LARRY KUDLOW: GOP must message better to win the midterms

Messaging is so important in policy and politics. You could have several million parents and children going south on spring break, but then the entire trip can be ruined by waiting three to four hours in TSA lines, all because Democrats won’t finance the Department of Homeland Security bill. After four votes in the Senate, Democrats are willing to ruin your vacation. How many more votes? How many more ruined vacations? Well there’s a couple of messages that Senate Republicans, indeed the entire Republican Party may want to be asking repeatedly.

The former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, is wondering why Democratic senators in Georgia aren’t helping America’s biggest airport and the most profitable airlines based in their home state. I bet a lot of people are wondering whether the Democratic majority leader, Chuck Schumer, gets to go to the front of the line instead of waiting three to four hours. Kind of seems unfair, don’t you think? I’d want to message that, too, if I were a Republican leader.

Then there’s Democratic blockade of the voting rights bill called the SAVE America Act. The Committee to Unleash Prosperity has a list of at least 65 things that you need a photo ID for. These include, say, getting on an airplane, joining a gym, adopting a pet, buying tobacco, adopting a child, buying a cellphone, donating blood, applying for a job, picking up mail, and the list goes on and on and on. There’s only one thing that doesn’t require a photo ID: voting. 

Does that strike you as odd? Sounds to me like Republicans should be messaging it on a daily basis. President Trump is doing it. And there’s gonna be a hell of a fight in the Senate. Yet the polling is about 80 percent to 20 percent in favor of the GOP position. And here’s another messaging thought. A number of presidential spokesmen have talked about how oil and gasoline prices are going to come down after the American military mission in Iran has been successfully completed. And I agree with that. Prices will come down. Yet rather than forecast energy prices, I think a better message would remind Americans what the mission is.

For example, new polls by McLaughlin and Company show tremendous support among likely voters for eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat. And nearly as much support for eliminating Iran’s terrorism threat.

A clear majority wants to end Iran’s nuclear weapons, and their terrorism, and their decades-long hostility to the United States. That majority agrees with Mr. Trump’s mission in Iran. And incidentally, the majority spans independents and even more than a fifth of Democratic voters. Yet a temporary energy price increase is a small price to pay in order to abolish the current Iranian regime, and the 47-year war it has waged against America.

Republicans would be advised to emphasize the mission in Iran, rather than trying to figure out the timing or the ultimate decline in energy prices. Americans are smarter and even more patriotic than politicians and the legacy press seem to think. Whooping Iran is going to be a sleeper issue in the midterms.