REGIONAL— There’s a battle in a mailbox near you as both President Donald Trump and Vice President Joe Biden vie for votes here in the North Country. Both the Republican Party of Minnesota and the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party have flooded the zone in recent weeks with glossy, oversized mailers that provide a stark contrast in both substance and style, highlighting the differing approaches of the campaigns of the major party candidates.
While the campaign for a second term is typically a referendum on the sitting president, the mailers from both parties have surprisingly little to say about President Trump. Mailers produced by the Biden campaign and the DFL focus, instead, on presenting Biden’s campaign agenda, highlighting issues ranging from health care to income inequality to election integrity. The GOP mailers, in contrast, say little about the president, his record, or his plans for a second term. Some don’t even mention the president, focusing instead on linking candidate Biden with a litany of policies backed by progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, many of which Biden has publicly opposed.
Headlines like, “Joe Biden and the Radical Left Are Attacking Our Values,” or “Don’t Let Joe Biden Shut Down Our Economy,” are typical of the flyers that have appeared in mailboxes in recent days. The flyers accuse Biden of supporting cuts to police funding, amnesty and health care for undocumented immigrants, and “the biggest tax increase in history.”
Biden has stated publicly that he opposes cuts to police funding, and that’s why Politifact determined the GOP claim to be “false.” In either case, “nearly all spending on both police and corrections is funded by state and local governments,” according to the nonpartisan Urban Institute. The federal government does provide some grants to police, mostly for the purchase of equipment, but operational funding for police departments comes almost exclusively from the state and local levels. Biden, during his career in the Senate, consistently voted in favor of more police funding, not less.
The GOP mailers also appear to distort Biden’s policies on immigration. Undocumented immigrants already have the right to emergency room care in the U.S., thanks to a law enacted by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Biden says he would allow the undocumented to purchase unsubsidized insurance through a public option as part of an expansion of the Affordable Care Act. Biden has also indicated he supports a pathway to citizenship for some of the 11 million undocumented believed to be in the country. That’s a position that more than 80 percent of Americans say they support, based on recent polling by Gallup.
On taxes, several analyses have confirmed that Biden’s call to repeal most of the Trump tax cuts would amount to a substantial tax increase for some Americans, though Biden has indicated that would only apply to households making over $400,000 and to corporations. An estimated 80 percent of the tax savings attributable to the Trump tax cuts, enacted in 2017, went to corporations and high-income earners.
While the GOP flyers attack Biden almost exclusively, the flyers from the Minnesota DFL highlight Biden’s policies and say little or nothing about President Trump or his policies. Several highlight Biden’s campaign theme, “Build Us Back Better,” and tout his proposals to:
• Lower the cost of health care by providing a tax credit for working families.
• Allow Medicare to negotiate with drug companies to lower prices.
• Raise the minimum wage.
• Expand coronavirus testing.
• Create a nationwide mandate requiring masks in public spaces.
• Expand funding to state and local governments to prevent layoffs of emergency responders.
• Increase funding to schools to provide needed technology to teach successfully online.
• Boost the country’s ability to produce masks and other protective equipment at home.
Another DFL flyer provides North Country residents with information on how to cast their ballot, whether by mail, early in person, or on Election Day.
The use of union printing is another difference between the two campaigns. All of Biden’s literature includes the union “bug” that signifies the material was printed by a union-run facility. None of President Trump’s mailings feature the union label.
To date, the Minnesota DFL reports spending considerably more on direct mail marketing than the state’s GOP. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political fundraising and spending on its website OpenSecrets.com, the DFL reports spending $287,301 so far this cycle on mailings. The party reports spending $163,554 on fundraising efforts. The GOP, meanwhile, reports spending far more on fundraising— a total of $841,936— while reporting just $28,572 on direct mail marketing. Given the volume of material that the party has already distributed in recent weeks, it would appear that the reported spending is lagging behind the actual expenditures.
With just over one month to go until Election Day, and with voting already well underway, residents can expect to see more such flyers in their mailboxes in the days to come.