The Wall Street Journal comes to Fall River with me
Fall River, Massachusetts, is the largest city in my district. It voted Republican for president in 2024 for the first time in a century. (Bay Stater Calvin Coolidge was the last Republican to carry the city.)
Greg Ip, Chief Economics Commentator of The Wall Street Journal, recently joined me for a full day in Fall River to discuss cost disease, law & order, and education as defining issues for Democrats.
You can read below portions of Greg Ip’s column:
“FALL RIVER, Mass.—Democrats’ bruising loss to Donald Trump in last November’s election could be explained in a single word: inflation. It should be the last thing a Democrat would want to raise with voters now. Yet it is the first thing that Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts brings up with them. “Prices are going up. We’ve all felt that,” he declares to a group of seniors at a cookout outside this former mill town 50 miles south of Boston.
Then comes a mini economics tutorial. Prices for some things usually stay the same or fall, like electronics, he says. Others rise, year after year, like housing, utilities and healthcare. These sectors have what he calls “cost disease,” which, like any disease, requires intervention. “Policymakers need to start treating cost disease.”
…The Democratic Party, shut out of power and mired at its lowest approval in over 35 years, is in crisis. On culture and quality of life, voters see it as out of touch. On economics, its populist positions on trade and entitlements have been co-opted by Trump.
Auchincloss thinks he knows the way out of the wilderness. A cerebral former Marine who looks younger than his 37 years, Auchincloss is a fan of social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt’s theory that the public associates morality with care, fairness, authority and loyalty. Auchincloss sums them up as “social order.” Democrats lost, he says, because “we were not perceived as upholding social order.”
…His formative political experience came when he ran for Congress in 2020. Despite public-health experts recommending schools reopen, Democratic-run cities and states kept them closed. They were “too focused on process, not enough on outcomes that mattered, which was getting kids back in schools. And there was a condescending attitude to parents who were rightfully frustrated watching kids atrophy at home.”
…Auchincloss’s district is reliably Democratic thanks to affluent liberal voters in Boston’s suburbs. But its largest city is Fall River, a blue-collar city once dominated by textile mills whose residents voted last fall for the Republican presidential candidate, Trump, for the first time in a century. Here is where Auchincloss is fine-tuning his message on costs and social disorder.
At a municipal services fair in a local park, a police officer relates how a railroad track converted to a recreational trail soon attracted a homeless encampment. “You should be able to clear these open air encampments,” Auchincloss responds. Democrats, he says later, haven’t been “muscular” enough on issues like homelessness and crime.
Auchincloss argues Trump and Republicans also contribute to cost disease through their closeness to corporations. At a meeting with independent pharmacist Tom Pasternak who complains about low insurance-reimbursement rates, Auchincloss blames pharmacy-benefit managers for steering patients away from cheap generics and toward their captive drugstore chains. He notes a bill to regulate such companies had wide bipartisan House support last year, but was excluded from a funding bill “at the behest of Elon Musk and has yet to get another hearing on the floor,” which he blames on lobbying by health insurers.
…Auchincloss has also targeted social-media companies for delivering “digital dopamine” to children. Here, too, Haidt was an influence. Last year, Auchincloss invited Haidt, who had just published the bestseller “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” to address about eight to 10 members from both parties of the Congressional Dads Caucus. “Jake is emerging as a major policy thinker among the Democrats,” said Haidt, noting the congressman’s authorship of a bill to raise the minimum age for certain social media protections to 16 from 13.”
Inflation was not the defining issue in the loss in November--it was the open border.
Thanks Jake for the piece. I listened to an interview with you on I think it was the Bulwark or maybe it was Pod Save America, sorry I listen to a lot of podcasts. Anyway, it was interesting and your “cost disease” issue is so on target 🎯I have a question for all Dems in Congress. Why oh why doesn’t someone challenge leadership? Hakeem Jeffries and especially Chuck Schumer are not meetings the moment, to say the least. Seems a big reason the Dem approval ratings are in the toilet 🚽 is because of leadership at the top of the DNC and leadership in congress. We can’t fix the dnc but the rank and file could make congressional leadership by voting them out and replacing them with a fighter. There is a ton of talent in congress, but it’s not I leadership. If you guys put your constituents and the country above loyalty to the status quo, and elected new leadership, almost guaranteed the view of the Democratic Party would unflush itself out of the toilet. Democrats are the ones giving the party shitty ratings. I’m a life long Democrat and every time I listen to Schumer or Jeffries speak or tweet I want to scream. It is so enraging. Also the issue of giving leadership-ish positions to Jerry Connelly, who is presently dead and now there is an open seat, while amazing communicator AOC is left in the dust. Another example is Debbie Dingle who isn’t dead but is about as engaging as a white bread mayonnaise sandwich. Meanwhile one of the best communicators Jasmine Crockett is left in the dust and on top of that is being told to be quiet. That is why Democrats hate the Democratic Party. Sorry long comment. Thanks Jake for reading.