“Political strategists say Democrats running in competitive races in this year’s midterm elections for the House and Senate should steer clear of making President Trump the centerpiece of their campaigns. While Trump’s approval ratings are low and Americans have been frustrated by his job performance in the first year of his second term, the strategists say the key to winning is to home in on economic issues – particularly affordability,” says The Hill in the lede to their Wednesday morning article headlined “Democrats advised not to center midterm campaigns on attacking Trump” and no, this story isn’t predicated on any sort of new internal memo or slide presentation the Hill obtained.
Their reporter Amie Parnes appears to have simply started with the conclusion that Dems should not make Trump’s corruption and malevolence a campaign theme and then got four strategists to help her work backward by supplying quotes that sort of kind of support her hypothesis, thus making the verb “advised” in the headline an entirely self-generated “consensus framing” to drive the plot (And yeah, THIS National Zero headline kind of oversold the strategic effort involved here. Guilty).
“The core focus of any candidate running in 2026 has to be focused on the reality that these affordability concerns, even one year later, still exist. The results of the 2025 races in select states underscored just how prominent those concerns are with swing voters right now,” said either GOP strategist Kevin Madden or ChatGPT when asked to generate a quote and then Madden tersely replied with a “👍🏻” when Parnes emailed to ask if the anodyne quote could be attributed to him.
Three other strategists – two Dems and anti-Trump Republican Susan Del Percio – also pitched in to help Parnes pad out the story with similarly truistic-adjacent bullshit that’s not even worth the space or effort to copypasta. Less scrutable than the astroturfed nature of the article is its endgame – if it isn’t simply some kind of really poorly conceived zero-calorie effort to somehow “head fake” the Dems or even just spare Trump’s sensitive feelings from the ample ammunition he’s handed them.
Republicans personified voters’ discontent with their economic struggles by first portraying Joe Biden as too old and weak to give a shit, then Kamala Harris as too preoccupied with wokeness and trans rights to give a shit, but somehow in 2026 it’s inadvisable or unseemly for Democrats to portray Trump as too old, mentally deranged, and making billions from his fucking crypto scams while they’re eating shitty Hamburger Helper for dinner so voters should reject the party in thrall to him in November. His power is unitary and getting someone authoritative to put their name on a quote like “the fight to win 2026 will be on the economy and affordability. It’s not going to be on the Epstein files,” comes across as fucking bargaining stage of grief-level weak and desperate.
It also presupposes that it takes more than 10 seconds to write “Trump and Republicans were more focused on covering up the Epstein files and protecting Donald’s rich friends than they were about lowering your cost of living” in a messaging memo. The Hill simply sucks even on their own terms.