Equal Pay Hits, United We Oppo, and Minimum Wage Reality
Here’s What You Need To Know
How do Republicans respond to the equal pay issue? Since April 4th marked “Equal Pay Day,” a symbolic day dedicated to raising awareness about the gender pay gap in the U.S. workforce, we wanted to give you some perspective on the issue. Democratic politicians have been able to attack their Republican opponents on this issue for decades now, though it has become most prevalent in the past several election cycles. Yet, through effective use of the type of research we prepare for our clients every day, GOP candidates have crafted a strong response.
- The GOP Responds By Exposing The Truth: As Republican politicians were repeatedly hit with criticism over their refusal to support Democratic equal pay measures, our analysts and other communications research teams went to work to provide an effective response to the criticism. We wanted to illustrated that these attacks were more political theater than policy debate. We found that numerous Democrats had substantial gender wage gaps within their own political offices and campaigns. By pointing out that the Clinton Foundation paid men more than women on average or that Elizabeth Warren’s Senate office did the same, Republicans can effectively nullify attacks on the issue. Better still, by making an analysis of an opposing campaign’s gender pay gap a mainstay of our political research, GOP candidates can launch the attack before their Democratic opponents even have a chance to raise the issue.
- Rules For Analyzing Gender Pay Gaps: Whenever our team prepares research on a Democratic candidate, especially one who has spoken out on the issue of equal pay, we look to their campaign and any other office they have held where employment and salary information is public to search for indications of a gender wage gap. One of the first things we recognize is that the details of how employee salaries are disclosed varies between offices. Even just looking in the federal government, Senate and House offices report their staff salaries differently. This means there is no one-size-fits-all formula and that each office needs to be reviewed on its own. Beyond that, we look for effective one-to-one comparisons of employees with the same titles to review monthly (not annual) payments. The critiques often also go beyond simply the salary figures, which is why we also examine the gender spread among senior staff on the campaign or in the office.
- Democrats Don’t Have An Effective Response Yet: As our clients and many other Republicans have used this research advantage to great effect responding to a key Democratic attack, Democrats have yet to effectively respond when called out for this apparent hypocrisy. Their primary approach has been to simply dispute the validity of the claims by either doing what Hillary Clinton’s campaign did and argue the accusations are based on too limited a set of figures or the strategy used by Elizabeth Warren’s office in offering manipulated statistics to disprove the pay gap. Some have even argued the gap only exists because their senior staff happens to be all men, which only magnifies their hypocrisy. Whichever response is chosen, it does not seem to be particularly effective and boils down to either blatant spin or a hollow denial. If Democrats hope to continue using the issue of equal pay as a political hit on their Republican opponents, they will need to prepare better for these counterattacks on the subject, or better yet, start practicing what they preach.
The point of this exercise is not so much a partisan one so much as it is to demonstrate precisely how effectively employing competitive intelligence can offer responses to tough attacks. Often times, complicated policy issues are boiled down to very simplistic attacks for messaging purposes, and those are almost always opportunities to dig into the facts and pushback with some carefully prepared research on the subject.
News You Can Use
UNITED WE OPPO
Earlier this week, United Airlines made headlines when a passenger was forcibly removed from an overbooked flight after refusing to give up his seat. The powerful images of the incident, showing the passenger bloodied and dragged down the aisle by his arms and legs, have plunged United into crisis mode with their stock dropping $1.4 billion in just two days. One part of what is undoubtedly a multi-faceted crisis PR operation has been surprisingly aggressive opposition research. Within 48 hours of the incident, members of United’s crisis communications team had dug into the passenger shown in the video and begun pushing out rapid response documents to the press outlining the passenger’s troubled past. They found that the 69-year-old doctor from Kentucky was previously convicted of trading prescription drugs for sexual favors resulting in the suspension of his medical license. This effort shows that some of the most high-profile crisis PR operations have competitive intelligence components on their team. However, it also shows that blaming the victim will not distract the public from your beat down of the victim. Research is only as good as the way it is used.
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HOME BUYERS’ STRUGGLE
Despite a relatively stable job market and mortgage rates holding near historic lows, home buyers face a major challenge in the real estate market – the thinnest national housing supply in the past 20 years. The supply of available homes in the U.S. has declined on an annual basis for the past 21 months, thanks to (1) Americans staying in their current homes even longer for fear of not finding a new home they both like and can afford, and (2) real estate investors who hold properties for a disproportionately long period of time owning roughly 35 percent of the market. Couple those factors with sluggish construction growth thanks to costly regulations, limited build-ready land, and a shortage of skilled labor, and you have a recipe for a struggling real estate market. This difficulty for young families and Millennials to purchase their first homes could mean an entire generation having trouble creating wealth over time, a major issue for long-term U.S. economic growth.
TRUMP’S SECRET WEAPON
The Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans have been quietly engaging in successful efforts to drastically pull back Obama-era regulations using a little known measure called the Congressional Review Act. The legislation, passed in 1996, effectively allows Congress to simply repeal recently enacted regulations. President Trump has already signed 11 of these CRAs targeting several of the Obama Administration’s last-minute regulations. The CRA can only be used within 60 days of Congress’ notification of the new regulation, so the window for its use against Obama era rules is closing. However, because the CRA also contains a provision that says once Congress repeals a regulation new rules that are “substantially similar” cannot be enacted, some Republicans are planning to use the CRA to preemptively block new regulations Democrats are likely to propose in the future. Between Trump’s quiet success repealing major regulations and his under-appreciated success shepherding Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the President is actually having a much more successful first hundred days in office than a skim of the national headlines would suggest.
THE DIGITAL WAR AGAINST ISIS
Dr. Haroon Ullah, a senior member of Secretary of State Tillerson’s Policy Planning Staff, recently published a Medium post outlining the Department’s efforts to combat ISIS inside one of their safe spaces – the internet. Ullah highlights ISIS’ effectiveness in using the internet to form a “Digital Caliphate” by recruiting disaffected individuals everywhere from Nice to Berlin to Orlando to San Bernardino. Efforts to blunt ISIS’ online growth have been undertaken by the U.S. government, our allies, and the private sector. Companies like Twitter are aggressively cracking down on accounts on their platform used by ISIS, with U.S. and allied governments working to reach a point where there is now more anti-ISIS content online than pro-ISIS content. Ullah explains these efforts must continue because even if ISIS retreats from the physical battlefield, the digital battlefield is where America and its allies must break the ISIS’ allure.
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MINIMUM WAGE REALITY
The “Fight for Fifteen” movement, which seeks to raise the minimum wage, has seen considerable popular support among progressives, particularly in urban areas. Yet even some progressive politicians who believe in the idea appear to be changing their minds when it comes to actually putting the policy into practice. Just recently, Baltimore’s new Democratic Mayor, Catherine Pugh, went from actively supporting efforts to raise the minimum wage to using her mayoral veto powers to block legislation to raise the wage, after actually studying the economics of the policy. She learned what many economists have argued about an increased minimum wage: it forces businesses to adjust their expenditures in order to account for these higher wages leading them to scale back employee hours, cut new positions, and move toward cheaper automated options. Many chief executives of governments at the local or state level across the political spectrum have realized that workers suffer the most when government prices them out of the labor market because statutory minimum wage policies – along with how they are implemented – often end up creating greater unemployment for workers rather than great prosperity.
THE MEALS ON WHEELS LIE
After President Trump released his budget outline, countless media outlets reported a proposal to eliminate the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program (CDBG) that would result in drastic funding cuts to the Meals on Wheels service that provides food delivery for homebound senior citizens. These sensationalist reports failed to mention that the vast majority of Meals on Wheels’ federal funding comes from an entirely different program. The CDBG is often used for business subsidies and pork-barrel projects, and is only loosely connected to Meals on Wheels because some states have opted to use the grant to supplement other funding sources for the program. The misleading headlines surrounding this issue are just another example of how hastily crafted media narratives can quickly snowball into hyperbolic claims that could have easily been avoided.
HOW PERVASIVE WAS OBAMA NSA SPYING?
Bloomberg reports that former National Security Advisor Susan Rice sought to “unmask” members of the Trump campaign and transition team whose communications were collected incidentally during legal surveillance of foreign persons. While these Trump associates were not the targets of surveillance, Rice’s action increased the chances that their identities and conversations would be leaked to the public. As outlandish as it sounds, it was already known that the Obama Administration worked to spread raw intelligence that included Trump officials’ conversations widely within the government.
Now some are beginning to connect the dots of a previous incident in which Obama officials exposed domestic political opponents using surveillance of foreign officials. According to a 2015 report, Obama staffers used similar tactics to monitor U.S. lawmakers during debate over the Iran deal. Despite a 2011 directive explicitly forbidding the National Security Agency from preserving communications of members of Congress, the agency reportedly intercepted conversations between the Israeli diplomatic officials detailing their private discussions with U.S. lawmakers. While this process was technically legal, many believe the Obama Administration later leaked information gleaned from this surveillance to influence the Iran deal debate.
President Obama declared President Trump’s claims of wiretapping were “ridiculous,” but looking back at actions taken by the previous Administration, his administration may have skirted the law once again to achieve their political and policy objectives.