The midterm story the Wall Street Journal wants you to read isn’t the real one. Jason L. Riley’s “Trump vs. Socialism: Which Do Voters Revile More?” hands you the receipts himself: Trump’s approval on the economy sits at 40 percent, Democrats now lead Republicans on the economic question by 9 points per a Fox News poll this month, and voters hold the president responsible for prices that remain above the Fed’s 2 percent target. Labor-force participation has dipped to its lowest level in five years. Then Riley pivots to the only thing he really wants to discuss — that some Democrats are socialists, and voters will recoil. The piece treats the label as the load-bearing argument. It isn’t. The economy is.
Let me be plain about the half I’m conceding, because I don’t want to dodge it. Yes, Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democrat Riley holds up, has said things Republican attack ads will eat alive: abolishing ICE, single-payer, free college. Riley is right that those positions cost Democrats with working-class and Black voters in swing states. Self-styled socialists do exist. The label “socialist” does scare some people. None of that is the question.
The question is what voters are actually angry about. Riley’s own column tells you: “consumer prices are higher than they were a year ago,” “labor-force participation has dipped to its lowest level in five years.” Those are the lede. The socialism scare is the kicker Riley hopes will save the GOP from having to answer for them. The whole column is a grief-counseling note to Republican candidates: don’t make them look at the receipts; show them the other guy’s fringe positions instead.
That’s not analysis. That’s a redirection plan from a party that has nothing left to defend on the merits. The “socialism” label does all the work the policy can’t. Single-payer healthcare becomes “socialism.” Free public college becomes “socialism.” Abolishing ICE — a stance worth debating on its own terms — becomes “socialism.” Each is a separate debate with separate arguments and separate evidence, and Riley declines to have any of them, because the label lets him skip the debate entirely.
The label also buries an irony Riley doesn’t appear to notice. The supposedly toxic “socialist” positions — universal healthcare, free public college, paid family leave — are precisely what polls show most Americans support. The trick is the word. Describe them as things and you get majority support; describe them as “socialism” and you get a scare. We already run a profitable state-owned bank in North Dakota, and nobody has ever called Bismarck the Kremlin. We already mail every Alaskan an oil dividend. We already insure every American over sixty-five through a single-payer plan called Medicare. The label is the argument, and the label is what’s scaring people, not the substance.
You can see the trick more clearly if you ask the question Riley never asks: what would Republicans say about the economy if the “socialism” scare weren’t available? The piece offers no answer, because there isn’t one. The numbers Riley recites are the numbers his own side is on the hook for. Tariffs raised input costs. The Iran war pushed energy prices up. Labor-force participation dropped. These are policy outcomes with named authors, and the pivot to El-Sayed is what you do when you’ve decided not to defend them.
So answer for them. The trick on tipped income is the easiest place to start. Trump flew to Nevada to brag that waiters, bartenders, valets and caddies now pay zero taxes on their tips. That sounds like a raise until you do the math. A bellhop whose paycheck doesn’t cover his rent isn’t helped by zero taxes on tips. Tips don’t add up to a living wage because the underlying wage is suppressed. The wage is the problem. The tax treatment is a banner.
Walk me through the actual budget. Rent, childcare, health insurance, groceries. Those four lines eat most of a working-class paycheck in 2026. None of them got cheaper because Republicans held the majority. Health insurance premiums are still rising; a hospital visit still risks bankruptcy; the childcare math still refuses to close. The arithmetic is the argument. The label “socialism” is the thing that lets the columnist not do the arithmetic.
We already ran the experiment that proves voters want material relief, not labels. In 2021, we expanded the Child Tax Credit to a monthly, near-universal payment. The Census Bureau measured the result. Child poverty by the Supplemental Poverty Measure fell by 46 percent in a single year — from 9.7 percent to 5.2 percent. Roughly 2.9 million children were lifted out of poverty. Then the expansion lapsed at the start of 2022. Child poverty shot back up. That wasn’t socialism. That was a cash benefit, paid in monthly installments, that we ran on ourselves. The receipt is in the Census data. We turned the policy on; poverty fell. We turned it off; poverty came back.
If “socialism” were the thing voters were running from, the candidate running against expanding the Child Tax Credit would be the one winning. They aren’t.
So what’s the alternative, the one Riley won’t name, because admitting it exists would break the frame? It’s the stuff we already do. Alaska has mailed every man, woman and child a share of oil revenue from the state’s Permanent Fund every year for four decades — a check that arrives every October like a small dividend on being an American citizen. North Dakota runs a state-owned bank — the only one in the country, in operation since 1919 and profitable across most of its history — that lends to farmers and small businesses the big banks won’t touch. About 145 million Americans belong to credit unions; another 42 million get electricity from rural cooperatives their grandparents built when the investor-owned utilities said the countryside wasn’t worth wiring. These are not “socialism.” They are member-owned, state-run, or cooperatively owned American institutions. They work. They predate most of the people reading this column.
That is the menu. Not gulag, not strip-mine. Co-op, credit union, public bank, sectoral wage board, paid leave, the public option — mechanisms that already exist, in some cases already work, and that the socialism frame exists to keep voters from asking for.
Riley’s column tells you voters are angry about the economy. Then he asks you to spend the rest of the piece chasing the word “socialism” so neither party has to answer the actual question. I’ll keep asking the question. The voters are already answering it. They’re answering at the grocery store, at the rent renewal, at the hospital billing window. They aren’t saying “socialism.” They’re saying “this isn’t working.” The midterms will go to whoever takes that sentence seriously.