Republicans need to do a better job of offensive messaging and contrasting their economic wins against Democrats’ socialist ideas to hold onto their congressional majorities in the midterm election, GOP pollster John McLaughlin said Monday.
Mr. McLaughlin, who has conducted polling for President Trump, the Republican National Committee and a wide array of GOP clients, said the party’s messaging is falling short as polls routinely find Democrats ahead in the generic congressional ballot.
“The Republicans have three weeks to go to play offense to frame the Democrats,” he said on Newsmax. “The Republicans have not done a good job getting out their message of success, particularly on the economy and what they’re doing to reduce inflation and to grow the economy at the same time.”
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Mr. McLaughlin said some public polls have oversampled Democrats and the results are unfairly weighted in their direction, but even his firm’s most recent poll shows Republicans running from behind.
The poll of 1,000 likely general-election voters found Democrats leading Republicans 48% to 43% on the generic congressional ballot, with 9% undecided. It was conducted Sept. 16-22.
“But when you asked, ’Do you want to vote for a Republican who’s a free-market capitalist, or do you want to vote for a Democrat who’s a big-government socialist?’ the Republican wins 45-41,” Mr. McLaughlin said.
He said that Republicans need to better frame their messaging around those differences.
“It should be a contrast election,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “You can talk about what you’ve done and what you’re going to do, but when the Democrats want to raise taxes by $4 trillion, by a couple thousand per household, when they would want to go back to $6-a-gallon gas, when they would trigger the inflation that set off these interest rates and everything, the Democrats haven’t changed. I mean, they are big government socialists, and Republicans need to contrast that, need to point that out.”
However, Mr. McLaughlin’s poll showed there may only be so much juice to squeeze from the capitalism vs. socialism framing.
Their September survey showed capitalism with only a 4-point advantage compared to the 13-point lead it held in July.
“That may be the most important finding in the survey,” Mr. McLaughlin said in a polling memo at the time.
“Republicans still perform substantially better when the election is framed around economic philosophy rather than party identification,” he said. “But over the past two months, support for the socialist alternative has increased 5 points while support for the capitalist alternative has fallen 4. With control of the House and Senate at stake, Republicans cannot afford for that trend to continue.”
In the Newsmax interview, Mr. McLaughlin still downplayed the significance of public polls overall, noting they have gotten it wrong in the past.
“At this point in time, two years ago, [then-Vice President] Kamala Harris was going to be president, according to most of the media polls,” he said.
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