I just told a Politico reporter that I couldn’t comment on whether some piece of Democratic messaging — the D drive, R reverse thing — would help them in 2010. I said, “No one knows, and anyone who thinks they know is making shit up. And I’m not going to make shit up.” He then said, half-jokingly, that pretending that they know was sort of what Politico does.
But you knew that.
What I did tell him was the following:
By now, the economy is largely Obama’s economy. Polls still say that more people blame Bush than Obama, but I think the trend in Obama’s approval belies that. Thus, the GOP should be talking about the economy. And they largely are, mixing in references to other policies or issues that appeal to their base and perhaps some independents (e.g., the deficit, health care reform).
What the Democrats’ message should be, and whether it will work, is anyone’s guess. I riffed a bit on Lynn Vavreck’s The Message Matters and suggested that the party disadvantaged by the economy needs to find another issue to talk about. But I don’t know what that would be.
The reporter then asked about whether the Democrats could successfully paint the GOP as the “party of no” and as not having a plan for dealing with various problems. I did feel confident talking about that message, and I said that the “party of no” message isn’t likely to help.
First, elections writ large depend more on performance than on policy — that is, they depend more on how things are going (for which the incumbent party is on the hook) than on specific policies, bills, legislation, etc. Second, although Republicans have said no to a lot of policies and bills, whether you think that’s a problem depends on whether you think saying no was the right thing to do. And how do you know what’s the right thing? It’s largely by taking cues from the party you already identify with.
So it’s not that people formulate views on policy, evaluate the parties in terms of whether they have a plan or the right plan, and then vote for the “best” party. It’s that people don’t always know a lot about policy, and depend on their party’s leaders for the answer. See this paper by Gabriel Lenz, for example.
This makes it difficult for Democrats to win by portraying the Republicans as having no ideas or having bad ideas. The people who will agree with that are the people already likely to vote Democratic.