A dangerous myth about those big Democratic losses is threatening Biden’s agenda

A dangerous myth about those big Democratic losses is threatening Biden’s agenda

President Biden delivers remarks on the authorization of the coronavirus vaccine for 5-to-11-year-olds on Nov. 3. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

By Greg Sargent

Columnist

Yesterday at 10:46 a.m. EDT

Did Democrats take a big drubbing on Tuesday because they are trying to accomplish too much on behalf of our country?

To some centrist Democrats and opinionmakers, the answer is yes. If this idea gains traction, it could spook centrist lawmakers into making more demands to downsize President Biden’s agenda, fueling ideological conflict and causing important programs to be jettisoned.

You hear this argument everywhere. But it’s weakly reasoned and utterly without any real basis.

House Democrats are close to passing a $1.75 trillion Build Back Better package (BBB), which would unlock passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill. The Senate would then take up BBB. Last-minute sticking points loom, but this is getting close.

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Is this cause for celebration, or angst? Well, one centrist congressional Democrat declares that those losses mean Biden doesn’t have a big mandate, after all: “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”

“The president ran as a competent bipartisan centrist,” is how one Democratic strategist interprets those results. “He has not governed that way.”

And a New York Times editorial makes this argument at length. Declaring that “Democrats deny political reality at their own peril,” it claims a need to “return to the moderate policies and values” that fueled 2018 and 2020 Democratic victories.

It insists the party is prioritizing “progressive policies at the expense of bipartisan ideas” and that many voters are “leery of a sharp leftward push in the party.” This requires reconsideration of centrist “concerns” about spending and BBB’s “price tag.”

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The basic claim here is that Tuesday’s losses were at least partly due to the ambition of the BBB agenda — and that this agenda alienated voters because it supposedly went much farther than Biden’s campaign platform.

But this reflects a flawed understanding of electoral politics and an account of the last two years that’s strangely detached from reality.

First, to believe this, you’d have to believe voters are extraordinarily attuned to policy detail. Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine if Biden had signed both bills, in their current form, a month or two weeks before the elections.

It seems obvious this would have helped Democrats. But if that’s the case, then how can the scale of the bill’s spending, or its alleged betrayal of Biden’s moderate campaign platform, in themselves be the problem?

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If Biden presided over a major signing ceremony on both bills, and local press accounts were full of descriptions of their benefits, it’s hard to imagine many swing voters saying: “Nope, the price tag is $500 billion too high, and this or that particular program just goes too far, so I’m voting Republican this fall.”

The failure to deliver was probably a much bigger problem. Oddly, the Times editorial sort of concedes this, citing “months of intraparty squabbling” as costing Democrats. I agree: The battling probably did fuel impressions of incompetence and detachment from voter concerns, alienating independents and moderates.

But if so, then the problem isn’t the agenda’s ideological ambition. It’s that legislating while bridging deep intraparty disagreements is hard, and voters don’t like the sausage making.

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The critics are incoherent on this point: The ideological scope of the package alienated moderate voters, and so did the failure to pass it.

Even stranger, Democrats actually did pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill through the Senate. Yes, it’s been held up by infighting. But here again, the problem lies in the challenges of legislating, not in the ideological makeup of the overall program or any alleged betrayal of Biden’s “moderation.” And what other “bipartisan ideas” are out there that Republicans would support?

Which leads to another fallacy in the criticism: It’s empirically the case that Biden did run on the agenda on its way to passage.

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I asked a Democrat who worked on the campaign about this, and he cited TV ad after TV ad after TV ad and speech after speech that made a core promise: Higher taxes on the rich and corporations to fund large investments in climate, job creation, health care, education, infrastructure, and even the care economy. Campaign blueprints vowed trillions in spending.

There’s just no denying that the campaign conveyed an agenda of great ambition, one that would rise to generationally defining national crises and foundationally transform our political economy. Is it possible swing voters supported that general agenda but got turned off by emerging details, deciding they were too “left wing?”

That’s dubious. This again assumes hyper-attunement to policy: Yes, let’s tax the rich to fund transformative investments in our country and people, but wait, this child tax credit check and that expansion of Medicare to cover hearing constitute too much Bernie-and-AOC style socialism for my taste!

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A caveat: Many swing voters probably were alienated by impressions that the party is culturally adrift on classroom curriculums, public health mandates, policing and the like. Backlogged supply chains and the covid-19 resurgence both hurt. These are real problems and failings that require a reckoning.

But even if so, this has little to do with the makeup and scale of Build Back Better or any alleged betrayal of Biden’s True Moderate Core. Indeed, a real reckoning with “political reality” would entail seriously parsing out the real causes of Tuesday’s results from ones being hyped for factional and ideological purposes. Otherwise we’ll learn exactly the wrong lessons from them.