Biden’s brand of bipartisanship

Biden’s brand of bipartisanship

By 

Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

March 30, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

The White House is attempting to redefine what the term means. Will it work?

A rainbow above the Washington Monument on Sunday. (Samuel Corum/Bloomberg News)

The first two months of Biden’s term have seen some bipartisanship. Biden has met with a variety of Republicans. The GOP has been more cooperative than one might have expected back in January. Biden’s Cabinet appointments have been approved with bigger majorities than Donald Trump’s. (Though that might be because they were more qualified.) And there have been other areas where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has demonstrated more flexibility than headlines would suggest.

By conventional metrics, however, not so much with the bipartisanship. Despite loose talk during the campaign of appointing a Republican or two to the Cabinet, Biden refrained from doing so. His big piece of legislation to date, the American Rescue Plan, was passed by Congress with nary a Republican vote.

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When asked at last week’s news conference about whether he was rejecting bipartisanship, Biden’s response was politically interesting: “I would like Republican — elected Republican — support, but what I know I have now is that I have electoral support from Republican voters. Republican voters agree with what I’m doing.”

This is a novel way of describing bipartisanship. Biden’s logic is that if he enacts policies that a significant fraction of Republican voters support, then it is bipartisan. In this polarized era, will this revamped definition hold up?

First, it is worth assessing whether Biden is correct about his support from Republican voters. The evidence is mixed. A new ABC News/Ipsos poll shows that 75 percent of voters approve of Biden’s handling of vaccine distribution — including a majority of GOP voters. Sixty percent of voters approve of Biden’s handling of the economic recovery, although that comes with only 23 percent of Republican support. On the latter, however, even elected Republicans acknowledge that they lost the narrative.

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Biden’s polling on border and gun-control issues is less stellar. But as CNN’s Harry Enten points out, voters are less concerned about those issues compared to the pandemic and the economy: “Biden’s secret to success is simple: he’s addressing the issues Americans care about, while his weaker issues are those that most Americans don’t seem as worried about.”

So let’s grant that Biden’s signature policies so far have been popular enough to earn the bipartisan label. The question is: In a highly polarized moment, will Biden be able to translate his moderate popularity in these areas into bipartisan support for future initiatives?

He might! Focus groups of Trump voters suggest much less antipathy toward Biden and his policies than toward Barack Obama. (I’ll let you figure out why.) Polling also suggests portions of the GOP might be attracted to Biden’s infrastructure plan.

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The other thing worth noting is that Biden is still extremely strong with both his Democratic base and independents — more than Trump has been with the GOP base. This might explain why swing Democrats are sticking with Biden.

This new framing of bipartisanship might have more legs than many would have suspected back in January. It will work as long as the issues Biden focuses on are important and resistant to partisan framing (like, say, framing infrastructure as an excuse for tax hikes).

The paradox for Biden is that the more successful he is at addressing the pandemic and the economy, the more difficulty he could encounter in building bipartisan coalitions to address other problems. Political Science 101 would suggest that if Biden gets credit for ending the pandemic and restoring a strong economy, that popularity should translate into greater political capital for other problems in the queue.

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Political Science 301 offers a cautionary warning: Solved problems fade from view. Biden is appropriately addressing the issues voters care about. But if the pandemic and the economy evolve as expected, voters will quickly bank those successes and focus on thornier problems — like immigration.

The big question, then, is whether Biden can use his agenda-setting power to focus on outstanding issues that are broadly popular and avoid issues on which the public is highly polarized. There are reasons to doubt any president’s ability to do this. But if Biden has one political gift, it is finding the median position on an issue and moving to that spot. The next few years will show whether that gift is enough to govern.