With Polls and Private Meetings, Republicans Craft Blunt Messaging to Paint Democrats as Extreme

Republican leaders are sharpening and poll-testing lines of attack that portray Democratic policies on health care, the environment and abortion as far outside the norm, in hopes of arming President Trump with hyperbolic sound bites — some of them false — asserting that Democrats would cause long waits for doctors or make killing babies after birth legal.

The blunt messaging underscores one of the biggest challenges facing Democrats as they try to defeat the incumbent president: the need to define themselves and their ideas before Mr. Trump and his conservative allies do it for them. CONT.

Jeremy W. Peters, New York Times