How Republicans Failed To Sell Their Tax Law

WASHINGTON – At the outset of the 2018 midterms, the head of the Republican Super PAC tasked with saving the House GOP majority had a stark message.

"There is no positive outcome in November," Corry Bliss, the director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, wrote in a January memo.

But Republicans did not take his advice. Even his own super PAC did not fully take his advice. The Congressional Leadership Fund is one of the first branches of the GOP campaign. March special election in Pennsylvania's 18th Congressional District.

The failure to take that advice – to make the tax cuts and try to run on that popularity – may have sealed the GOP's fate. Though Republicans staved off Democrats in many districts that Donald Trump won in 2016, the GOP could not stop Democrats from flipping many of the districts Hillary Clinton took two years ago. In these districts, often in upper-crust suburbs. Instead, that was not enough.

Nearly every Republican interviewed for this story agreed to a better job selling the tax cut law. But Democrats argue that the problem was the policy: Voters just did not buy the tax for the wealthy trickle down to the middle class.

"You might be able to sell New Coke," said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who has helped marshal the anti-tax cut messaging. "You can not sell New Arsenic. The problem here was not the promotion. It was the policy. "

When the GOP rolled out the tax law, Democrats were worried. While projecting confidence, they started polling the elements of the tax bill in October 2017. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and other groups found that they did not counter the GOP messaging, Republicans would win the fight. So Democrats – The United States is the largest corporation in the world.

"It's important to remember:" DCCC communications director Meredith Kelly told HuffPost this week.

The most worrying period for Democrats came in January and February, when large corporations and businesses were seemingly announcing new bonuses for workers and taxing them to the tax bill. At least 50 percent in a hit New York Times poll. And then the momentum stalled, in part because the bonuses are largely unhelpful to many people.

The legislation was a little more money in most voters' hands. The average household in the middle 20 percent of incomes should be 1.3 percent more tax-efficient. But the law cuts taxes more substantially for wealthier individuals. Taxpayers in the 95th to 99th income percentiles will have 3.4 percent more income after taxes.

The law also slowed money on corporations. The 40 percent tax cut for corporations. Voters seemed to think the tax code changes for the purpose for businesses.

Republicans claimed a drastically lower corporate tax rate would boost hiring and wages, and they pointed to a series of corporate bonus announcements as proof. When House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) Describes the bonuses as "crumbs" relative to what corporations got, Republicans spent weeks highlighting her as wacky and out of touch.

But the bonuses really were crumbs compared with the wave of shareholder-enriching stock buybacks that the law inspired this year. Workers may not be affected by the tax rate, and may also be taxed at other times.

"There was a nexus of Republicans, the White House Trump and big, wealthy corporations trying to sell this plan," Ferguson said. "We were not delusional about what we were up against. But every time a CEO spoke about how great the plan was, he confirmed that it was a plan for CEOs. "

The DCCC also emphasized how important it is for the country to be more interested in the argument, rather than getting into an argument about how much money has been spent on individual pockets.

"We wanted to make sure they were not put first," Kelly said.

Despite strong economic growth – gross domestic product rose 3.5 percent in the third quarter of the previous year – wage growth has been weak. Adjusted for inflation, real earnings for more workers than 1 year annually. In the fourth quarter of 2006, which also saw 3.5 percent GDP growth, wages outpaced inflation by more than 2 percent each month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The first real political test for the tax bill in Pennsylvania early in 2018. Republicans had just passed their tax bill, and they were pushing their candidate there, Rick Saccone, to use the legislation against the Democratic Candidate Conor Lamb. But it has not been supported by the Republic of the Republic, but it has not been supported by the government, and it has certainly not increased the deficit and is potentially reducing Medicare and Social Security.

Sincerely, House Speaker Paul Ryan (Wis.) And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) Made about the need for entitlement reform.

The strategy worked. Saccone lost the race. And suddenly Republicans are a little more

As lawmakers began campaigning in this year, Republicans barely mentioned the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in their ads. Democrats, meanwhile, hired comedy writers to skewer the law.

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"That poisoned the well," DCC national press secretary Tyler Law told HuffPost.

Kelly and Law said it would have been much harder for Democrats to neutralize the tax cut issue if Republicans had passed that law before trying to repeal Obamacare.

Over the summer, the tax law faded from the national political consciousness. North Korea, Trump's press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and Trump's threats to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions dominated the news. Democrats relentlessly focused on health care. The Republican position in crucial House districts deteriorated.

Around Labor Day, the Club for Growth – a conservative group that pushed for tax cuts. It found a massive enthusiasm gap in Democrats' favor and tested ways to solve it.

"The strongest of these was defending the tax cuts and making them permanent," pollsters Chris Wilson and Allen Byron of WPA Intelligence wrote in a memo summarizing their findings. "Defending the tax cuts and making them strong persuading voters in the Republican voters."

The group shared the data with Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), But nothing changed.

"They completely ignored the data," said David McIntosh, the President's Club for Growth and an Indiana-trained congressman. "It was a classic failure of the establishment of the Republican Party to run out issues that were helpful to them."

He argued that Democrats were backing away from their opposition to the law, with fewer and fewer recalls for the sake of repetition. He said Republicans could have saved his members like Dave Brat, who lost a seat in suburban Richmond, Virginia, if they had focused more on the tax cuts.

The National Republican Campaign Committee and the Congressional Leadership Fund contested claims that they did not run on the tax bill. NRCC communications director Matt Gorman told HuffPost that Republicans DID campaign on an economic message, releasing a handful of ads to a week before Election Day "I also think it should not preclude us from going into the candidates' background and digging into opposition research," he said.

What do you think is New York Democrat Antonio Delgado ounce being a rapper, Minnesota Dan Feehan Democrat being employed by a "[George] Soros-funded liberal outfit in D.C."And connecting Michigan Democrat Elissa Slotkin to Pelosi and rioting mobs because"Slotkin is one of them,"According to ads paid for by the NRCC.

Republicans may have talked about the tax bill and the strong economy, but it was far from the overwhelming message. According to data compiled by Kantar Media / CMAG for HuffPost in September, just under 12 percent of the GOP TV ads mentioned the tax bill, out of 396,607 TV spots analyzed. Treaties and the GOP focused on a ginned-up crisis centered on the Central American asylum seekers walking towards the southwestern US border, the so-called caravan .

This strategy prevented a true blue wave from gathering, staving off the democratic pickups in districts where trump and his racially charged messages have traction. But in suburban, tributary, educated districts – where "country club republicans" are heading up the president – the failure of capitalists to capitalize on their tax bill might have been one of the reasons they lost there.