Ineffective messaging lets impact of Biden’s rescue plan fizzle, Democrats complain

Paul Begala remembers a prophetic conversation he had with Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania last year, when he told his old friend that he felt confident the recently passed American Rescue Plan would be a big political winner.

Casey was less certain.

“I said, OK, this is going to pay off for us,” Begala, a onetime top aide to former President Bill Clinton, recounted in an interview. “And he said, ‘No, it won’t, unless we do two things we’re not good at: Bragging and blaming.’ ”

Begala paused.

“And he was right,” he added. “We did not brag about it or blame Republicans.”

(A spokeswoman for Casey confirmed Begala’s account.)

In the year since President Joe Biden signed the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan into law, some of the Democratic Party’s leading strategists, lawmakers, and leaders say they have become increasingly frustrated that it hasn’t yet made a bigger impression on the public. Instead, they say a law many of them consider the White House’s most important achievement to date — and one they had hoped would herald a new era of Democratic politics — has either been ignored, misunderstood, or entirely forgotten by many voters.

And like Begala, they’re ready to blame the disappointment on everyone from the White House to congressional lawmakers for failing to drive a message that connects with the public.

“There’s a difference between speaking and being heard,” said Democratic Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois. “We’ve talked about it. There’s no question about that.

“But the message hasn’t necessarily gotten through,” he added. “So we have to work to make sure that we frame all that we’re doing.”

Complaints about communication strategies are a common refrain in Washington when a political party is mired in difficulty, and, indeed, some party strategists argue the problems with the law’s popularity run deeper than efforts to promote it.

Democrats like Schneider also emphasize that they think the party still has time to turn the rescue plan into a political asset ahead of November’s midterm elections, arguing that the legislation gave an essential boost to the economy and coronavirus recovery effort. If the pandemic recedes and inflation eases, they argue, the president and Democratic Party could stand to receive more credit.

But amid a difficult political climate marked by Biden’s low approval ratings, the law hasn’t proven an electoral lifeline as many in the party once hoped.

“This has been a very sobering lesson about what it takes to break through,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who worked for Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020. “As long as people’s lived experiences are negative and not positive, which is how they feel right now, then you’re going to get very limited credit.”

White House response

White House officials point out that the president has consistently talked about the rescue plan, whether during updates about the state of the pandemic or during monthly remarks about the latest jobs report. The administration’s communication efforts increased this week, ahead of the law’s one-year anniversary, with senior White House officials briefing reporters about its economic effects and local mayors touting the money they received as an essential tool to stave off budget cuts.

Biden also mentioned the American Rescue Plan by name five times during last week’s State of the Union address — more than other initiatives like the Bipartisan Infrastructure law — tying the nation’s recent robust job growth to the program in a way senior White House officials say to expect more of in the coming months.

“When you see the president talking about the economy, he’s going to continue to talk about it in the way he did in the State of the Union, where he’s going to say our economic strategy started with ARP and was built on with the Bipartisan Infrastructure law,” said a senior White House official.

The law itself is also popular, according to polls, and voters still respond positively to individual benefits included in it.

A survey from the liberal Data for Progress and Invest in America released this week, for example, found that 68% of respondents supported the rescue plan after being told it included a $1,400 stimulus check and expanded unemployment insurance, among other measures. Another progressive operation, Navigator, found in that November poll that 77% of voters support the stimulus checks.

But party strategists say that while the individual components of the law might test well, voters in the real world don’t necessarily remember that Biden was responsible for the stimulus checks, much less give him enough credit to materially affect how they view him now.

A CNN/SSRS poll released in February found that 56% of Americans don’t approve of anything Biden has done since taking office — not a single thing.

“He has dumped thousands and thousands of dollars into the pockets of middle-class Americans and often gets no credit for it,” Begala said.

‘You could just watch it turn’

Other parts of the law, Democrats say, did not work out politically the way they had hoped. Party strategists say that provisions to boost unemployment insurance by as much as $300 a week, for instance, proved unpopular once concern about the pandemic started to ebb in late spring of last year.

“You could just watch it turn. In April, it was OK. In May, it was getting bad, and by June, it was a disaster,” said a Democratic pollster, granted anonymity to speak candidly about party strategy.

The strategist said that in their data, about 60% of voters had turned against the boost to unemployment insurance, which Democrats let expire in September.

Another measure that had been at the center of the party’s political message, an expanded Child Tax Credit program that issued monthly payments to parents of children, also expired this year after Democrats failed to extend it, something even senior White House officials acknowledge was a significant blow.

If extended, some party strategists contend the program would have been a clear political winner even if it applied to a relatively small number of voters. (Lake said she projected only about 28% of the 2022 electorate would have a child under 18.) But making the measure temporary likely makes its effect negligible.

“There is a pretty reasonable amount of evidence that people who got the child tax credit became more supportive of it,” said Sean McElwee, the founding executive director of Data for Progress. “The problem is when you take what percentage of the population gets this, what percentage becomes persuaded by it, and now they don’t get the extended benefit, the political effects are muted.”

Still other parts of the law, whether boosts in funding for low-income families to heat their homes or hundreds of billions of dollars distributed to state and local governments, have gone largely unnoticed, at least thus far.

“I’ve told the White House this: There has to be a coordinated effort with all of us speaking the same kind of language and talking to our members and coalition partners about the benefits,” said Lee Saunders, president of the public-sector union AFSCME. “We’ve got to do that now. That can be beneficial for the upcoming elections, but we can’t wait until September to talk about what the benefits are.”

Republicans, for their part, have charged that the rescue package exacerbated the nation’s rising inflation, which voters rate as a top concern. No amount of economic growth will alleviate the public’s concern about the economy, they say, until inflation eases.

For some Democratic allies, however, studying voter response to the rescue plan has been a lesson in how the public doesn’t always respond to government benefits in an expected way.

Sarah Longwell, founder of the anti-Donald Trump Republican Accountability Project, said as a longtime Republican she always envied Democrats who, in her view, could deliver benefits to people in legislation and watch voters reward them at the ballot box.

But her research this year — Longwell conducts regular focus groups with moderate voters and former Republicans who backed Biden during the 2020 election — has shown her it’s not that simple, she said.

“What’s been startling to me is the way people focus on what other people get, and so it opens up more opportunities for resentment than appreciation,” she said. “And the first time I’ve heard it, and I’ve heard it over and over, people say some version of, ‘I can’t believe how much the businesses got, they bailed out the businesses and I only got x, y, or z.’ Or people say, ‘Look, I got the check, but I didn’t need it.’ ”

‘People are confused’

Everyone from White House officials to Democrats acknowledge that a series of compounding crises last year and this year, from the deadly pullout from Afghanistan and rise of two new coronavirus variants to soaring inflation and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have made any sort of political success difficult.

And efforts to earn credit were hindered further still, they agree, during a summer and fall in which protracted negotiations over the Democrats’ legislative agenda frustrated even members of their own party. Biden and Democrats eventually passed only an infrastructure law last year, failing to win enough votes for a larger spending package known as Build Back Better that stirred lasting resentment at the administration from many progressives.

But some leaders say even before the party ramped up those negotiations, the party should have taken more time to sell the rescue plan’s benefits to the public.

“Democrats in DC and the Biden administration certainly have had not just a share of challenges this and last year but a real ambitious agenda to impact people’s lives,” said Steve Bullock, former Democratic governor of Montana. “So you got done with the American Rescue Plan and immediately started rescuing infrastructure. They didn’t even necessarily take that pause and travel around and get out and say, ‘You know what, 367,000 new manufacturing jobs were created in 2021, and that was brought to you in part by the American Rescue Plan.’”

Bullock, who said he was otherwise bullish that the legislation would ultimately be a political asset for Democrats by November, said in particular his party hadn’t spent enough time making clear to voters that no Republican lawmakers voted for the spending package.

It’s a view shared by Lake, the Biden pollster in 2020, who said focus groups and polling data show her that few if any voters know that only Democrats backed the law.

“People are confused about the timelines here, because they think the rescue package was Trump and Biden, and they think vaccines were Trump and Biden,” Lake said. “And again, it hasn’t gotten through that zero Republicans voted for that rescue package.”

Whether voters start to feel differently about the rescue plan or give more Democrats more credit by the midterm elections is uncertain, some Democrats concede.

“I know that everyone will feel it in time,” Schneider said. “I’m just not sure they’ll feel it in time for the elections.”

This story was originally published March 10, 2022 at 4:52 PM.