Why Calling a Democrat a Socialist Isn’t the Insult It Once Was

[MUSIC PLAYING] President Trump is rolling back some tariffs on Canada to help Susan Collins in the midterms. Plus, Republicans are running ads calling Democratic candidates socialist and warning of the communist menace. That's not having quite as strong an impact as it once might have. What is considered radical in the US has really shifted over the last couple of decades. And this particular Republican strategy isn't really keeping up with that. And Apple's flip phone finally hits stores. But good luck getting your hands on one. It's Friday, October 23. I'm Alex Ocelef for the Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. [MUSIC PLAYING] First, ahead of the midterms, some political news. The Justice Department has sued the state of Alaska to block the state's Senate results if the Republican candidate there loses. The suit cites the potential for voter confusion because there are two damn Sullivan's on the ballot. There's Dan J Sullivan Jr., and also Republican incumbent Senator Dan S Sullivan. Dan S is the one who's in a tight race with Democratic challenger Mary Peltola. The lawsuit asks the judge to delay finalizing the vote's outcome if Dan J Sullivan gets enough votes to potentially change the outcome. Also, the journal is exclusively reporting that the US is removing 50% tariffs on some Canadian products in a bid to help Maine's Susan Collins hold on to her Senate seat. Collins said she asked for the tariffs relief. Her Democratic challenger, Tori Jackson, has made Trump's trade war with Canada a central issue in the campaign. And Jackson and Collins are neck and neck in the polls. And in Maine and other states this election, there's one word that keeps coming up again and again in ads against Democratic candidates, socialist. Take a congressional contest in Michigan in a district that includes the Capitol, Lansing. It's one of the country's most competitive house races where the incumbent Republican Tom Barrett is facing 36-year-old Democrat William Lawrence. Have a listen to some of these Republican ads against Lawrence, who's a former member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Socialist William Lawrence wants to redistribute your property and money. That's William Lawrence's socialist vision for America. But these days, attacking a candidate as a socialist doesn't carry the sting it once did. Journal National Security reporter Vera Bergangruin is here now to discuss. Vera William Lawrence has focused on pocketbook issues, opposition to data centers and the war with Iran, and the country's widening income disparity. Voters seem to be responding to that. So is this label socialism still a political liability? There's quite a bit of evidence that it's really not sticking the way it used to. Republicans are not just calling these candidate socialists. They're also reaching even further back and trying to call them communists because they think that's going to have a more visceral reaction. But the truth is that among young voters especially, these ideas just aren't that scary anymore. The idea of some government intervention in order to cap rent or curb drug prices are pretty popular, not just with Democrats, but also with many Republicans. Calling candidates communist doesn't have the same reflexive impact that it used to have. It's interesting. It seems like people have a different kind of emotional foundation for what these terms mean and how they resonate. Where else in the country besides Michigan are we seeing the term socialist communists come up in these races? It's fascinating. We're seeing this everywhere. We're seeing billboards coming up, common sense over socialism. There are events at suburban golf clubs where they're bringing in Venezuelans, Cubans, to talk about their experience with socialism. We're seeing a lot of ads that use the words communism and socialism. We're seeing it resonate quite a bit in places like Florida where the Cuban and Venezuelan and other Hispanic immigrant communities are very heart-like when it comes to this. At the same time, we're also seeing some Republican candidates dial it down as we're getting closer to the midterms as the polls are showing that these attacks aren't resonating. Even Republican strategists told us that it's starting to be kind of a problem to brand people's socialists when a lot of younger voters, especially actually just don't see that as a negative. They kind of see it as either a positive or as just a different way of governing. Right, so what are some of those socialists or maybe populist economic ideas that have gained traction among voters on both sides of the aisle? Some of the examples are capping prescription drug prices, limiting rent increases, even taxing billionaires now has quite a bit of support from Republicans. What we're really seeing ahead of the midterms is that concerns about affordability are just really making people warm to a lot of these ideas, these populist ideas. Are Republicans talking about them on the campaign trail and really embracing them? We're not really seeing Republicans campaign on these issues, but what we are seeing is that they're not really going after them. And President Trump himself has embraced a surprising degree of government intervention in some ways. That was WSJ National Security reporter Farah Bergengruin. Thanks, Farah. Thank you. Meanwhile, Democrats are already planning ahead for what they'll do after the election if they succeed in retaking the House, impeaching defense secretary Pete Heggseth. At rallies in public statements and on cable news, Democrats have vowed to remove him from office. General reporter Maya Davis says Democrats may be setting their sights on Heggseth because they see a third impeachment of President Trump as potentially counterproductive. When we're looking at cabinet members such as Heggseth, he is the public face of a very unpopular war right now. His approval ratings are low and so are the presidents. But he becomes a much easier target on the campaign trail when Democrats are wanting to talk about holding the administration accountable without falling into that sticky trap of a presidential impeachment. Maya says Democrats are hoping that Republicans may be willing to join them in impeaching Heggseth if the GOP loses at the polls. What I know from seeking with Representative Raskin, he's the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is that he intends to force a vote on Heggseth impeachment during this lame duck session between the November midterm elections and when new Congress members come in in January. I've been going through my role of ducks and calling Republicans. There hasn't been a lot of appetite in the people that I've spoken to, so we're going to have to wait until November to see if they might cross the aisle and vote to impeach. Maya says that if Democrats take the House, they could also target Heggseth next year. And if the House does vote to impeach, the matter moves to the Senate. There, a 2/3 supermajority is required to convict Heggseth, which is seen as very unlikely. Coming up, by two low payroll teams going head-to-head, might actually make for a really exciting world series, more after the break. In markets today, the Dow dropped more than 1%. Leading the losses in the major indexes and oil prices kept climbing on worries about an escalating conflict with Iran. Brent crude rose more than 3% today to near $117 a barrel. It's highest level since late April. Today, Apple's new foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, hits stores. And despite some mixed reviews, it's in high demand and also hard to find. The company said that stores will have, quote, "limited numbers of the phone for walking customers," and according to a telecom data provider, orders placed on Apple's online store had a longer shipping delay than the three most recent iPhone models. That all suggests that Apple didn't make enough of the Duo, in part because the supply chain producing it wasn't quite ready for launch. In the world of pharma, we're looking at the results of a trial for an experimental cancer vaccine from Moderna and Merck. As we mentioned on yesterday's show, the results were released prematurely, causing Moderna stock to drop almost 18% yesterday, and it's also down more than 1% today. Xavier Martinez covers biotech for the journal and it's here to help us understand why. Xavier, the study data that was leaked showed a roughly 40% reduction in the risk of melanoma spreading compared with a standard immunotherapy treatment. That seems pretty good to me. Why such a negative reaction from investors? I think you really have to go back to August when Merck and Moderna tell the world that this clinical trial has met two goals. Number one, it stopped the melanoma from coming back. And number two, that it stopped the melanoma from spreading to other organs or metastasizing. That's all they said. They didn't release any data. And in the months since then, there's been a lot of anticipation about what those results can show. People were expecting really amazing data. They know that Merck and Moderna are running almost a dozen other clinical trials, testing this and other types of cancer. And you start to think what could that unlock in terms of really disrupting this $240 billion plus oncology market? So a lot of the oncologists we talked to weren't involved in the study. He said that this is a great step forward. I just think that the data didn't necessarily show that this was something that would be just ubiquitous universal prescription written for every single person with melanoma, which is what a lot of the sort of naysayers of the stock were pointing to when they were looking at the valuation over the last couple of months. You know, it really went through the roof, and so I just think it's a bit of a misalignment. So what's next for this treatment? Are there more clinical trials ahead? And when could we be looking at possible FDA approval? The companies have said that they're expecting to file their application for approval before the end of this year, and that they expect the therapeutic individualized cancer vaccine to be on the market sometime next year. This readout could raise questions about that. timeline. I think we're still waiting to see for sure. And then I think the last thing we really need to be looking forward to, there's this metric that they track in these clinical trials called overall survival. And that's just measuring, you know, how long it really prevents someone from dying. That probably won't be out for another year or more. And so that is something that I'm calling just really our looking toward as I was sort of real proof in the pudding kind of number to see ultimately is this going to be something that's going to be widely prescribed. Journal reporters, Xavier Martinez, thanks so much. Thank you. And finally, that clip you just heard was the moment Milwaukee beat out the LA Dodgers from ESPN MLB. Tonight's the first game of the World Series and the Tampa Bay race are facing off against the brewers in Milwaukee. There are two of the lower payroll teams in the league to put some dollars on this. The brewers swept the Dodgers out of the playoffs. And the race knocked out the Yankees earlier this month. The Dodgers and the Yankees together spent half a billion more in payroll than the teams that beat them. And those some critics worry that the series won't be as closely watched as one that features wealthy franchises. Journal sports columnist Jason Gaye says the naysayers have it all wrong. You've been hearing for quite a while that baseball has become a game of the halves and the have nothings that a team like the Dodgers, which had won the prior two world series had just been so supercharged with money that we were never going to see what we're seeing this year, which is a couple of small market low pay roll teams competing for baseball's biggest prize. If you're in a sort of mid a small market team like a Baltimore Orioles or the Pittsburgh Pirates you should look at the rays and the brewers and say okay maybe there's hope for us. It is validating four teams that have these kind of budgetary struggles and at the same time it has to be a little bit maddening that your team cannot seem to get over the hump and make these kinds of decisions. Jason's looking forward to the match up and he'll be in Milwaukee tomorrow for game two. Milwaukee is a fabulous baseball town. This is a fabulous franchise that has not won a world series ever. There's going to be this kind of emotional release happening in Milwaukee the next couple of nights that I think is comparable actually to what we saw with the NBA and the Nix fans in the spring early summer. This is a city that's ready to pop for its team. Actually the rays have never won a world series either so no matter what happens we'll have a first-time winner. And that's what's news for this week. Tomorrow you can look out for our weekly markets wrap up what's news in markets. Then on Sunday we'll be discussing how Social Security is breaking and Congress has no plan to fix it. That's in what's news Sunday and we'll be back with our regular show on Monday morning. Today's show is produced by Anthony Bansi and Pierre Biennay with supervising producer Tally Arbell. Michael Laval wrote our theme music. I shall muslimize our development producer. Chris Sinsley is our deputy editor. Lee Tal Melod is our senior director of shows and Samantha Henig is the Wall Street Journal's Head of Multimedia. I'm Alex O'Sullot. Have a great weekend and thanks for listening.