To hear Republicans tell it, the 2017 Republican tax cut law was the culmination of Republican thought. It was the be-all, end-all demonstration of the party's commitment to Lowering Your Taxes, presuming "you" are either a corporate entity or richer than most American small towns. Everyone wanted to be photographed celebrating its passage! Everyone wanted to brag to their voters about how their taxes would most definitely certainly be going down by measurable amounts that you would absolutely notice! (Deficits were no longer a concern; as the federal budget hemorrhages money out every orifice you can expect Republicans will notice this approximately ten minutes after the next Democratic president gains office.)
That was then, this is now, and that same glorious Republican tax cut is, on the campaign trail, dead, dead, dead.
The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super-political action committee that’s the largest-spending political group this cycle, has put out 31,220 broadcast spots in the first nine months of 2018, just 17.3 percent of which referred to the tax law, according data from Kantar Media’s CMAG, which tracks political advertising.
That the Republican tax cuts for the wealthy are disappearing from campaign rhetoric is being painted as surprising news, given how fervently the party was touting those same cuts in the months after their passage. If your voters were truly seeing lower taxes, you'd think you'd want to point out that it was you that had done that for them; if Steve Steelworker can suddenly afford a boat thanks to your partisan generosity, you'd want to mention that every chance you get. So what happened?
Simple: Not many voters saw a damn thing. If their taxes did go down, it was by some negligible amount within the margins of every year's fluctuations. The papers were absolutely full of stories about rich people and congressmen making off like bandits, however, and that probably salted the wound.
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I'm going to disagree with conventional wisdom here a bit in that I don't think the "Republican tax cut" was truly intended to be a 2018 election issue at all. This isn't a case of rhetoric gone stale or a Republican plan gone awry after the voters found out what was really going on; voters were obviously going to catch on as soon as they looked for their cut and didn't find any.
The sole purpose of the Republican tax cuts were to reward wealthy donors. It was to give money away to rich people, because rich people wanted that, and that was all it ever was. As a side effect, it creates deficits so large that some future set of lawmakers will be able to use it as launching pad for killing off still more government programs, but even that was not high on the list of lawmaker concerns. It was to give a crapload of money away to the donors that brought them there, and nothing else.
The mewing about how the move would be a boon for the common man was necessary to prevent widespread outrage; even in this decade, shoving money into billionaires' wallets is only stomached if other taxpayers can be goaded into thinking there's something in it for them as well. But the notion that Republicans were going to pass a tax cut with next to no value for most Americans and somehow, after every one of those Americans filed their taxes and saw with their own eyes the pointlessness of it, still campaign on it as a great and noble victory was ridiculous from the first day.
The point of the tax cuts were to reward Republican donors. That's it. That's all. That's who the celebrating lawmakers were being photographed for; that's the crowd that, in private phone calls and private fundraisers, are still being reminded of Republican generosity. It was done far enough away from the next election season that voters would hopefully not still be angry about it; current reminders of the tax law might apply to the most gullible members of the base, but few others.
It was never going to be a 2018 campaign issue because it was never structured to offer anyone, aside from the fabulously rich, any actual relief. On the contrary, campaigning Republicans are sincerely hoping most voters have forgotten about it.