The two presidential campaigns are failing to offer the voting public distinct visions of the country’s future.
The two presidential campaigns are failing to offer the voting public distinct visions of the country’s future.
T he cliché maintains that campaigns should be studies “in contrasts.” This year’s presidential campaign, however, is more likely to hinge on the narcissism of small differences. The distinctions Joe Biden’s camp seems set on drawing with Donald Trump are of the finest sort, and the presumptive Republican nominee appears content to play the incumbent president’s game on his terms.
In a thuddingly unimaginative display on Tuesday, Biden sought to distinguish his approach to the forthcoming crisis posed by the imminent insolvency of America’s entitlement programs from Trump’s. “This man has no idea what he’s talking about,” Biden said of his opponent’s position on reforming programs like Social Security and Medicare. “And over my dead body will we cut Social Security so we can give tax breaks to the super wealthy.”
The opportunity to resurrect this threadbare attack on conventionally conservative Republicans presented itself after Trump touched on the issue during a Tuesday morning interview with CNBC. The clip the Biden camp chose to highlight features Trump extemporaneously musing that “there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.” Team Biden cut the clip off abruptly at the word “cutting,” having apparently heard nothing else the former president said. But Trump’s full remarks would disabuse an honest listener of the impression that he has any interest in strengthening America’s nondiscretionary spending programs.
“In terms of, also, the theft and the bad management of entitlements — tremendous bad management of entitlements — there’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do,” Trump continued. He issued this pablum not because he is eager to put Social Security on a more sustainable path. Indeed, he was rejecting the premise that major reforms to these programs were necessary to ensure their longevity. Trump has repeatedly insisted that the only threat to programs like Medicare (which will become partially insolvent in 2028, according to its trustees) and Social Security (which will hit the wall in 2033) is posed by their would-be reformers — including members of his own party. No one who is cursorily familiar with these programs’ unsustainable trajectories would lend credence to the notion that they can be saved by cracking down on “theft” and “bad management.” In that sense, Biden and Trump are of the same mind on entitlements.
Even the venue Biden’s team chose for this critique of his opponent, his campaign’s brand-new TikTok account, would be fodder for almost any other Republican nominee. The efforts by the House GOP to spearhead legislation that would compel Communist Chinese interests to divest from the platform for national-security reasons should provide the GOP nominee with a springboard to savage the president. But Trump has recently (and conspicuously) warmed to TikTok, voluntarily sacrificing his ability to draw a contrast with Biden. Both major-party nominees seem to have invested political capital in ensuring that TikTok survives in its present form, regardless of the threat it poses to American security.
The Biden campaign is similarly devoted to convincing voters that Trump is an old-school union buster. This, too, is a retread from the 2020 campaign, in which both candidates devoted themselves to courting unionized workers. But unlike 2020, the Trump campaign has made serious overtures to the leadership of organized labor outfits like the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters this time around. A lot of good that outreach has done Trump’s campaign: When they’re not playing coy about their allegiances, union officials have rebuffed Trump’s advances outright. But the campaigns’ prohibitive focus on the tiny sliver of Americans who are members of organized labor unions deprives voters of the opportunity to be presented with a different vision for America’s workers — one Republicans spent decades cultivating before Trump showed up.
At the end of the last decade, Republican-led efforts to liberate American workers from involuntary unionization had achieved remarkable success. Over half of the states had passed right-to-work laws limiting the ability of unions to require workers in unionized shops to join their organizations and pay dues to them. The result was an exodus of workers from the ranks of organized labor. The 2018 Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME found public-sector unions could not compel nonmembers to pay dues to organizations to which they did not belong, profoundly limiting those organizations’ political power. Within a year, AFSCME lost 98 percent of its agency-fee payers. The SEIU lost 94 percent. Union membership across the board was the lowest it had been since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it in the 1980s.
But as the GOP became besotted with the idea that it could become a “worker’s party,” and needed to get right with organized labor to do so, it gave up the fight for workers’ rights. As the GOP lost elections at the state level, right-to-work laws were scaled back or repealed altogether. Union membership is again on the rise, as one would expect if workers no longer have a choice in the matter. Neither candidate for the White House is articulating a different vision of how American labor should organize itself. We’re left with two candidates vying to be the most zealous in their appeals to the same small constituency.
Nor do Trump and Biden seek to establish a stark division between them on issues as central to the American economy as foreign trade. Biden insists that he “will stand up to China’s trade abuses.” He never misses an opportunity to remind voters that he favors protectionist trade policies that would encourage consumers and procurement specialists alike to “buy American.” “Past administrations including my predecessor failed to Buy American,” Biden said in his State of the Union address last week. “Not anymore.” In practice, his trade policies make the cost of consumer goods increase at the expense of overall economic growth.
You could be forgiven for concluding from Biden’s hectoring that Trump does not default to “tariffs” as the answer to any and every economic or geopolitical challenge. His commitment to protectionism despite its negative impact on efficiency was in evidence throughout his presidency, including in one of his first acts as president: the “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, which seized on the very same Great Depression-era procurement laws Joe Biden claims Trump rejected. And, sure, “Trump’s tariffs hurt U.S. jobs,” the New York Times admitted. But the voting public responds warmly to attacks on free trade, which explains why the Biden administration has kept most Trump-era trade policies in place.
From the silly (like the Biden campaign’s frenetic efforts to convince voters that Trump’s mental acuity is on the same downward trajectory as the president’s) to the serious, the two presidential campaigns are failing to offer the voting public distinct visions of the country’s future. The two candidates differ primarily in their temperaments. That cosmetic distinction isn’t much to base a presidential campaign on, but partisans on either side of the aisle will be expected to invest great amounts of emotional energy into parsing it. After all, what else do they have to argue over?