The closing economic pitch Republicans are too scared to make

In the final stretch before the midterm elections, President Donald Trump has asked Republicans to vote as though he’s on the ballot. But weirdly enough, neither he nor the rest of the GOP has made much of a case for his record at all.And in a third consecutive election where voters insist that their No. 1 concern is the cost of living, the absence of an affirmative defense of Trump’s economic performance is a conspicuous omission. Fairweather Trump frenemies will point to the Iran war’s impact on gas prices (but never the tariffs preventing an absolute decrease in goods prices last year, per the estimation of the New York Fed) to claim that the economy couldn’t be worse.Obviously, that is not true. Raw, real average weekly earnings are slightly negative over the past year, reversing a nearly 2% wage gain over the first 10 months of Trump 2.0. And culminating in essentially a net paycheck change of zero — no higher than when Biden left office, no lower. That’s hardly a win for the White House on its own, even when compared with the net 4% decline in real earnings over the course of former President Joe Biden’s four years. But real wages after accounting for taxes, which were flat in the first 10 months of Trump’s second, nonconsecutive term, are now up 1.8% over its entirety. That’s a direct result of the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill, which, beyond constituting the largest single tax cut and extension in history, is the president’s signature piece of second-term legislation that has oddly been dismissed by the administration in its run-up to the midterm elections.To the extent that the One Big Beautiful Bill is mentioned at all, it’s been rebranded with the hogwash handle, the “Working Families Tax Cut.” When, in fact, the bulk of the new tax cuts went neither to families nor workers.Rather, the best boon of new tax cuts went to corporations. That’s something that the White House would be wise to embrace rather than run away from, seeing as full expensing and the tax law’s business agenda kicked off the AI boom that’s supercharging productivity growth and setting the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow forecast to 3.5% economic growth for the third quarter of this year.Meanwhile, rather than relitigating the widely panned Biden administration of the past, why not talk about what Democrats are doing while they wait in the wings and will do when they get power?In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rent freeze has resulted in record-high median rent in Manhattan and some of the lowest vacancy rates in the history of the five boroughs. Fellow socialist Mayor Brandon Johnson has driven Chicago to a debt crisis bad enough that even Bank of America bailed on its plan to help facilitate an unprecedented sale of the city’s billion-dollar auto debt. (Johnson’s latest plan to backfill his $882 million budget deficit for 2027? Tax the corporations leaving the city in droves, of course.)So, when Vice President JD Vance sputters the ludicrous falsehood that socialism, once a rosy and warm ideology that meant “prioritizing workers,” is now only bad because it means “you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls sports,” Republicans are wasting a valuable opportunity. To point out that local lefties are already doing socialism, and Democrats’ marquee midterm candidates want to execute the agenda nationally.TRUMP TARGETS LISA MURKOWSKI OVER SAVE AMERICA ACT IMPASSEYes, we should point out that “Medicare for all” immediately inserts the government into social issues by forcing the (im)moral rationing of care. And it would forbid a newly federalized medical corp from refusing to perform abortions or sex changes, or whatever Woke 2 priority President AOC will create. Yet, arguably as important is that nationalizing one-fifth of the economy with socialized healthcare will cost $47 trillion over a decade. Which is more than half of all of the federal revenue that the CBO projects Uncle Sam will collect in that time.Trump’s economy is far from perfect, and whataboutism alone isn’t a closing message. But the GOP should own the positive good where it matters and actually define what the Democrats will do with power.Tiana Lowe Doescher (@TianaTheFirst) is an economics columnist for the Washington Examiner.