“All politics is local,” former House Speaker Tip O’Neill was fond of saying. He was referring to the fact that it’s very difficult to run a successful congressional race without the candidate talking about bread and butter issues like taxes, health care, jobs, and the economy.
But in recent years, that truism doesn’t carry as much weight as it used to. In fact, all politics can be national with a clever communications strategy and candidates willing to sell a party line.
Republicans were wildly successful in 2010 running against the national issue of Obamacare. The GOP swamped Democrats in congressional and state races that year and set the stage for a decade of dominance in Washington and statehouses across the country.
Ordinarily, nationalizing a midterm is a fraught enterprise for any party that tries it. But Republicans feel they have a winning national issue — parental control in education — and they believe they can ride that issue back to power.
Democrats hold the governorship in eight states up in 2022 that are less or similarly favorable than Virginia — Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — a grouping that has topped Republicans’ target list since the election cycle began. Biden won all those states except for Kansas, and each one of those states has a Democratic incumbent seeking reelection except for Pennsylvania, where the party is lining up behind state Attorney General Josh Shapiro to replace term-limited Gov. Tom Wolf.
“The Biden stuff and everything that happened was so loud, and you couldn’t ignore it,” said Neil Oxman, a veteran Democratic admaker based in Pennsylvania, listing everything from Afghanistan to the ebbs and flows of the pandemic. “Clearly the election was nationalized last Tuesday, more so than you necessarily get in some elections.”
The issue of education is local, for the most part. So candidates for governor are going to be dragged into the debates over parental control and critical race theory whether they want to or not.
Related: The 2022 Midterms Could Be Apocalyptic for Democrats
Nationalizing local races will also prove beneficial for Republicans if Joe Biden continues to be a failure.
The key for Democrats, Oxman and others said, would be a turnaround in the political atmosphere — one that could still change over the next year, especially given how much it has changed since the 2020 election. It is about “whether Biden and the administration will get its act together and make it a little more even playing field for Democrats — or it’s going to be as bad as it has been for us, because they haven’t been able to get it together,” he said.
Even if Biden is able to pass his Build Back Better bill, the national issue of inflation is likely to derail any chance many of these Democrats have of maintaining power. All politics may be local unless a national issue like inflation dominates the nation’s political consciousness.
Democrats also need to grapple with a different economic message, strategists say — including addressing the rising costs of everyday goods due to inflation. After his administration largely dismissed inflation concerns as temporary for months, Biden on Wednesday said in a statement that inflation “hurts Americans pocketbooks, and reversing this trend is a top priority for me.”
Democrats are hoping that the president’s dual track legislative agenda — the infrastructure bill, which Biden is scheduled to sign into law next week, and his sweeping social program expansions proposed in the reconciliation package — will buoy the party, and both poll well among Americans.
Governors can try and insulate themselves from the unpopularity of the national party and its leader, but if the other side is flooding the airwaves with ads targeting the failure of a political party, it will be very tough to accomplish that.
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