Trump didn’t have to deliver for his party’s base. Biden does.
Imagine how rank-and-file Democrats would feel about President Biden if his first legislative victory — in his case, the American Rescue Plan — was also his last, then his party lost the House in the midterm elections, and his reelection campaign was soundly defeated, giving Republicans total control of Washington.
The prevailing attitude toward him would probably be disgust. The Democratic base might grant that his heart was in the right place, but they wouldn’t want to have much else to do with him. Since he failed them, they’d move on and look for someone else to lead them.
That is precisely what happened to former president Donald Trump, yet he continues to loom over the GOP. The question for every Republican candidate today is whether they advocate for the lie that Trump won the 2020 election, and if they ever criticized him they have to perform a public self-flagellation worthy of the Cultural Revolution.
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Which reveals how different the dynamics within the two parties are, and how difficult a challenge Biden faces. While Trump successfully broke the link between politics and policy within his party, Democrats will judge Biden by how much progress he makes on their agenda. And he has a steep mountain to climb.
Democrats are entering a critical period in which their first-year agenda could rise or fall, in two bills now moving through the legislative process. The first is infrastructure — in its current incarnation, a bipartisan bill that we’re told has the support of 10 Senate Republicans, enough to overcome a GOP filibuster. The second is a potentially enormous reconciliation bill covering a wide swath of policy areas, which could pass without any Republican support but will need the support of every last Democrat.
In the end, Senate Minority Leader McConnell (R-Ky.) will probably exert sufficient pressure on Republicans that all but a few will abandon the bipartisan deal, ensuring it won’t overcome the GOP filibuster and Democrats will have to fold it into a larger reconciliation bill. That would make passing that bill — and satisfying everyone from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) — even trickier.
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Should it fail, the Democratic base will likely lose faith in Biden, because he didn’t deliver. There is no performative campaign he could engage in that would change their minds.
Things just don’t work that way in the Republican Party, where the ability of a politician, even a president, to “own the libs” may be the most powerful predictor of their popularity. You’ll notice “owning the cons” isn’t even a thing for Democrats.
That’s not to say there are no Democrats who engage the base with carefully considered media strategies; of course there are. But the Democratic celebrities of the left — Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) — are beloved in large part because they are strong advocates for a well-defined and comprehensive policy agenda, not just because they enact performances of loathing for the other side.
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Which illustrates just how extraordinary it is that Trump is still the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party. In the past, presidential one-term losers have quickly faded away, as politicians in their party avoided being associated with them and the party’s voters looked for new figures who might reverse their defeat. And not only did Trump lose, his presidency was a profound failure at its most fundamental level.
His only significant legislative accomplishment was an enormous tax cut for the wealthy and corporations. He and congressional leaders failed to repeal Obamacare. He did get three appointments to the Supreme Court. But his most important promise to that white conservative base — to make America what it once was, a place where immigrants were invisible, your values reigned, and the culture reinforced and celebrated your status instead of making you feel alienated — was one he utterly, and inevitably, failed to achieve.
But more than anything else, he taught his party to stop caring about whether he gave them anything substantive. Politicians have always tried to put on a show, but Trump’s show was so all-encompassing and so focused on his base’s feelings — their resentments, their alienation, their anger, their lust for revenge — that it made the question of whether he achieved demonstrable policy gains seem trivial.
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Nothing like that could ever be the case with Biden, because he and Democrats are different. The symbolic things he offered were reassurance, empathy, and calm, which he has largely managed to deliver. But if they aren’t followed by progress on the sweeping agenda Democrats voted for, they will grow disillusioned.
The practical effects of such an outcome could be complicated. But for a start, it could mean weak turnout in the 2022 midterms, which would then mean the party would lose the House and possibly the Senate. And if that happens, Biden’s challenge will only multiply.
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