Different positions

Debates widen the agenda gap 

Democrats and Republicans don't just have different positions. They have different issues.

By Shane Goldmacher

Some of biggest fireworks of the Republican debate in Las Vegas flew between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz over the hot-button issue of immigration. They sparred for minutes on end about how to handle the millions of people living in America illegally as the candidates and moderators bandied about the word 'immigration' nearly two-dozen times.

Four days later, the topic went all but unmentioned at the Democratic debate in Manchester. Instead, some of the most impassioned exchanges for Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley came over gun control. Variants of the word gun were said 39 times.

In Las Vegas, the word had come up only once on the main GOP debate, and then only in the metaphorical sense. "America is under the gun to lead the free world to protect our civilized way of life,” Jeb Bush had declared.

The two presidential debates held last week exposed fissures within the two parties, of course, but also the growing gulf between them, so much so that it felt at times as if the candidates were vying to lead two different countries— one red and one blue.

Democrats talked about CEO pay, increasing the minimum wage, and Wall Street excesses. They mentioned the "middle class" 14 times, a phrase that went unmentioned on the GOP stage. "The rich get richer," Sanders complained.

Republicans looked abroad. They debated bulk collection of phone metadata to protect the homeland and talked about "terrorists" 40 times. That word was spoken fewer than 10 times by the Democrats.

There has long been little overlap between the Democratic and Republican positions in a politically polarized America. But increasingly they are speaking to different audiences about different issues entirely, not just different positions.

“They’re talking to people with completely different world views on everything,” said former Rep. Tom Davis, a former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “That’s why it’s difficult to find a middle ground.”

In one telling moment, moderator David Muir of ABC pressed Sanders about racial profiling — a hot topic among Republicans, especially after Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims’ entry into the country. “I want to talk about something else,” Sanders cut him off, pivoting to his core message about economic insecurity.

“They're anxious about the fact that they are working incredibly long hours,” Sanders said of Americans. “They're worried about their kids, and they're seeing all the new income and wealth — virtually all of it — going to the top 1 percent. And they're looking around them, and they're looking at Washington, and they're saying, 'The rich are getting much richer, I'm getting poorer, what are you going to do about it?'”

Republicans were focused on a different set of concerns entirely.

“Today, you have millions of Americans that feel left out and out of place in their own country, struggling to live paycheck to paycheck, called bigots because they hold on to traditional values,” Rubio framed the contest in his opening statement four nights earlier. “And around the world, America's influence has declined while this president has destroyed our military, our allies no longer trust us, and our adversaries no longer respect us. And that is why this election is so important.”

In the wake of the attacks on San Bernardino and Paris, both debates did focus heavily on national security, terrorism and the role of Islam in America (indeed, that was the stated focus of the GOP debate). Both parties did debate vigorously America’s global role — how, when and why to intervene internationally — and clear fissures within the parties emerged. At the same time, candidates of all stripes declared the need for an Arab-led army to take on the Islamic State in Syria and the Middle East and declared they’d build a coalition to get one. None said how they’d have more success than President Barack Obama.

More broadly, though, the debates laid bare the degree to which the Democratic candidates are aligned on most of the major issues of the day, and how the Republicans are not. The three Democrats said, “I agree,” a total of eight times during their debate. The Republicans — despite triple the number of candidates on stage — uttered those two words only twice.

After eight years of the Obama presidency, the Democrats are largely unified behind the same agenda. “The Democrats don’t want to mess with that model,” Davis said.

On the Republican side, “You can see the party at war with itself,” he added. “This is what happens when you want to become the majority. You have to cobble disparate groups into — I used to call it an organized conspiracy to seize power.”

But Hugh Hewitt, the conservative radio show host and one of the panelists at the GOP debate, saw the relative unity on the Democratic side as a refusal to engage on real-world issues.

“The Democrats' debate is la-la-land. it’s about a world that doesn’t exist, about taxes that will never be passed by a Congress that doesn’t exist,” Hewitt said.

He also predicted that the issues of immigration and gun control, subjects of so little internal debate among the parties, would nonetheless return with a vengeance in the general election.

"Those are both general election debate issues,” said Hewitt, who asked the only gun-related question at the GOP debate, and it was at the undercard contest. "There is not much difference in the Republicans on guns and there is not much difference among the Democrats on immigration."

In the most recent debates, Clinton came the closest of all the candidates to trying to straddle the chasm between red and blue America, an advantage of her position the far-away Democratic front-runner. Asked if corporate America — a pillar of the GOP establishment — should “love” her, she replied, “Everybody should,” in one of the night’s most memorable lines.

But what came next from Sanders was just as telling. He was openly disdainful of vying for corporate America’s support. “They ain't going to like me and Wall Street is going to like me even less,” he said.

A rare cross-partisan appeal came Saturday night, when Sanders, who has captured the support and imagination of many Democrats who feel alienated by their party establishment, made a direct plea for support to the backers of Trump, who has won over so many disaffected Republicans.

"So what I say to those people who go to Donald Trump's rallies, understand: He thinks a low minimum wage in America is a good idea,” Sanders said. "He thinks low wages are a good idea."

The location of the appeal was no accident. New Hampshire is one of the states where independents can vote for candidates of either party, and so anti-establishment candidates like Sanders and Trump can, at times, be drawing from the same well.

Of course, the debates did have one other thing in common: Trump.

He was the only Republican mentioned by name in the Democratic debate. And the trio of denunciations from Clinton, O’Malley and Sanders of Trump’s position on Muslims was the evening’s most talked about moment on Facebook.

In the GOP debate, a Trump jab similarly topped the charts. It came when Bush turned to Trump and said, "You can’t insult your way to the presidency."