Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Opinion columnist

The catchphrase in the headquarters of the 1992 Bill Clinton presidential campaign was “It’s the economy, stupid!” It was there to remind members of the campaign to focus their messaging on a single point — that the economy was bad under President George H.W. Bush, and that a Clinton presidency would fix it.

Now, as Democrats face the prospect of campaigning against President Donald Trump, they might sum up their biggest obstacle this way: “It’s the stupid economy!” With stocks at record highs and unemployment at the lowest levels in most Americans’ lifetimes, it’s going to be hard to run against the Trump economy. Thanks to fracking, the United States is even becoming the world’s largest oil producer, outstripping Russia and Saudia Arabia, which is good news for Americans, and bad news for Russia and Saudi Arabia. Unemployment is historically low even among groups, like blacks and Hispanics, who tend to do worse. As Steve Cortes notes, Trump is lifting the “economic underdogs.”

Economy is best hope for Dems

Running against Republicans on the economy is a Democratic strategy that goes back to Franklin Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover. And Democratic partisans were quick to roll it out, as early as election night 2016 itself, when economist Paul Krugman looked at falling Dow futures and opined, “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

That prediction didn’t even bear out the next day, and as markets keep hitting new highs, bloggers and tweeters continue to have fun throwing Krugman’s take back in his face. But what can the Democrats run on if not the economy?

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Judging by the recent debates and the presidential race so far, the answer is “woke” politics: Open borders, increased rights for sexual minorities, racial reparations and a return to forced racial busing.

This may play with the Democratic activist crowd, but it’s not clear that these views even command a majority of Democratic primary voters, much less the general electorate. Black and Hispanic workers face the most competition from illegal immigrants (and tend not to prioritize transgender rights), the descendants of Vietnamese boat people are unlikely to want to pay reparations for slavery that ended over a century before they came to America, and many blue-collar Democrats, especially in swing states, aren't fans of busing.

Democrats can continue — as Republicans did eight years ago — to pray for a scandal that will knock Trump out of office, but given how many efforts to drum those up have failed, the likelihood that a new one will catch on seems, if not impossible, certainly a very long shot.

Economy can be distorted

Of course, Democrats can always hope for a market crash and recession in the next year. That could certainly happen — recessions are inevitable, sooner or later. All recoveries come to an end eventually.

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What’s more, the economy doesn’t have to actually crash. It just has to look bad enough to swing some voters. That’s what happened when Bill Clinton was running against George H.W. Bush. Voters were told over and over again that it was the worst economy in decades, when in fact things were rapidly improving. As Clinton pollster Mark Penn recounts in his book, "Microtrends":

“I have found over the years that there is often a huge disconnect between belief about the economy and the true economic state of affairs. Until the statistics are actually published, people tend to assess the economy primarily through the eyes of the national media. In 1992, when Bill Clinton won the presidency based on worries about the economy, the statistics that came out after the election showed that the period leading up to November had actually been a period of record growth. ... In his 1996 State of the Union speech, President Clinton said we had the best economy in 30 years — a statement that sent a flurry of reporters to check actual statistics rather than popular political movements and sweeping, politically motivated statements. The more people looked at the facts, the more they agreed, and six months later, there was near-unanimity that the economy was in good shape. Had the economy changed? No, what had changed was knowledge about the true facts of the economy.”

Just in time for 2020

That knowledge came too late for President Bush and just in time for Clinton to become President Clinton first. (A more accurate version of the Clinton campaign slogan could have been, “It’s the economy — if you’re stupid.”) The Clinton campaign, as Penn notes, owed a lot of thanks to the national news media for the public perception that got Clinton elected, and no doubt the Democrats can expect the national media to offer them similar assistance today, if there is anything at all to work with. Will there be? Stay tuned.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of "The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself," is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.