The blunt messaging underscores one of the biggest challenges facing Democrats as they try to defeat the incumbent president: the need to define themselves and their ideas before Trump and his conservative allies do it for them.
The Republican National Committee has already begun polling in 16 states to assess ways to discredit ideas like “Medicare for all,” which Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed in a bill this week, and build on the party’s broader argument that Democratic candidates like Sanders are promoting an extreme socialist agenda. Social conservative leaders have met with White House officials to discuss calling attention to Democratic-sponsored legislation to loosen restrictions on abortion in the second and third trimesters, like one that passed recently in New York.
The recent focus on health care and abortion follows well-coordinated attacks on policies like the Green New Deal, which reduced the far-reaching climate change proposal to a punch line with jokes about cow flatulence and putting farms out of business.
Some Democratic strategists said they have been taken aback recently by how successful Trump and Republicans have been at setting the terms of the debate around liberal policy ideas. And they are encouraging their party to be more nimble and deliver a more concise and accessible message.
In a fight with Trump, they say, nuance is not usually the Democrats’ best weapon.
“What our side has to understand is that to fight Trump, it’s a battle for definition,” said Celinda Lake, a top Democratic pollster who has been working with left-of-center groups on a strategy to counter the messaging campaign from the right.
“The Democrats will issue a 61-page white paper that nobody in their right mind will pass on to their friends,” she added. “He uses a one-sentence slogan, and his voters feel emboldened to share it, pass it on.”
Democrats say they expect an asymmetrical battle against an opponent who makes his own rules and possesses a singular ability to saturate the national conversation. This can cut both ways, especially on issues like immigration, where it is not clear whether Trump’s fitful threats to close the southern border feed the perception that he is a crisis mitigator or instigator.
Still, the president’s purge of the Homeland Security Department this week signals his belief that strict immigration enforcement is a winning issue for him. And while the wall he promised in 2016 remains unbuilt, he will continue to look for new ways to hold a hard line on border security
It is not clear whether any of the Republican messaging is having an impact on voters outside of the president’s so far unmovable base. But Lake said that as she surveyed likely 2020 swing voters, she was surprised to hear people in focus groups repeat false assertions made by the president and his allies — that Democrats would end air travel in the United States and shut down dairy farms and beef production because of greenhouse-gas emissions from cows.
“It’s amazing the number of people who would volunteer that,” she said. The actual language in the proposal calls for cleaner transportation and agriculture “as much as is technologically feasible.” The misperception about cows and airplanes originated with a now-retracted fact sheet published by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office that contained an ironic aside about getting rid of "farting cows and airplanes.”
Republicans said they also saw “Medicare for all”-type proposals as a way to give their rallying cries on socialism more substance and potency. Some plans, like the one put forward by Sanders, would largely eliminate private insurance plans, which Republicans have found is overwhelmingly unpopular with the kinds of voters they need to win back.
“The debate that’s going to play out in suburbs across the country is a choice between capitalism versus socialism,” said Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. “When Democrats talk about abolishing private health insurance, for example, most of my friends are on private insurance plans through their jobs or their husbands’ jobs. They don’t want to lose that. They don’t want to wait in line to get to the pediatrician.”
“Whichever Democrat wins the nomination will have to own their party’s socialist agenda,” she added. “That’s a debate that President Trump is eager to have and knows he can win.”
The Republicans’ data on voters from the 2018 midterms showed that coverage of pre-existing medical conditions was the top issue of concern. But here they face a serious disadvantage: They have no health care plan of their own.
But they have been testing messaging on health care with likely voters in the 16 states they believe will be the most competitive in 2020. These include ones Trump narrowly won like Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida, as well as those he won by larger margins but have tilted more Democratic lately, like Arizona and North Carolina. The RNC found that when voters were told that “Medicare for all” would eliminate private insurance and create a government-run system paid for by higher taxes, independents, married women and union members disliked the idea by wide margins. Among married women alone, nearly 60 percent disapproved.
Trump’s own approach at labeling Democrats has been inconsistent. He has yet to come up with the kind of indelible rhetorical device that he used to repeatedly brand his opponents in 2016. So far he has nothing like “Crooked Hillary,” “Little Marco’’ and “Low energy Jeb,” which delighted many of his supporters two years ago.
Trump has occasionally made graphic and false claims that Democrats support legislation that would allow “executing babies AFTER birth,” as he said in a recent tweet. During a meeting at the White House before his State of the Union address that included some conservative activists, Trump expressed amazement at comments by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who defended a bill that would put fewer hurdles in front of women who want abortions in later stages of pregnancy. “Can you believe this governor of Virginia?” the president said, according to someone at the meeting.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says such late-term abortions are extremely rare. Only about 1.3 percent of abortions in the United States in 2015 were performed in or after the 21st week of pregnancy, the agency reported.
But anti-abortion activists said the efforts in some states like New York and Virginia to remove certain barriers to second and third trimester abortions allowed them to present the issue to voters in a new and graphic light. Democrats have struggled to defend the new legislation; privately some say they are not being persuasive in explaining the health situations the bills address while the other side accuses them of condoning infanticide.
While polls show that Americans support allowing abortion in the first three months by wide margins, that support drops sharply when people are asked in general about the second and third trimesters. (They overwhelmingly support exceptions if the mother’s life is endangered.)
“We’re in a totally different environment,” said Mallory Quigley, vice president of communications for the Susan B. Anthony List, a group that opposes abortion rights and that plans to test messages on the issue with voters in the months ahead.
Democrats say they cannot let Trump and other Republicans go unanswered as they try to link the party to socialism — a term that Americans view negatively overall — and to extremism in a broader sense. That has been the motivation behind Republicans’ intense focus on two young, freshman members of Congress: Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who calls herself a democratic socialist; and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, whose criticism of Israel led the president and others to condemn her as an anti-Semite. Some of Omar’s most vocal defenders have been self-described democratic socialists.
And this week Republicans angrily condemned her after seizing a few words from a speech in which she appeared to blithely refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as “some people did something.” She denied this, and her full statement shows she was making a broader point about Islamophobia.
Even if Americans say they like policies that are derivative of socialism, like Social Security, the term “connotes very clear imagery to people in a very dog whistle kind of way,” said Jefrey Pollock, president of the Global Strategy group, which advises Democrats on messaging. “Then they attach faces to it,” he added, “and I think it can have resonance, and it has had resonance.”
The effort on the right to elevate Ocasio-Cortez, 29, as the most prominent socialist foil is something Democrats are watching, Pollock said. “She is, of course, six years away from being able to run for president. But they are still trying to make her the face of the party.”
Conservatives have extended this line of attack beyond candidates like Sanders, who identifies as a democratic socialist. They are using it on other 2020 contenders like Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host, last week accused Buttigieg’s father, who died recently, and who had taught at the University of Notre Dame, of being “a committed Marxist, who affectionately embraced the Communist Manifesto.” She cited a Washington Examiner report as evidence.
Democrats’ own research has found this approach to be effective with the Republican base, which can be more aware of liberal policies like the Green New Deal than liberals are. When Global Strategy Group and GBA Strategies surveyed Fox News viewers last month, they found that Republicans who watch Fox are more than twice as likely as all other groups to have heard about the plan than Democrats.
Their verdict? Seventy-seven percent of them are very concerned about the influence of socialism in the Democratic Party.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.