It’s a simple truth: Republicans explode the deficit when they’re in power. But, as soon as they’re out of power, they demand austerity—while painting Democrats as wasteful socialists who trade handouts for votes.

That’s been pretty much a given for a generation now, but have Democrats come up with an answer? Barack Obama spent his entire presidency wrangling with Republican demands for drastic cuts to the social safety net and reductions in the federal deficit—despite the fact that the country was still recovering from a serious recession. Democrats got no credit for the spending cuts or deficit reduction, but when the recovery was slower than hoped for, and left some sectors behind, they sure got the blame. Today, despite the fact that President Trump’s legislative legacy consists of one deficit-compounding tax cut for corporations and the wealthy, Republicans are planning a 2020 campaign aimed at convincing voters that their opponents are socialists who can’t be trusted to hold the keys to the economy—a smear they will no doubt continue if a Democrat prevails.

The current spate of Democratic contenders—with the possible exception of Joe Biden, whose dog ate his homework—are proposing a set of programs, most notably the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, that could surpass Obama-era proposals in their scope and, yes, cost. To date, discussion of those programs has focused on the details (when they exist), or on how these plans will get through a Republican Senate (even if Democrats regain control, given the existence of the filibuster). But winning these battles will also require Democrats to win the battle for public opinion—and, winning that could require Democrats to defang Republicans’ wholly predictable and wholly hypocritical demands for austerity. A Democratic president might well take office in 2021 with what politicians and political observers like to call political capital, but he or she will have to spend that capital not only selling expansive reforms to the country, but also on fighting deficit-hawking Republican demands to cut spending.

During Obama’s presidency, Republicans consistently sabotaged the economic recovery. By the time that Obama had taken office, the entire Republican Party had turned against Keynesian “pump priming” and instead began whipping the country into a debt-obsessed hysteria. Despite Obama’s apparent nod to the GOP of keeping the total 2009 stimulus bill below $1 trillion, it received zero Republican votes. Over the next two years, Republicans used that stimulus—and the Democratic debate over increasing healthcare access—as the centerpiece of a campaign about restoring fiscal seriousness to Washington, ultimately winning in a landslide during the 2010 midterms.

In August of 2011, President Obama signed the Budget Control Act. It was as part of a deal to end a crisis Republicans manufactured the month before when they threatened to shut down the government if Democrats did not agree to future spending cuts. The law mandated sequestration and imposed strict fiscal controls at a moment when the economy still needed economic stimulus. Sequestration, which capped the discretionary portions of the federal budgets, further slowed the recovery and constrained the Obama administration’s ability to influence the economy. “The recovery since 2009 has been historically slow, and the disappointing pace can be explained almost entirely by the fiscal austerity imposed by the Republicans in Congress,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens said in 2016. “To be blunt, if public spending since the Great Recession had followed the path it took during the recovery presided over by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, the U.S. economy would have been fully healed for years now.”