David Winston, a strategic adviser to the Senate and House Republican leadership and former director of planning for ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, recently published an op-ed in the Ripon Society Newsletter, detailing the role that Republican legislators should play in the upcoming presidential election.
“There’s a quiet debate going on,” Winston, president of the Winston Group, a strategic planning and political survey research firm, said. “One side argues that Hill Republicans should leave a faint legislative footprint so as not to risk running afoul of the eventual GOP presidential nominee’s agenda…The other side, of which I am a proponent, argues that if Hill
Republicans can keep the focus on jobs and the economy through
legislative and policy initiatives, especially in these crucial months
before the GOP presidential nominee is chosen, the party has a huge
opportunity to expand its majority coalition for the foreseeable future.
And that kind of positive environment is good for the nominee, whoever he or she may be.”
In essence, Winston said Republicans must be aggressive and proactive during the next 12 months in developing an agenda, rather than trying to sell voters on the failures of their opponents.
“If congressional Republicans can keep the focus on the economy for the next 12 months, we will have a huge strategic advantage because despite the election of Barack Obama twice and a constant drumbeat on the Left for a European-style economy, this remains a center-right country, unshaken in its belief that economic growth is still the answer to most of our problems,” Winston said.
Winston said that if Republicans remain reactive, they do little more than give Hillary Clinton and those who support her “an unfettered ability to define the political agenda for the next year.”
“Without a proactive economic policy agenda or a presidential candidate to espouse a national agenda, we risk letting Democrats and the media control the issue debate,” Winston said. “Republicans need to get into the game on better turf, and that means talking in specifics about how we will bring the economy back and help create the jobs that go with real recovery.”
Finally, Winston detailed how history supports his opinions, drawing on lessons learned from the years leading up to the 1980 presidential election.
“In the late 1970s, under President Jimmy Carter, the U.S. economy was struggling through a similarly difficult period,” Winston said. “In the 1976 presidential race, Carter defined the state of the economy by using a “misery index” based on the inflation and unemployment rates. In his re-election campaign, however, Carter found the phrase turned on himself.”
“(Republican) candidate Ronald Reagan proposed a totally different economic approach called “supply side” economics,” Winston said. “Armed with this reinvigorated economic argument, he went on to decisively win the election and his re-election four years later.
“President Reagan’s economic plan led to a remarkable comeback, but who planted the legislative seeds that would eventually become Reagan’s great economic turnaround? House Republicans five years earlier, (when they) authored legislation called the Jobs Creation Act.”
Through all of this, Winston said the main takeaway is that, while presidential primary politics are playing out over the next 12 months, congressional Republicans can help create a winning general election environment by legislating a dynamic growth agenda, an actionable agenda on issues people care most about. “In doing so, they can also put the party and eventual nominee on a path to a majority coalition.
“If the 2010 and 2014 elections taught us anything, it is that in this political climate, you win elections by winning issues,” Winston said. “What do Americans want? A plan to bring America back – not next July in Cleveland, but starting now.”