ICYMI: The third rail Republicans can’t stop touching [POLITICO]

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POLITICO: The third rail Republicans can’t stop touching
Social Security and Medicare are wildly popular. So why do GOP Senate candidates keep talking about privatizing them?
By Natalie Allison
September 22, 2022

Key Points:

• For two decades, campaign after campaign, Republican politicians have floated the idea of privatizing government entitlement programs including Social Security and Medicare. And campaign after campaign — from Paul Ryan to George W. Bush — it’s been a loser.

• But for some reason, they keep trying. The latest is Don Bolduc, New Hampshire’s GOP Senate nominee, who advocated privatizing Medicare during a campaign town hall in early August, according to a recording of the event obtained by POLITICO.

• “The privatization is hugely important,” the retired army general told the audience in the town of Pembroke on Aug. 2. “Getting government out of it, getting government money with strings attached out of it.”

• Bolduc isn’t the only Republican to take aim at the popular programs in recent months; GOP Senate nominees in some of the country’s most competitive races this year have also faced scrutiny over their current or past support for privatizing the programs.

• In Arizona, GOP Senate nominee Blake Masters in June floated the idea of privatizing Social Security during a candidate forum… “Maybe we should privatize Social Security. Private retirement accounts, get the government out of it.” A few months earlier, he went further, telling Republicans in Sun City the country would need to “cut the Gordian knot” on Medicare and Social Security.

• Republican Sen. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, meanwhile, has taken heat for suggesting that funding for Medicare and Social Security should not be automatically renewed each year, but instead become discretionary spending subject to annual congressional review.

• His Democratic opponent, Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, has continued to raise the issue on the campaign trail, forming a “Seniors for Mandela” group that highlights Johnson’s proposals on Medicare and Social Security.

• Bolduc’s remarks about privatizing Medicare will all but certainly be used against him in advertisements by Democrats, who have long used the threat of changes to Social Security and Medicare to animate older voters. Bolduc’s opponent, incumbent Sen. Maggie Hassan, has said she would fight to protect existing Social Security and Medicare programs.

• Elderly voters — many on fixed incomes and relying on government benefits — are a key voting bloc. New Hampshire’s 307,000 Medicare recipients made up roughly one-quarter of the state’s population in 2020, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, while Social Security recipients totaled 321,000 in the state as of last year.

• “He has problems. This doesn’t solve any of them, and perhaps compounds them a little bit,” said Tom Rath, the state’s former attorney general and a former Republican National Committeeman for New Hampshire. “This is a state with a lot of folks over 60 — you’re talking to one — and that matters.”

• He criticized Bolduc for believing he could dramatically change positions from the primary to general election without voters noticing.

• The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has spent more than $1.7 million on television ads in Arizona specifically highlighting Masters’ comments on privatizing Social Security — a topic they’re still putting money behind on the air.

• It appears their messaging is breaking through to voters. During a focus group conducted Thursday by the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, viewed exclusively by POLITICO, two of the nine Arizona voters participating — each of whom voted for Trump in 2016 but not in 2020 — brought up Masters’ views on Social Security.

• Both men said they intend to vote for Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly this fall.
  
  

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