All reporting this week indicates that while President Biden and House Republicans aren’t near a deal to raise the debt ceiling, they’re moving in the right direction and an eventual agreement probably will lean hard toward the Republicans (even while infuriating the far right of the House GOP, which apparently expected Democrats to rubber stamp their dream bill).
Biden won’t get any Democratic priorities enacted as part of a deal, while Republicans will get spending caps in the area of spending that Democrats prioritize — domestic discretionary spending — some sort of energy permitting reform, rescission of some unspent covid money, and maybe new work requirements on some social service programs (raising the debt ceiling isn’t a win for Democrats; pretty much everyone who isn’t an economic idiot, regardless of ideology, thinks it needs to be raised to prevent economic catastrophe).
Some of this reflects the fact that Republicans are far more willing to dangle the country over an economic cliff than Democrats are, befitting their embrace of warfare politics. Some of it, however, reflects the fact that Republicans have succeeded in having this debate now.
Why does timing matter?
If the fight over the budget was happening in conjunction with the annual appropriations process, in which Republicans would have to spell out where they’d cut spending, it would give Democrats a crucial weapon to win over public opinion. For 40+ years, voters have generally expressed a preference for Republicans’ low tax stance, as well as generally thinking the government ought to be fiscally responsible and not rack up debt. Yet, simultaneously, they don’t actually want to cut and eliminate programs in the way that Republicans do.
So when the fight is over specific cuts, it gives Democrats far more leverage, because they can say “the other guys want to take food from the hungry, cut cancer research, hurt our veterans, rip health insurance from people,” and on down the line. And that message resonates with voters, who don’t want to do those things. But for now it’s an abstract discussion — should we cut spending in conjunction with raising the debt limit? Democrats can’t easily paint the GOP as cruel and heartless over this abstract thing that most voters don’t even understand and therefore aren’t paying attention to (more on that below).
That tells me a few things: Republicans probably will score meaningful concessions here and this deal will be a bitter pill that plenty of congressional Democrats will need to swallow to save the economy. There’s a small chance that Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy cut a deal and then it fails in one house of Congress or the other, because of simultaneous revolts from both the right and the left. Something similar happened to the initial 1990 budget deal between President George H.W. Bush and congressional Democrats and then the TARP rescue package in 2008.
That seems unlikely because of the absolute need to raise the debt ceiling (and the economic impact such a failed vote would have). But it is possible, especially if a large majority of Democrats have to support the bill in either the House or Senate, because some conservatives want even deeper concessions.
I’m confident that a deal gets struck, because from Biden’s perspective, a deal his own party loathes makes him look like a statesman governing from the center and prevents an economic catastrophe that could impede his reelection. There is also a possibility that reduced spending will reduce inflation, which will also help his reelection efforts. He could fracture his party, which would be politically perilous, but that will depend on how steep the spending cuts are, what the new work requirements look like, and what wins Biden scores later in the year.
Democrats won’t this outcome, but Biden is playing a rotten hand.
There is also a caveat: whatever happens now is just round one of the fight. There is going to be a round two in the fall or winter over the annual appropriations bills that keep the government funded. Those will decide what gets cut and by how much. As explained above, Democrats will have a much better political hand in that battle — even if it takes a government shutdown to score a win. They can be claiming to fight for widely popular programs and initiatives and painting Republicans as scrooge. That will provide leverage to secure a better deal, whether it involves extraneous policies like those I discussed last week or in protecting Democrats’ top spending priorities.
One other note tied to all of this: I wondered last week about whether Republicans might agree to closing tax loopholes that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy to fund broadly popular programs. After all, they’re trying to become the more populist party. But the answer this week from House Republicans was absolutely not. They rejected out of hand a proposal from Biden’s team to close loopholes as part of any deal.
So that is going to make the appropriations process that much rockier, and makes a government shutdown far more likely…
New Swing Voter Focus Group Offers Crucial Insight into the Electorate
Every month, Axios and Engagious/Sago conduct a focus group of swing voters — Trump-Biden voters — in a crucial state led by Engagious’s Rich Thau. This month the state was Georgia and the results, chronicled in two Axios stories and this video of nine minutes from the focus group, revealed a massive amount about why there is a huge disjuncture between public policy and what pollsters repeatedly find to be the wishes of a majority of Americans.
Specifically, the focus group participants expressed support for new gun control measures, only four of eleven said they were “pleased” that their state’s strict six week abortion ban had led to a substantial drop in abortions, two said they had known of women who wanted abortions and couldn’t have them, they expressed support for increasing taxes on those making over $400,000 per year as part of handling the debt ceiling, and many were aghast at the behavior of Justice Clarence Thomas, with five of the 11 indicating support for impeaching him.
In short, all left leaning views on a variety of economic and culture issues, as well as the flashpoint issue of Thomas, who most conservatives see as persecuted and most liberals consider to be an embarrassment.
And yet, 10 of the 11 participants said they’d vote for an “unnamed ‘garden variety, boring, middle-aged, white guy governor from somewhere in America’ with ‘mainstream conservative views’” over President Biden. Similarly, when discussing potential “moderate” third party candidates who they could envision supporting, one participant mentioned Florida’s right wing Gov. Ron DeSantis (who himself would be aghast to get labeled a moderate), and another mentioned former Hawaii Rep Tulsi Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party and routinely goes on Fox News and blasts her former party.
So basically, the focus group participants expressed left of center views — and a willingness to vote for politicians who support the exact opposite of their preferred policies.
That helps explain why the Republican Party has moved both so far right and toward a rigid, uncompromising posture that sees politics as warfare. Too many voters who dislike the Republican position on scores of issues, especially guns and abortion, but also taxation on the wealthy, climate change, and more, are still willing to vote for conservative Republicans. So long as that remains true, and the party avoids repeated electoral wipe outs, there is zero incentive to moderate or adjust its positions to better match those of the electorate writ large.
Republicans can instead freely cater to their far right base and worry about primary elections, without fretting about getting shut out of power. And as long as they are focused more on primaries and hold some degree of power in Washington (thanks the Senate filibuster, 41 senators is all Republicans need to obstruct something) policy won’t come close to matching what voters want.
What explains the willingness of the focus group participants to support a politician who stands for the exact opposite of the policy positions they hold?
The focus group offered two major possibilities: the participants had a bleak view of President Biden. When asked what they think when they see Biden on television, the participants used words like, "confusion," "pity," and "embarrassment." Those reactions could stem from a belief that Biden’s fumbling and frequent misstatements come from cognitive decline related to age. Which raises the question of where polling would be today if Biden was 15 years younger?
Those who follow politics closely know that Biden stuck his foot in his mouth in his 40s and 60s like he does in his early 80s. But if he was younger, it seems likely that voters would be less likely to worry that his fumbling and occasionally cringeworthy statements stem from decline or call into question his fitness for office.
The dim view of Biden — despite his numerous policy achievements — also reflects poorly on the ability of the White House to get its message to voters. Some of that owes to the structure of the media; while the right often decries the mainstream media’s “liberal bias,” there is actually more of a bias toward the negative. Something going wrong is a lot more newsworthy than something going right. The media also focuses on conflict. So a messy legislative process that fuels deep intraparty or inter-party fractures draws lots of attention, as does what isn’t in legislation or what the president didn’t achieve — even when he scores big wins. And this goes for any president.
Yet, the problem for Democrats exposed in the focus group — voters tend to agree with them on most non-economic issues without the party being able to translate it into a durable majority — is nothing new. That suggests that the Democratic message just doesn’t resonate. Either voters don’t know that the people they’re voting for disagree with them on issues, or Democrats haven’t raised the salience of the issues on which the electorate agrees with them above the general, decades old sense that Republicans handle the economy well.
But doing so is absolutely essential for success in our current political moment when the GOP is out of touch with voters on myriad issues.
The second factor lurking in the focus group that might explain why the participants have a dim view of Biden despite his achievements came in a discussion of the debt ceiling fight captivating the DC media and those of us who follow politics closely.
Most of the focus group participants were paying almost no attention to the issue and didn’t understand how it might affect their lives. And this is probably true of most people beyond the Beltway who aren’t tuned into politics full time. It’s an arcane issue that’s hard to understand and both parties are just lobbing accusations at the other. If you understand politics, you almost certainly think one side is being totally irresponsible and the other side is doing the right thing. But if you pay little attention to politics, it’s all a blur and unlike, say, inflation, it takes a real explanation to understand how it affects your life.
In terms of Biden, this revelation is a real reminder that most voters don’t pay attention to politics and won’t know about accomplishments unless he tells them about those wins. It’s a clarion case for new strategies to get his message across to voters.
With regard to the debt ceiling debate itself, Thau’s focus group revealed another reason Republicans are doing better in negotiations. When he read the focus group participants statements on each party’s position, they sided with the Republicans — though with a desire to see higher taxes on the wealthy in addition to spending cuts. While the Republican comparison of the debt limit to a credit card limit is inaccurate (the debt limit isn’t like someone’s credit card limit; it’s more like do we pay off the bills we’ve run up or not?), the focus group participants seemed to have found it compelling/used it themselves.
The willingness to increase taxes which House Republicans have dismissed out of hand, indicates, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME), one of the few Democrats holding a district won by Donald Trump, and one of the party’s most centrist members, has his finger on the pulse of swing voters. Golden suggested that Democrats demand new taxes on the wealthy in exchange for spending cuts.
But the focus group discussion revealed why the deal that eventually gets reached will probably lean more toward the Republicans at least for now…
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