The phrase “all politics is local” is a common refrain in the US. The former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Democrat Tip O’Neill of Boston, is most closely associated with this idiom, which essentially means being always immersed at the community level, knowing your people, and understanding and solving their specific problems. Like many other political norms, President Donald Trump is turning this old adage on its head, as he frames all his talking points on a national level. So, whether he is in South Dakota or Texas, the same set of soundbites are announced from the podium. This was most spectacularly pronounced last week, when he declared in Houston: “You know what I am? I am a nationalist” — a phrase avoided by most of his predecessors due to its racist and anti-Semitic connotations. This is ultimately where the battle lines of the 2018 midterm elections are being drawn. You have Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives seeking to frame their individual campaigns in each of the 435 constituencies on local healthcare or education issues, while the president is drowning out the echo chambers of local talk radio and cable television with such declarations of being a “proud” American nationalist. Lawmakers have returned home to their congressional districts in recent weeks for the final stretch of the campaign to discover, if they didn’t know already, that most voters were no longer paying much attention to core issues in their own communities. This is forcing senators and representatives to offer commentary locally on all the national controversy. The more Democrats are forced away from their key messages of wage growth, education and healthcare to discuss the latest set of MAGA headlines or tweets from Trump, the more the Republicans gain in the polls. Sean Evers One of the president’s current favorite talking points is a migrant caravan of up to 7,000 Central Americans moving steadily north through Mexico toward the US border. It has become political ammunition for Trump, who calls it an “assault on our country.” He has even seized on right-wing media reports to suggest the caravan could be infiltrated by “unknown Middle Easterners” affiliated with Daesh. These red-hot issues are thrust into the path of regular Democratic candidates competing for election in constituencies far removed from the 3,000-kilometer US-Mexico border. They are compelled to address these sentiments of national sovereignty when all they want to discuss is the fact that the Republicans have destroyed Obamacare and, in so doing, removed healthcare coverage from their constituencies. The more Democrats are forced away from their key messages of wage growth, education and healthcare to discuss the latest set of “Make America Great Again” headlines or tweets from Trump, the more the president’s Republican Party gains in the polls. And, to the surprise of many pundits commentating from the sidelines, myself included, it shows rather shockingly poor political skills on the part of the Democratic Party that, after three years of facing the same Trump playbook of “America First” talking points, they still have not developed a robust set of responses and all they continue to do is gasp in disbelief with hands thrown in the air as potential voters drift away. Sean Evers is the founder and managing partner of Gulf Intelligence. Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News" point-of-view