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Why the popular Covid relief bill may not pay off electorally for Democrats

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1 year ago

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This fits with the average vote, which shows almost universally more than 60% of Americans who approved the package.

What is the point: It doesn’t take many hoops to see how passing popular legislation can help Democrats in the electoral realm. Nor can it hurt Democrats that Republican members of Congress were universally opposed to the bill.

What the hell does the Republican Party see as making them come out against such a popular bill? Sometimes election math is not easy. Something can be popular without having big ramifications.

For this relief package, let’s start with the fact that it’s not clear that improving the economy is in the minds of their minds. Remember, us just had a few elections where he lost the most confident candidate in the economy (Donald Trump).
Now only 16% of Americans say the economy is one of the nation’s biggest problems, according to Gallup. This is one of the lowest measures of economic importance in the last decade.

In comparison, 86% of Americans said the economy was a major problem in 2009 when a new Democratic president and Democratic Congress passed a stimulus.

That makes sense because “real unemployment” is in the rate by 11% right now. This rate is not low, although it is much lower than it had during Barack Obama’s first term, when it never fell below 14%. The real unemployment rate, which includes the underemployed, marginally linked and discouraged workers, was 15% in February 2009, when the democratic stimulus was approved that year.

Democrats, of course, will argue that this stimulus is part of the biggest effort to combat the effects of coronavirus, which remains the nation’s biggest problem. Democrats may end up winning this battle, though it is not guaranteed.

Also, most Americans don’t necessarily believe that the bill will help people like them much. Only 23% of Americans said yes. This compares to the 27% who said the bill would not help them at all. Among registered voters, the gap is even bigger, with 20% saying the bill would help them a lot and 29% believe not.

When you add those who said the bill would help them a little or a little, the gap was 52%, it helped some or a lot, and 47% it helped little or nothing. It is a much lower margin than the general approval of the bill. This 5-point difference is about the rating of Biden’s net approval (pass-disapprove) in the survey.

The ability or inability of the bill to change political opinion can be reduced to the impact it really has. If the real unemployment rate falls, it could help Democrats in 2022.

This would not be a guarantee, however, as the link between the economy and election results is not so clear in the medium term as in the presidential election. (Trump’s Republican Party lost 40 mid-term seats in 2018 during a relatively strong economy).

In fact, there will be many things that will happen over the next year and a half that voters will think about before voting. Biden and Congress Democrats are likely to pass other laws. Many of these pieces may not end up being as popular as this one.

Thus, the events following the 2009 stimulus should be a warning to Democrats for a multitude of reasons.

Democrats lost 63 seats in the House in the next midterm election. This happened, although the clear majority of Americans (54% in CNN polls) supported this stimulus when it was signed into law.

Part of what happened was that the real unemployment rate remained high, which may not be the case this time.

Perhaps most importantly, the events overshadowed the 2009 stimulus in the minds of voters. Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act, which at the time proved to be very unpopular. it was highly correlated with voting patterns.

Obviously, we have no idea how the 2022 interim periods will work after this stimulus, and the 2009 stimulus was not as popular as this one.

Still, it’s very easy to see how voters won’t even be thinking about what happened this week at the time of the 2022 election.

Before bidding: The main theme of the week is NCAA March Madness themed song.

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