Democrats, you may have heard, have a messaging problem. President Donald Trump’s poll numbers are imploding, and the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act is sunk once more, yet members of the opposition are “still struggling to tell voters what their party stands for,” the Associated Press reported on Sunday. “The message is being worked on,” House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley told the outlet. “We’re doing everything we can to simplify it, but at the same time provide the meat behind it as well. So that’s coming together now.” The fact that the number-four Democrat in the House admitted “his party lacks a clear, core message even amid Republican disarray,” the AP claimed, “highlights the Democrats’ dilemma eight months after President Donald Trump and the GOP dominated last fall’s elections, in part, because Democrats lacked a consistent message.”

This damning report was compounded by a Washington Post-ABC News poll, released the same day, which found that just “37 percent say the party currently stands for something, while 52 percent say it mainly stands against Trump,” the Post reported. “Even among Democrats, over one-quarter say their party primarily stands in opposition to Trump rather than for their own agenda.” Some elected Democrats don’t dispute this view. “Even if this [Russia] investigation leads to a new president, it doesn’t change the fact that only four in ten Americans currently believe the Democrats are for something,” Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, told CBS. Buttigieg, who ran for chair of the Democratic National Committee earlier this year, added, “They’ve gotta know what we’re for, not just what we’re against.”

Buttigieg is right, generally speaking, that Democrats should have a clear identity that’s independent of Trump. But Democrats don’t necessarily need it next year. Opposing the president—or simply being the opposing party—may be enough. “History generally shows that the out party in a midterm doesn’t typically need much of a message if the presidential party is unpopular,” Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the election analysis website Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told me. “Midterms are historically referendums on the ruling party. In other words, despite the Democrats’ internal fissures, opposition to Trump may be enough in 2018 for them to make significant gains.” As the Post’s Aaron Blake pointed out on Tuesday:

Republicans ran for years on a message of “Obama is bad” and “undo what Obama did” and it worked out pretty well for them in the 2010 and 2014 midterms. Charlie Cook had this prescient quote in Rolling Stone in March 2010, when Republicans were actually in a pretty similar spot to where Democrats are right now and people were wondering what the message was: “Does the Republican Party lack a clear leader? Absolutely. Do they lack a positive message? Of course. Do their demographics suck? Yeah,” Cook said. “But in a midterm election, none of that matters. Because midterm elections are a referendum on the party in power. And to throw one side out, you’ve got to throw the other side back in.”

This analysis won’t stop Democrats from arguing about their message, nor should it. As Blake wrote, “people within the party truly care about policy and about its direction”—and a “core message” is nothing if not a distillation of the party’s vision for the country. But that’s why the messaging question isn’t as central or critical as some are making it out to be. The most important debate among Democrats right now isn’t over how to sloganeer in 2018, but which policies to put forth.

The handwringing over the Democratic Party’s message began even before last year’s devastating loss, but has taken on added urgency as Democrats look to capitalize on Trump and his flailing party. “The Democratic Party is embroiled in a debate,” Politico reported in May, “over where they should focus their efforts to win back political power: health care or Russia.” Earlier this month, Newsweek political editor Matthew Cooper wrote that Democrats “see the Russia probes as their ticket to taking back the House in 2018,” while he cautioned that the health care fight “remains the party’s best hope.” The Hill’s Mike Lillis reported that there’s an even more fundamental debate within the party: “House Democrats are at odds over whether attacks on President Trump will prove to be a winning campaign message in 2018.”