Today’s Democrats are at risk of being dragged back into the old politics of tax cuts. Since President Trump’s tax bill passed, Republicans keep talking about the middle-class benefits in the law, and the poll numbers for both Trump and congressional Republicans have risen.

Recent television ads in Indiana and Missouri — taken out by the Koch brothers’ advocacy group — are typical. They’re meant to damage those states’ Democratic senators, who are both running for re-election. “Senator Claire McCaskill said she’d support tax cuts for hard-working Missourians,” the narrator in one ad says, “but when she had the chance, she said no, voting against tax cuts for you, standing with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, instead of us.”

Democrats have been too slow to respond to these attacks. Maybe they’ve been distracted by Russia and everything else. Or maybe they assumed that the tax bill would stay unpopular, like it was late last year. Whatever the reason, the inattention has been a mistake.

“Every day that Democrats aren’t dedicating the bulk of their paid and earned messaging at the tax bill is a day that helps Republicans hold onto the House,” Dan Pfeiffer, the Pod Save America co-host and former Obama adviser, wrote this week. “This gift to the wealthy, Wall Streets, and corporations should be a messaging lay up.”

Similarly, a liberal advocacy group and two research groups released a strategy memo that argued: “Democrats continue to have winning messages on health care and the economy, but right now voters are not hearing them. That must change.”