news conference that went on for a very long time. About an hour of questions, something that never happened under the pompous and secretive Obama. Want to know how many questions from the leftists in the press to President Trump were about the economy? Not a single one about the economy, stupid. And that's what is actually cared about by the voter. Just saying.
Democrats will need to come up with something a whole lot more compelling than their current platform, which consists of ... um ... well, not being Donald Trump, I guess. Unfortunately, they have taken a year and a half to vilify the president as their sole reason for existence, while at the same time the subject of their vilification has been driving the denuclearization of North Korea and the destruction of ISIS, standing up to unfair foreign trade practices, and has lit the fuse on an economic boom that every voter is feeling, for the better.
They have nothing, the Democrats do, and unfortunately for them and the conventional wisdom, they are asking for people to vote against candidates supporting a president who has undeniably made their life better.
Good luck with that. It is, after all, the economy. Stupid.
Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton