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

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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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