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Tag: congressional Republicans

  • President Trump calls for end of Senate filibuster to break funding stalemate

    President Donald Trump on Thursday urged congressional Republicans to unilaterally end the government shutdown by eliminating the filibuster — an unprecedented step that GOP leaders have opposed taking until now.”It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.Senate Republicans have so far ruled out changing the Senate rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold needed for passing legislation, arguing that it would ultimately benefit Democrats the next time they retake power.But Trump, in his post, brushed off that concern, contending that Republicans should take advantage of the opportunity first.”Now I want to do it in order to take advantage of the Democrats,” Trump wrote.

    President Donald Trump on Thursday urged congressional Republicans to unilaterally end the government shutdown by eliminating the filibuster — an unprecedented step that GOP leaders have opposed taking until now.

    “It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

    Senate Republicans have so far ruled out changing the Senate rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold needed for passing legislation, arguing that it would ultimately benefit Democrats the next time they retake power.

    But Trump, in his post, brushed off that concern, contending that Republicans should take advantage of the opportunity first.

    “Now I want to do it in order to take advantage of the Democrats,” Trump wrote.

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  • Why Republican Politicians Do Whatever Trump Says

    Why Republican Politicians Do Whatever Trump Says


    The story Donald Trump tells about himself—and to himself—has always been one of domination. It runs through the canonical texts of his personal mythology. In The Art of the Deal, he filled page after page with examples of his hard-nosed negotiating tactics. On The Apprentice, he lorded over a boardroom full of supplicants competing for his approval. And at his campaign rallies, he routinely regales crowds with tales of strong-arming various world leaders in the Oval Office.

    This image of Trump has always been dubious. Those boardroom scenes were, after all, reality-TV contrivances; those stories in his book were, by his own ghostwriter’s account, exaggerated in many cases to make Trump appear savvier than he was. And there’s been ample reporting to suggest that many of the world leaders with whom Trump interacted as president saw him more as an easily manipulated mark than as a domineering statesman to be feared.

    The truth is that Trump, for all of his tough-guy posturing, spent most of his career failing to push people around and bend them to his will.

    That is, until he started dealing with Republican politicians.

    For nearly a decade now, Trump has demonstrated a remarkable ability to make congressional Republicans do what he wants. He threatens them. He bullies them. He extracts from them theatrical displays of devotion—and if they cross him, he makes them pay. If there is one arena of American power in which Trump has been able to actually be the merciless alpha he played on TV—and there may, indeed, be only one—it is Republican politics. His influence was on full display this week, when he derailed a bipartisan border-security bill reportedly because he wants to campaign on the immigration “crisis” this year.

    David Frum: The GOP’s true priority

    Sam Nunberg, a former adviser to Trump, has observed this dynamic with some amusement. “It’s funny,” he told me in a recent phone interview. “In the business world and in the entertainment world, I don’t think Donald was able to intimidate people as much.”

    He pointed to Trump’s salary negotiations with NBC during Trump’s Apprentice years. Jeff Zucker, who ran the network at the time, has said that Trump once came to him demanding a raise. At the time, Trump was making $40,000 an episode, but he wanted to make as much as the entire cast of Friends combined: $6 million an episode. Zucker countered with $60,000. When Trump balked, Zucker said he’d find someone else to host the show. The next day, according to Zucker, Trump’s lawyer called to accept the $60,000. (A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

    Contrast that with the power Trump wields on Capitol Hill—how he can kill a bill or tank a speakership bid with a single post on social media; how high-ranking congressmen are so desperate for his approval that they’ll task staffers to sort through packs of Starbursts and pick out just the pinks and reds so Trump can be presented with his favorite flavors.

    “I just remember that there’d be a lot of stuff that didn’t go his way,” Nunberg told me, referring to Trump’s business career. “But he has all these senators in the fetal position! They do whatever he wants.”

    Why exactly congressional Republicans have proved so much more pliable than anyone else Trump has contended with is a matter of interpretation. One explanation is that Trump has simply achieved much more success in politics than he ever did, relatively speaking, in New York City real estate or on network TV. For all of his tabloid omnipresence, Trump never had anything like the presidential bully pulpit.

    From the January/February 2024 issue: Loyalists, lapdogs, and cronies

    “It stands to reason that [when] the president and leader of your party is pushing for something … that’s what’s going to happen,” a former chief of staff to a Republican senator, who requested anonymity in order to candidly describe former colleagues’ thinking, told me. “Take away the office and put him back in a business setting, where facts and core principles matter, and it doesn’t surprise me that it wasn’t as easy.”

    But, of course, Trump is not the president anymore—and there is also something unique about the sway he continues to have over Republicans on Capitol Hill. In his previous life, Trump had viewers, readers, fans—but he never commanded a movement that could end the careers of the people on the other side of the negotiating table.

    And Trump—whose animal instinct for weakness is one of his defining traits—seemed to intuit something early on about the psychology of the Republicans he would one day reign over.

    Nunberg told me about a speech he drafted for Trump in 2015 that included this line about the Republican establishment: “They’re good at keeping their jobs, not their promises.” When Trump read it, he chuckled. “It’s so true,” he said, according to Nunberg. “That’s all they care about.” (Nunberg was eventually fired from Trump’s 2016 campaign.)

    This ethos of job preservation at all costs is not a strictly partisan phenomenon in Washington—nor is it new. As I reported in my recent biography of Mitt Romney, the Utah senator was surprised, when he arrived in Congress, by the enormous psychic currency his colleagues attached to their positions. One senator told Romney that his first consideration when voting on any bill should be “Will this help me win reelection?”

    From the November 2023 issue: What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate

    But the Republican Party of 2015 was uniquely vulnerable to a hostile takeover by someone like Trump. Riven by years of infighting and ideological incoherence, and plagued by a growing misalignment between its base and its political class, the GOP was effectively one big institutional power vacuum. The litmus tests kept changing. The formula for getting reelected was obsolete. Republicans with solidly conservative records, such as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, were getting taken out in primaries by obscure Tea Party upstarts.

    To many elected Republicans, it probably felt like an answer to their prayers when a strongman finally parachuted in and started telling them what to do. Maybe his orders were reckless and contradictory. But as long as you did your best to look like you were obeying, you could expect to keep winning your primaries.

    As for Trump, it’s easy to see the ongoing appeal of this arrangement. The Apprentice was canceled long ago, and the Manhattan-real-estate war stories have worn thin. Republicans in Congress might be the only ostensibly powerful people in America who will allow him to boss them around, humiliate them, and assert unbridled dominance over them. They’ve made the myth true. How could he possibly walk away now?



    McKay Coppins

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  • Trump Is Coming for Obamacare Again

    Trump Is Coming for Obamacare Again

    Donald Trump’s renewed pledge on social media and in campaign rallies to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act has put him on a collision course with a widening circle of Republican constituencies directly benefiting from the law.

    In 2017, when Trump and congressional Republicans tried and failed to repeal the ACA, also known as Obamacare, they faced the core contradiction that many of the law’s principal beneficiaries were people and institutions that favored the GOP. That list included lower-middle-income workers without college degrees, older adults in the final years before retirement, and rural communities.

    In the years since then, the number of people in each of those groups relying on the ACA has grown. More than 40 million Americans now receive health coverage through the law, about 50 percent more than the roughly 27 million the ACA covered during the repeal fight in 2017. In the intervening years, nine more states, most of them reliably Republican, have accepted the law’s federal funding to expand access to Medicaid for low-income working adults.

    Read: The real reason Republicans couldn’t kill Obamacare

    “Republicans came very close to repealing and replacing the ACA in 2017, but that may have been their best window before the law had fully taken hold and so many people have benefited from it,” Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a nonpartisan think tank that studies health-care issues, told me. “I think it gets harder and harder to repeal as more people benefit.”

    Trump’s repeated declarations over the past several weeks that he intends to finally repeal the ACA if reelected surprised many Republicans. Few GOP leaders have talked about uprooting the law since the party’s last effort failed, during Trump’s first year as president. At that point, Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress. But whereas the House, with Trump’s enthusiastic support, narrowly voted to rescind the law, the Senate narrowly rejected repeal. Three GOP senators blocked the repeal effort by voting no—including the late Senator John McCain, who dramatically doomed the proposal by signaling thumbs-down on the Senate floor. (Trump mocked McCain while calling the ACA “a catastrophe” as he campaigned in Iowa last weekend.)

    Republicans lost any further opportunity to repeal the law in the 2018 election when Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives. With the legislative route blocked, Trump instead pursued an array of regulatory and legal efforts to weaken the ACA during his final years in office. But since the 2017 vote, the GOP has never again held the unified control of the White House, the House, and the Senate required to launch a serious legislative repeal effort.

    If Republicans did win unified control of Congress and the White House next November, most health-care experts I spoke with agreed that Trump would follow through on his promises to again target the ACA. Leslie Dach, the founder of Protect Our Care, a liberal group that supports the law, says that he takes Trump’s pledge to pursue repeal seriously, “because he is still trying to overturn the legacy of John McCain, and it’s one of the few things he lost. He doesn’t like to be a loser.”

    Trump hasn’t specified his plan to replace the ACA. But whatever alternative Trump develops will inevitably face one of the main problems that confounded Republicans’ last attempt at repeal: Every plan they put forward raised costs and diminished access to care for core groups in their electoral coalition.

    That was apparent in the contrast between how the ACA and the GOP alternatives treated the individual insurance market. The ACA created exchanges where the uninsured could buy coverage, provided them with subsidies to help them afford it, and changed the rules about what kind of policies insurers could sell them. Key among those changes were provisions that barred insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting health conditions, required them to offer a broad package of essential health benefits in all policies, and prevented them from charging older consumers more than three times the premiums of younger people.

    The common effect of all these and many other requirements was to require greater risk sharing in the insurance markets. The ACA made coverage in the individual insurance market more available and affordable for older and sicker consumers partly by requiring younger and healthier consumers to purchase more expensive and comprehensive plans than they might have bought before the law went into effect. That shift generated complaints from relatively younger and healthier consumers in the ACA’s early years as their premiums increased.

    Every alternative that Republicans proposed during the Trump years sought to lower premiums by unraveling the ACA provisions that required more sharing of risks and costs. For instance, the House GOP plan allowed insurers to charge seniors five times as much as young people, reduced the number of guaranteed essential benefits, and allowed states to exempt insurers from the requirement to cover all applicants with preexisting health conditions.

    One problem the GOP faced was that although this approach might have lowered premiums for the young and healthy (albeit while leaving them with less comprehensive coverage), it would have significantly raised costs and reduced access for the old or sick. “A lot of ‘repeal and replace’ was putting more cost back on people with health-care problems,” Linda Blumberg, an institute fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center, told me. The Rand Corporation calculated that for individuals with modest incomes, the House GOP plan would have cut premiums for the majority of those under age 45 while raising them for virtually everyone older than 45. The Congressional Budget Office, in its assessment of the House-passed GOP bill, projected that it would nearly double the number of people without health insurance by 2026, and that the greatest coverage losses would happen “among older people with lower income.”

    As I wrote in 2017, the paradox was that the Republican plans would have hurt older working-age adults—a preponderantly GOP-leaning constituency—while lowering costs for younger generations that mostly vote Democratic. I called this inversion the “Trumpcare conundrum.”

    The congressional Republican alternatives to the ACA under Trump also uniformly made deep cuts to Medicaid, the joint state-federal health-care program for low-income people. But GOP constituencies were big winners as well in the ACA provisions that expanded eligibility for Medicaid.

    Until the ACA, Medicaid was generally available only to adults earning less than the federal poverty level. But the law provided states with generous federal financing to expand coverage to low-income individuals earning up to 138 percent of the poverty level. Particularly in interior states, research showed that many of those low-income workers covered under the Medicaid expansion were white people without a college degree, the cornerstone of the modern Republican electoral coalition.

    Another big beneficiary from the Medicaid expansion was rural communities, which have become more reliably Republican in the Trump years. Expanding access to Medicaid was especially important to rural places because studies have consistently found that more people in those areas than in metropolitan centers suffer from chronic health problems, while fewer obtain health insurance from their employer, and more lack insurance altogether.

    The increased number of people covered under Medicaid gave rural hospitals a lifeline by reducing the amount of uncompensated care they needed to provide for patients lacking insurance. “When you go out to the rural areas, frankly most hospital executives, like other business people, they tend to be pretty conservative,” Timothy McBride, a co-director of the Center for Advancing Health Services, Policy & Economics Research at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. “And they don’t like government intervention. But I would go to see these people and they would say, ‘I’m for Medicaid expansion,’ because they had to deal with the uninsured.”

    The Medicaid expansion also quickly became a crucial source of financing for addiction treatment in states ravaged through the 2010s by the opioid epidemic. Before the ACA, addiction treatment programs relied on “a little bit of block grant money here, a local voucher there, kind of out-of-pocket payments, and a little bit of spit and glue,” Brendan Saloner, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies addiction, told me. “Then Medicaid came along, and it provided a much more reliable and stable source of payment.”

    Since the 2017 legislative battle, the ACA’s impact on all these fronts has only deepened. Biden and congressional Democrats both increased the federal subsidies to buy insurance on the Obamacare exchanges and expanded eligibility to families further into the middle class. Largely as a result, the number of people obtaining insurance through the exchanges soared from about 10 million then to more than 15 million as of this past December.

    Similarly, a majority of the 31 states that had expanded Medicaid by 2017 were solidly Democratic-leaning. But the nine additional states that have broadened eligibility since then include seven that voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020.

    That has not only increased the total number of low-income workers covered through the Medicaid expansion (from about 16 million then to well over 24 million now), but also broadened the red-state constituency for the ACA. McBride estimates that the federal government has annually pumped $2 billion into the health-care system in Missouri alone since voters there approved a Medicaid expansion in 2020. The federal Department of Health and Human Services recently calculated that the likelihood of rural hospitals closing was more than twice as high in the states that have refused to expand Medicaid than in those that have. Simultaneously, the amount of funding that Medicaid provides for the treatment of substance abuse has at least doubled since 2014, allowing it to serve nearly 5 million people, according to calculations by Tami Mark, a distinguished fellow in behavioral health at RTI International, a nonprofit independent research institute.

    Even more fundamentally, Blumberg argues, the pandemic showed the ACA’s value as a safety net. Through either the exchanges or Medicaid, the law provided coverage to millions who lost their job, and insurance, during the crisis. “This law was critical in protecting us from unforeseen circumstances even beyond the value that people had seen in 2017,” she told me. “If we had not had that in place, we would have seen massive amounts of uninsurance and people who could not have accessed vaccines and could not have accessed medical care when they became sick.”

    For all of these reasons and more, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the president of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank, told me that he believes it’s a mistake for Trump and the GOP to seek repeal once again. Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, remains critical of the ACA, which he says has not done enough to improve the quality of coverage or control costs.

    But, he points out, during the Trump years, Republicans succeeded in repealing some of the law’s elements that they disliked most, including the tax penalty on uninsured people who did not buy coverage. “I don’t think we should be happy with the current system,” Holtz-Eakin told me. “But it’s not fruitful to try to roll the clock back to 2010.”

    Beyond the policy challenges of excising the ACA from the health-care system, the political landscape also appears less hospitable to a renewed repeal drive. In 2017, KFF polling found that the share of Americans who viewed the law favorably only slightly exceeded the share dubious of it; in the group’s most recent survey measuring attitudes toward the law, more than three-fifths of Americans expressed favorable views, while only slightly more than one-third viewed it negatively. Support for individual provisions in the law, such as the ban on denying coverage because of preexisting conditions or the requirement that insurers allow kids to stay on their parents’ plans through age 26, runs even higher in polls.

    Read: Republicans are trapped by preexisting conditions

    Yet even with all these obstacles, Trump’s promise to seek repeal again virtually ensures another round of the ACA war next year if Republicans win unified control of the federal government. By historical standards, that’s a remarkable, even unprecedented, prospect. Though Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee, had opposed the creation of Medicare, for instance, no Republican presidential nominee ever proposed to repeal it after Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law in 1965.

    If Trump wins the nomination, by contrast, it would mark the fourth consecutive time the GOP nominee has run on ending the ACA. (Among Trump’s main competitors, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has also promised to produce an alternative to the ACA, and Nikki Haley, who has spoken less definitively on the topic, might feel irresistible pressure to embrace repeal too.) Congressional Republicans may have been surprised that Trump committed them to charging up that hill again, but that doesn’t mean they would refuse his command to do so. “He wants to reverse a loss and take it off the books,” Dach told me. “And we’ve learned that that party follows him. It’s not like they are going to stand up against him, especially in the House. They will destroy the law if they can.”

    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Trump Insists He Hasn’t Read Mein Kampf

    Trump Insists He Hasn’t Read Mein Kampf

    This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

    A little more than halfway into his speech in Waterloo, Iowa, last night, former President Donald Trump returned to his new favorite line.

    “They’re destroying the blood of our country,” Trump said, complaining that immigrants are arriving from Africa, Asia, South America, and “all over the world.” He said that unnamed individuals (presumably his advisers) do not like it when he uses these sorts of phrases. During this section of his speech, the packed crowd inside the Waterloo Convention Center was pin-drop silent. He suddenly assured everybody that he’s never read Mein Kampf. “They said, ‘Oh, Hitler said that,’” he explained, adding, “in a much different way.” Then he was right back to it. “They could bring in disease that’s going to catch on in our country,” Trump warned. “They’re destroying the blood of our country; they’re destroying the fabric of our country.”

    Trump has enjoyed a double-digit lead in the polls for months. “We could put this to bed after Iowa, if you want to know the truth,” he said of the GOP-primary race. His first-place finish in the caucus less than four weeks from now seems all but certain. He continues to trounce Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose campaign has become something like a balloon expelling air, chaotically fluttering in its descent. And although former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley has continued to rise in the polls, she remains a long shot in Iowa, and only slightly less of a long shot in New Hampshire. Congressional Republicans are coalescing around their leader. Over the weekend, Representatives Lee Zeldin of New York, Wesley Hunt of Texas, and Matt Gaetz of Florida were all stumping for Trump in Iowa. The former president smells it in the air. Last night, he seemed animated, as if taking a preemptive victory lap.

    Read: ‘Nothing is going to stop Donald Trump’

    As Trump’s position in the race has improved, his rhetoric has become more extreme. Speaking to the overwhelmingly white crowd in Waterloo, he spent even more time than usual demonizing nonwhite people. Immigrants, Trump said, are dumped on our borders, pouring into our country, bringing in crime. He said they were coming from other nations’ prisons and mental institutions, that they were “emptying out the insane asylums.” Later, he went after the kids. “You have children going to school, speaking languages that nobody even knows what the language is,” Trump said, adding that “there’s no room for our students in the classrooms”—emphasis on the “our.” He once again promised that, if reelected, he’ll carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.

    Two weeks ago, Trump said he would be a dictator “on day one.” Last night, he praised the “great gentleman” Viktor Orbán of Hungary. “He’s the leader, he’s the boss, he’s everything you want to call him,” Trump said of the autocratic Orbán. He cautioned that our planet is on the brink of World War III, and that he, Donald Trump, is the only one who can prevent it. (He bragged about how he personally made sure our nuclear stockpile was “all tippy-top.”) Trump scoffed at his indictments, particularly the classified-documents case against him: “I have total protection. I’m allowed to do it.” He vowed to “take over our horribly run Washington, D.C.” and give indemnification to any police officer who “gets in trouble” for pursuing a criminal. I’ve watched Trump speak live in several different settings over the past several months. I’ve never seen him more bombastic this year than he seemed last night; he sounded like an unmoored strongman.

    Scott Olson / Getty

    Trump’s pageant of darkness unfolded against a backdrop of Christmas cheer. The former president was flanked by two Christmas trees, each topped with a red MAGA hat. Prop presents in Trump-branded wrapping paper dotted the stage. Red, green, and white lights glowed down from the ceiling. Trump opened with a long monologue from his earlier days: how we’re all saying “Merry Christmas” again. (His campaign volunteers handed out signs plastered with the phrase.) Even the press laminates were decorated with a string of cartoon Christmas lights.

    One of Trump’s warm-up speakers, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, asked the audience, “What do you give the man who has everything as a Christmas present?” This was a slightly confusing setup for a joke about how Christmas is going to come late for Trump this year, when he wins the Iowa caucus in mid-January. People sort of got it.

    Before Trump took the stage, I spotted Santa Claus leaning against a brick wall outside the assembly hall and asked for an interview. He wavered, then reluctantly agreed. The back of his red suit said MAGA CLAUS in gold block letters. Santa, it turns out, is a man in his mid-20s named Alex. He said he lives in Northern Virginia and works for Public Advocate of the United States, a conservative nonprofit group. He told me he plays all sorts of characters, such as Cupid and an evil doctor/mad scientist who forces people to take a COVID vaccine. He told me he had showed up at the Loudoun County school protests dressed as Uncle Sam. Two of his organization’s signs hung outside the venue’s entryway: Make the Family Great Again! and There are only TWO genders: Male & Female. Merry Christmas.

    Read: What is this ‘Christmas’ you speak of?

    Sitting at a nearby table was 81-year-old Susan Holland and her husband, Buzz. Both welcomed me with a nod as I pulled up a chair next to them. Holland, wearing a bedazzled Trump hat and an American-flag sweater with flag earrings, told me she had seen Trump in person about 10 times over the years. “We can hardly wait ’til he’s sworn in again,” she said. I asked her where she gets her news. “We watch Fox News,” she said. “We watch the regular news too.”

    Over the past several months, I’ve asked dozens of Trump supporters if there is anything the former president could do or say that would make them withdraw their support. Mike Benson, a 62-year-old retired carpenter from Waterloo, was posted up a few blocks away from the venue at the Broken Record Bar earlier in the afternoon, wearing a red TRUMP 2024 hat, nursing a Bud. He told me about being out of step with his union buddies, who all staunchly vote Democratic. (He said he cast his first presidential vote for Ronald Reagan and has supported the GOP ever since.) I brought up that Trump had been praising people like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Orbán, and asked if he thought Trump himself would end up a dictator.

    “Not a chance,” Benson said. “People confuse Trump’s praise for them. He’s not praising them; he’s acknowledging that they’re smart people. They’re smart enough to manipulate their population, and Trump is acknowledging that,” he said. “The devil is smart,” he added.

    I asked him if he thinks Trump manipulates our population.

    “No,” he said. “He puts what he believes is true out there, and if you believe that too, all you have to do is follow him. He’s not strong-arming people around. He’s not manipulating facts. He’s not militarizing government departments to go after opponents. He’s not doing any of that.”

    Less than an hour before Trump took the stage last night, the Colorado Supreme Court had ruled that the former president was disqualified from appearing on the state’s ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his actions leading up to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. His campaign has already said that it will appeal the decision, and the case appears destined to wind up before the Supreme Court.

    In Waterloo, Trump didn’t mention the Colorado ruling. Instead, he focused on Biden, the swamp, and the “deep state.” “We’re going to bring our country back from hell; our country’s gone to hell,” Trump said. By Christmas 2024, he countered, the economy will be roaring back and energy prices will be plummeting. He claimed responsibility for the presently high stock market—arguing that returns are up because people believe he is returning to office.

    John Hendrickson: Could the courts actually take Trump off the ballots?

    “Crooked Joe Biden” is “a low-IQ individual” and “the most incompetent, most corrupt president in the history of our country,” Trump said. “Other than that, I think quite a bit of him.” Later, Trump mocked Biden’s slow speech at a recent news conference.

    Throughout the night, Trump pandered to Iowa voters, attacking electric cars, talking about persecution of Christians, and praising those who “still till that soil.” He fired off some strange ad-libs: “Does everybody in this room love their children? Does anybody in this room not love their children? Raise your hand. Oh, that guy in the blue jacket raised his hand!”

    But his grotesque anti-immigrant rhetoric kept returning—a messier, ganglier version of “Build the Wall.”

    As attendees filtered into the convention center, a 69-year-old man stood outside in the frigid cold and wind holding a handwritten sign. It read: EVERY TIME YOU EAT A PORK CHOP OR RIBEYE STEAK THANK AN IMMIGRANT. The man, Paul, had driven from his home in Manchester, about 50 miles east. He told me he used to work alongside many immigrants at a seed-corn plant. He said he was dismayed by all the slurs he had been hearing about foreigners. “I decided I was gonna come, I was gonna hold the sign,” and offer a message that was “at least halfway positive,” he said. I didn’t see any members of Trump’s flock stopping to consider it.

    John Hendrickson

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  • Biden’s ‘Big Build’

    Biden’s ‘Big Build’

    When President Joe Biden visits South Carolina to tout a new solar-energy-manufacturing facility today, he will underscore a striking pattern: Some of the biggest winners from his economic agenda have been Republican-leaning places whose political leaders have consistently opposed his initiatives.

    Centered on a trio of bills Biden signed in his first two years, the president’s economic program has triggered what could become the most concentrated burst of public and private investment since the 1960s. The twin bills Biden signed in 2022 to promote more domestic production of clean energy and semiconductors have already helped generate about $500 billion in private investment in new factories and expansion of existing plants, according to the administration’s tally. Simultaneously, the federal government is spending billions more repairing roads, bridges, and other facilities through some 32,000 projects already funded by the bipartisan infrastructure bill approved in 2021. Companies are spending twice as much on constructing new manufacturing facilities as they were as recently as two years ago, a recent Treasury Department analysis found.

    “We had high expectations, and we are meeting or exceeding those expectations, particularly on these investments serving as a catalyst for private-sector investment,” White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients told me in an interview.

    Read: Biden’s Blue-Collar Bet

    This surge of investment could rumble through the economy for years. The reverberations could include reviving domestic manufacturing, opening new facilities in depressed communities that have suffered plant closings and disinvestment since the 1970s, and potentially increasing the nation’s productivity, a key ingredient of sustained growth.

    “That data suggests we are in the midst of a big build as a country,” says Joseph Parilla, the director of applied research at the Brookings Metro think tank. “We are in a very important economic moment, particularly for a lot of these regions that have been waiting for this type of private investment, and desperately need it.”

    But the political impact of this investment for Biden and other Democrats remains much more uncertain. Polls suggest that for most Americans, the continued pain of inflation, even as it moderates, overshadows the good news of new factory openings. And analyses by Brookings Metro and other groups have found that this private investment is flowing disproportionately into places that didn’t vote for Biden in 2020 and remain highly unlikely to vote for him again in 2024. Many of the communities benefiting most are represented by congressional Republicans who initially voted against the new federal incentives encouraging these investments, and more recently even voted to repeal some of them.

    Biden has presented the red tint of the investment patterns as a point of pride, proof that he’s delivering on his promise, after the polarization of Donald Trump’s presidency, to govern in the interest of all Americans. “I promised to be a president for all Americans, whether or not they voted for me or whether or not they voted for these laws,” Biden said last week when announcing a $42 billion plan under the infrastructure bill to extend high-speed internet to all communities by 2030. “These investments will help all Americans. We’re not going to leave anyone behind.”

    Many Democrats see that as an important economic commitment and a powerful political argument. But portions of the party are grumbling that the administration is not showing enough concern as companies steer so much of the investment triggered by the new federal incentives toward Republican-leaning states and counties.

    That concern is rooted partly in the belief that voters in those places are unlikely to credit Biden for promoting new factories and facilities or to punish Republicans who have opposed the incentives that made them possible. An even larger complication may be the fact that many of these new jobs are moving into states where workers have historically received lower wages and benefits than in the more heavily unionized blue states. “They are sending the money to the states with the lowest worker protections, lower worker standards,” Michael Podhorzer, the former longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “It’s putting pressure on blue-state employers to lower their standards to be competitive.”

    The magnitude of the Biden boom in investment could be historic. Three bills are contributing to the upsurge. One is the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides sweeping subsidies for the domestic manufacture and deployment of clean-energy products such as electric vehicles. The second is the CHIPS and Science Act, which allocates billions of dollars to encourage the domestic production of semiconductors, now produced mostly abroad. The third is the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which funds not only traditional infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges but also new needs like the broadband program and a nationwide network of electric-vehicle chargers. Biden hopes to turbocharge the effect of these bills with other policies pushing companies to buy American in the materials they use in all of these projects.

    “What seems to be emerging is a clearly American industrial strategy,” says Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a senior fellow in climate and energy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. “This is about moving ahead in markets where we can be super competitive.”

    In a rough calculation, the administration has forecast that these three bills will generate about $3.5 trillion in investment over the next decade. Public spending, either directly on infrastructure projects or through the tax and grant incentives for semiconductors and clean-energy projects, will account for only about two-fifths of that total, with investment from private companies providing the rest. If these bills inspire that much new public and private investment, it would represent a substantial increase—as much as 7 percent annually—in the level of investment the economy now produces (about $5 trillion annually).

    The torrent of spending from companies that these bills are expected to unlock is crucial because it refutes the traditional conservative complaint that public investments simply discourage private investments, Jared Bernstein, the new chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, told me. “The idea that public investment crowds out private investments turns out to be ‘bass-ackwards,’ and that is an important insight of Bidenomics,” Bernstein said.

    There’s no guarantee that the bills will generate as much net new investment as the administration hopes. Jason Furman, who served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Barack Obama, told me that if the surge of investment contributes to “overheating” the economy, that would prompt the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates, which would reduce the level of investment elsewhere. “If you get more in these areas, you are going to get less in other areas, and you can’t just think of these as additive,” said Furman, now an economics professor at Harvard.

    Bernstein doesn’t entirely reject that possibility, but he told me that more investment will just as likely expand the economy’s capacity to produce more output without inflation. “These are investments in the supply side; they are ways to give yourself a little more room to grow,” Bernstein said. “If you are truly standing up a domestic industry that wasn’t there before, that’s new capacity, and, in the long run, that reduces inflationary pressures.”

    Whether or not the Biden agenda generates all the investment the administration now projects, it likely will represent the federal government’s most ambitious effort since the height of the Cold War to upgrade the nation’s physical infrastructure and nurture technologically advanced strategic industries. Economic-development experts such as Parilla say that the closest modern parallel to Biden’s investment agenda may be the intertwined federal initiatives from the mid-1950s to the late ’60s to build the interstate highway system, invigorate higher education and scientific research after the shock of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik-satellite launch, upgrade our nuclear-weapons capabilities, and then win the space race to land on the moon. Those efforts accelerated the development of an array of new technologies, from semiconductors to computers to the internet, that provide the foundation of the 21st-century digital economy.

    Biden has indicated that he’s expecting similar long-term economic benefits from his agenda, whose direct public spending in inflation-adjusted dollars is larger than the funds Washington spent combined on the interstate highway system and the Apollo moon-landing program. Some Democrats see Biden’s interlocking policies to increase public and private investment as the party’s most fully fleshed-out alternative to the GOP’s argument, since the Ronald Reagan era, that lower taxes and less regulation are the keys to growth.

    But the distribution of this new investment has complicated that political calculus. Parilla and a senior research analyst at Brookings Metro, Glencora Haskins, calculated that half the private-sector investments the White House has cataloged have gone to counties that voted for Trump—far more than the 28 percent of the nation’s total economic output that those places generate. Regionally, the biggest winner from the new investment has been the Republican-leaning South, attracting more than two-fifths of the new dollars, considerably more than its share of the total GDP (about a third). The Midwest (about a fifth) and West (about a fourth) have each attracted a share of new investment that roughly matches its portion of the GDP, while the big loser has been the staunchly Democratic Northeast, which is drawing only about an eighth of the new spending.

    Some key swing states are among the biggest beneficiaries. Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan—each of which flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020—rank in the top six states receiving the most investments, according to unpublished data provided by Brookings Metro to The Atlantic.

    But nine of the 15 states receiving the most private investment backed Trump in 2020—including Texas, Ohio, Idaho, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Utah, North Carolina and South Carolina. And of those nine, North Carolina is the only one that Biden realistically can hope to contest in 2024. Meanwhile, several blue-leaning but still competitive states that Biden likely must hold to win next year have attracted much less investment, including Wisconsin (24th), Pennsylvania (26th), Minnesota (34th), and New Hampshire (44th).

    Administration officials are adamant that they are not trying to channel the investment in any way. “The president ran as being president for the American people, for communities all across the country, and that is what he is doing,” Zients told me. “This implementation is not a political exercise.” Instead, Zients said, “the money is flowing into all communities” where there is either, in his words, a “need” to upgrade infrastructure or an “opportunity” to locate manufacturing facilities.

    Hughes-Cromwick correctly notes that if Biden in any way said, “‘This money needs to go to blue states,’ the reaction” from Republicans “would be fierce.” But critics are also correct that the administration’s hands-off approach to the investment flow could threaten its broader economic and political goals.

    Joel Dodge: My Hometown Is Getting a $100 Billion Dose of Bidenomics

    The administration hopes “that in red and purple states, workers will credit Biden and Democrats for the new investment and jobs, which will make Democrats competitive in the region,” Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO political director, told me. “That is just not going to be the case. History tells us that if any politicians are credited, it’s much more likely they will be local ones.” Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, last week demonstrated the problem when he denounced Biden’s program and credited local efforts at the opening of an electric-vehicle-battery plant in the state that has received tax breaks under the Inflation Reduction Act.

    The issue is not just who gets political credit for the new jobs. To achieve its full impact, Biden’s investment agenda will need durable support over time from a congressional majority willing to defend its central provisions. The early evidence suggests that investment in red places is not helping this cause: Even though four-fifths of all the clean-energy investments announced have gone to districts held by Republicans in the House of Representatives, every one of them voted this spring to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act incentives that have encouraged those investments.

    The White House, in a fact sheet for Biden’s visit to South Carolina, pointedly noted that Republican Representative Joe Wilson (who famously yelled “You lie” at Obama during one of the president’s State of the Union speeches) was among those who voted to repeal the incentives, although they helped finance the expansion of solar manufacturing in his district that Biden visited to celebrate today. Zients said that Biden plans to aggressively “call out” Republicans who are not just “showing up at the ribbon cuttings for a bill they didn’t support, [but] are actively trying to take that money away from their communities.”

    The biggest challenge in the red-state-investment tilt may be whether it impedes Biden’s overarching goal of creating more well-paying jobs for workers without a college degree. As Podhorzer pointed out, average wages in many industries, including manufacturing, are much lower in red states than in blue.

    Almost all the projects funded under the infrastructure bill require contractors to pay higher “prevailing wages,” so that legislation has proved immensely popular with unions representing construction workers. But the UAW union has repeatedly complained that the auto companies receiving massive federal subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act are seeking to reduce wages and benefits by producing EV batteries and other components in new facilities that are not subject to the union’s national contract. “Why is Joe Biden’s administration facilitating this corporate greed with taxpayer money?” UAW President Shawn Fain complained in a statement late last month after the Energy Department approved a $9.2 billion loan to Ford to construct three new EV-battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee.

    Compounding the union’s concern is that, as the EV share of the overall market grows, the auto companies will inevitably reduce employment at the unionized plants now producing the batteries for internal-combustion vehicles as they gear up production at their EV-battery plants. Given the locations of most of those EV plants, that change will also likely shift jobs from Rust Belt states that Democrats must win, like Michigan, to states such as Kentucky, Tennessee, and South Carolina, where their prospects are dim. “If I am a Democratic Party adviser, why are we giving $9 billion to replace 7,500 Rust Belt jobs with half-the-wage Kentucky and Tennessee jobs?” one UAW source, who asked for anonymity while discussing union strategy, told me. “What’s the political calculus there?”

    Biden lost his most powerful tool to promote unionization in the EV transition when Senator Joe Manchin insisted on the removal of a provision in the inflation-reduction bill that would have given consumers a substantial tax break for purchasing electric vehicles built with union labor.

    But critics in the party believe that the administration should be more aggressive about challenging companies to provide good wages with the tools they still have, such as the conditions they can attach to the sort of loan Ford received. “We definitely don’t want to be stimulating a race-to-the-bottom dynamic that will be undermining our own goals of ensuring decent livelihoods for workers,” Isabel Estevez, the deputy director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, told me.

    Biden has identified with unions more overtly than any Democratic president in decades, so he will likely seek some way to soothe the discontent at the UAW. But he probably won’t veer from his larger course of celebrating how much of the new investment is flowing into red-leaning blue-collar places, even if many of those are communities he is unlikely to win or in states he cannot seriously contest.

    Because Bidenomics aims to revive “investments in places that have long been left behind, then it is inevitable” that some of that funding will benefit distressed communities that have turned away from Democrats and embraced Trump, Bernstein told me. For Biden, aides say, that’s not a bug in his plan, but a benefit. “President Biden often says, ‘Whether you voted for me or not, I will be your president,’” Bernstein said. “Now he can stand at the podium and hold up the graphics that show that it’s true.”

    Ronald Brownstein

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  • This Debt Crisis Is Not Like 2011’s. It’s Worse.

    This Debt Crisis Is Not Like 2011’s. It’s Worse.

    On its surface, the unfolding debt-ceiling crisis looks a lot like the confrontation in 2011 between congressional Republicans and then-President Barack Obama. Once again, a new GOP majority in the House is using the threat of a national default as leverage to force a first-term Democratic president to agree to spending cuts in exchange for lifting the federal borrowing limit. A first-ever default could crash the markets and trigger a recession. But, as in 2011, the two parties remain far apart, with a deadline to act approaching rapidly.

    Eric Cantor knows the feeling well. Twelve years ago, he was the House majority leader deputized by then-Speaker John Boehner to negotiate an agreement with Joe Biden, who was Obama’s vice president at the time. Cantor left Congress in 2014 after a stunning primary defeat that presaged the GOP’s anti-establishment, anti-immigration lurch toward Donald Trump two years later. He’s now a senior executive at a Wall Street investment bank.

    I called him up this week to ask what he had learned from the 2011 negotiations and how he sees today’s fight going. He warned that the risks of failure—and with it, economic calamity—are significantly greater this time around.

    Read: The logic behind Biden’s refusal to negotiate the debt ceiling

    Cantor and Biden failed to strike a deal on their own in 2011; that task ultimately fell to Biden and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell. But Cantor told me he was impressed with Biden’s willingness to bargain: “He was very much in the mode of negotiating, compromising.”

    Not this time—Biden has rebuffed pleas from Speaker Kevin McCarthy for one-on-one negotiations. “President Biden is not the same person as Vice President Biden was,” Cantor said, a bit ruefully. Nor has Biden empowered anyone in his administration to bargain at all.

    “They’ve not negotiated a darn thing,” Cantor said.

    In 2011, Obama engaged with Republicans months in advance of the fiscal deadline, and the talks between Cantor and Biden, along with separate negotiations between Obama and Boehner, helped set parameters for the agreement that materialized when the nation was on the brink of default.

    The present lack of negotiations is likely a direct result of how things went back in 2011. Though both sides came to an agreement eventually, the near miss still caused a stock-market slide and the downgrading of the U.S. credit rating. When the U.S. bumped up against the debt ceiling again later in the Obama presidency, the administration was less inclined to negotiate—and a chastened GOP allowed the limit to be lifted without a fight. The lesson Democrats drew from that experience was never again to concede to the Republican premise that increasing the borrowing limit should be subject to legislative haggling.

    Biden’s no-negotiation stance, however, might not be sustainable. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen informed congressional leaders that the country would run out of fiscal wiggle room—afforded by the use of “extraordinary measures” that stretch federal funds—as soon as June 1. That deadline is earlier than many people in Washington expected, and Yellen’s warning injected fresh urgency into the effort to find a way out of the crisis. In response, Biden summoned McCarthy, McConnell, and their Democratic counterparts to a White House meeting next week.

    In 2011, McCarthy was one rung beneath Cantor in the House GOP hierarchy. Now, as speaker, he’s operating with a much thinner margin than Boehner and Cantor, who had more than 20 votes to spare. The GOP’s five-vote majority has less leverage, but it is more dug-in against the Democrats, and the speakership that McCarthy fought so hard to secure could be at risk if he were to allow the debt ceiling to be raised without extracting sufficient budget cuts or other concessions. The moderate dealmakers in the House Republican Conference have all but vanished. Boehner was ultimately forced out in 2015 by a conservative revolt, but he did not face the threat of an ouster that now hangs over McCarthy.

    Although McCarthy was able to muster enough votes last week to pass an opening bid through the House—“a huge victory,” Cantor told me—he’s unlikely to secure the same level of budget cuts that Republicans did in 2011. Obama and Boehner had traded proposals for entitlement cuts and tax increases, and the deal Congress eventually passed triggered $1.2 trillion in spending reductions over a 10-year period. Under pressure from former President Donald Trump, McCarthy isn’t even pushing this time for cuts to Medicare or Social Security. The likeliest solution, according to potential congressional dealmakers, is an agreement that would merely slow the growth of federal spending, not reverse it. “You’re just not going to move the needle as far,” Cantor said.

    Cantor remains in touch with McCarthy; the two, along with the Republican who succeeded Boehner as speaker, Paul Ryan, were once a conservative triumvirate known as the “Young Guns” (they were already in their 40s, but this is Congress), who rose quickly in the House GOP. When I asked him whether it was possible for McCarthy to emerge victorious in the eyes of his party, Cantor seemed doubtful. “Look, he’s got a very, very slim majority,” he said. “And given where conservative media and social media is on the issue, it’s just hard to be able to create a situation where you can declare a win and have everyone go along with it.”

    Annie Lowrey: The trillion-dollar coin might be the least bad option

    For now, Cantor said, McCarthy is doing what he needs to do to give himself space to negotiate. “Kevin has demonstrated a will to fight, and I think that’s the most important thing right now for members to see—he’s willing to go to bat for them and fight,” he said. “So he comes into this with a fair amount of capital to work with.”

    Biden is also in fighting mode at the moment, in contrast to his bargaining mode in 2011. Cantor argued that “ironically,” Biden had more authority to hammer out a deal when he was Obama’s lieutenant than he does now. “He’s captive of the extreme left and the progressives in his party,” he said.

    This is mostly spin from a Republican who remains, even in his political retirement, a party loyalist. And Biden would surely dispute the suggestion that he would cut a deal with Republicans if left to his own devices; he came away from the 2011 experience with the same determination as others in his party not to negotiate again over the debt ceiling. But Cantor’s point is that because progressives are more ascendant now than they were then, Biden has less room to maneuver, especially as he launches a reelection bid for which he’ll need the left’s enthusiastic support.

    Cantor offered a couple of scenarios for how Biden and McCarthy could avert a default. The most likely involves Washington’s favorite fallback, the punt: Republicans would agree to a short-term increase in the debt ceiling in exchange for Biden committing to serious fiscal negotiations later in the year, when both sides would face a harder deadline. They could also reach a broader agreement in the next few weeks, but Cantor did not sound particularly hopeful. “I still don’t think we go into default,” the veteran of congressional brinkmanship told me, “but I think the path is certainly narrower, and the options available to either side are narrower.”

    Russell Berman

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  • Feisty Joe Biden Is Back

    Feisty Joe Biden Is Back

    It was a raucous, interactive, and argumentative State of the Union like no other. And when it was over, President Joe Biden had provided a clear signal of how he plans to contest the 2024 presidential election.

    Leaning hard into his populist “Scranton Joe” persona, an energetic and feisty Biden sparred with congressional Republicans heckling him from the audience as he previewed what will likely be key themes of the reelection campaign that he’s expected to announce within months, if not weeks.

    Biden’s speech showed him continuing to formulate an economically focused alternative to the cultural backlash that Donald Trump has stressed throughout his political career—and which Trump’s former White House press secretary, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, revived in her bellicose GOP response. Whereas Sanders summoned “normal” Americans to rise up against a “woke mob” allegedly erasing American values and traditions, Biden called for national unity around shared goals, particularly delivering economic benefits to working families.

    David Frum: How Biden successfully baited congressional Republicans

    It’s easy to view those sharply contrasting messages as a preview of the 2024 election. Almost any GOP nominee—but particularly Trump or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the two early front-runners in polls for the nomination—is likely to stress the cultural notes that Sanders hit in hopes of maximizing turnout among the GOP’s core constituencies of older, noncollege, and nonurban white voters and expanding the party’s 2020 beachhead among culturally conservative nonwhite voters, especially Latino men.

    Biden’s emphasis on economic concerns reflects his belief that the best way to counter that strategy is to downplay culture-war fights while defining himself primarily around a practical agenda to lift average families.

    Well into the speech, Biden delivered an unflinching pledge to veto any GOP effort to ban abortion nationwide (which has no chance of passing the Senate anyway). Near the beginning and end of his remarks, he also pointedly alluded to the threats to American democracy unleashed by Trump and the insurrection on January 6, 2021.

    But given how important both of those issues proved to the unexpectedly strong Democratic performance in the 2022 midterms (particularly among white-collar suburbanites), Biden gave them only passing attention.

    The difference in emphasis between Biden and Sanders was unmistakable. Cultural concerns dominated Sanders’s speech. She painted a dark vision of the “radical left’s America,” where “our children are taught to hate one another on account of their race,” “violent criminals roam free while law-abiding families live in fear,” and “normal” Americans “are under attack” from a “woke mob” pursuing “a left-wing culture war that we didn’t start and never wanted to fight.” Her remarks showed again how the fear of cultural and racial displacement in an America that is inexorably growing more diverse, secular, and urbanized remains the most powerful motivator for what I’ve called the Republican “coalition of restoration.”

    By contrast, the core of Biden’s speech was his pledge to both create good-paying jobs for working-class families and provide them with tangible economic help, such as by reducing drug prices and fighting surprise airline and hotel fees. As he often has before, Biden called his agenda a “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America” and stressed how many jobs that do not require college degrees would be created by the troika of major bills passed during his first two years: legislation promoting clean-energy industries, more domestic manufacturing of semiconductors, and infrastructure construction projects nationwide. He delivered repeated populist jabs against big corporations and billionaires paying lower tax rates “than a nurse.”

    It was telling that the most extended of the several remarkable back-and-forth exchanges with Republicans came not from abortion or any social issue, but Social Security and Medicare. Echoing the “you lie” cry from a GOP representative during a 2009 Barack Obama speech, several Republicans apparently called out “liar” when Biden noted, correctly, that some Republicans (specifically Senator Rick Scott of Florida whom he did not name) have proposed to sunset all federal programs every five years, including Social Security and Medicare. What the exchange made clear above all is how comfortable Biden is creating a contrast that Hubert Humphrey would recognize, with Democrats claiming their historical ground of protecting the social safety net.

    Derek Thompson: Don’t ‘buy American’

    Polling during the midterm election, and right through the days before last night’s speech, revealed that Biden has not yet convinced most Americans that his economic agenda will benefit them. Most Americans continue to express downbeat views about the economy, and in an ABC/Washington Post national survey released this week, more than three-fifths of Americans said Biden had accomplished not much or nothing at all.

    After hosting a focus group of voters who watched last night’s speech, Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, a Democratic polling consortium, told me in an email that although their reactions suggested that Biden “was successful in telling a positive story about how the economy has improved over the last two years … the issues of inflation and spending remain deep pain points that he and his administration will have to continue to work on.” Yesterday’s speech showed that Biden similarly believes (rightly or wrongly) that his fate will be decided more by voters’ assessment of his impact on their financial situation than by whether they share his values on the kind of cultural issues Sanders hammered.

    The other thematic pillar of Biden’s presidency has been his promise to unify America and work across party lines. But Biden’s speech continued a recalibration of that message that began last fall.

    In the midterm campaign, Biden differentiated between “mainstream” Republicans who were willing to reach bipartisan agreements and what he called the “extreme MAGA” forces that represented a radical threat to democracy and individual freedoms. In the State of the Union, he offered a variation on that theme. He began by congratulating the new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and stressed how during his first two years as president, “time and again, Democrats and Republicans came together” to pass big legislation, such as the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

    But as the speech progressed, Biden pivoted from where he thought he could deal with Republicans to where he insisted he would resist them. Biden forcefully called on Republicans to pass a “clean” increase in the nation’s debt ceiling, without any conditions, and pledged to veto any effort to undo the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that reduce drug prices, any legislation imposing a national ban on abortion, and any efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare. He touted his commitment to a wide array of priorities, including expanded preschool and an assault-weapons ban, that he knows have no chance of passing a Republican-controlled House.

    All of that notably departed from the tone that his two Democratic predecessors struck in their first State of the Union immediately after losing unified control of Congress, as Biden also did this past fall. Both Bill Clinton, in his 1995 State of the Union speech, and Obama, in his 2011 address, were elaborately conciliatory, even contrite, as they addressed the new GOP majorities. Both men drew some lines of contrast, but mostly focused on issues they believed would appeal to Republicans, such as reducing the federal deficit and streamlining government. Although Biden similarly nodded toward more cooperation at the outset of his speech, overall he was much more confrontational.

    David A. Graham: Biden seizes the center

    That was partly because Biden had less to be contrite about: Democrats performed much better in last year’s midterm than they did when Obama and Clinton suffered their first-term reversals. Democrats lost more than 50 House seats in Clinton’s first midterm, and more than 60 in Obama’s, but they surrendered only 10 in Biden’s—and actually gained a Senate seat, in contrast to the substantial Senate losses under his two predecessors. After those losses, both Clinton and Obama felt enormous pressure to signal to voters that they were making a course correction toward the center; Biden last night betrayed no hint that he felt any need to change direction. As Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s White House communications director, recently told me, last November’s results were “quite different” from the “shellacking” that both Obama and Clinton had suffered. “This election cannot be read as a repudiation of Biden and his agenda,” Pfeiffer said.

    Equally important, though, the gulf between the parties is even greater than it was under Clinton or Obama, which leaves very few realistic opportunities for Biden to pursue bipartisan agreements with the GOP-controlled House. That distance was vividly demonstrated by the repeated catcalls from Republicans—a display that obliterated any traditional notions of decorum during the State of the Union and underscored the zealotry of the conservative vanguard in the House GOP that McCarthy empowered in order to win the speakership.

    Last night, Biden gave voters a spirited preview of his 2024 message and strategy. Sanders and the militant House Republicans simultaneously provided voters with a preview of the alternative they may hear next year. The most revealing measure of the night came not so much in the messages sent by either side, but in the distance between them.

    Ronald Brownstein

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  • The Double-Negative Election

    The Double-Negative Election

    This has become the double-negative election.

    Most Americans consistently say in polls that they believe that President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have mismanaged crime, the border, and, above all, the economy and inflation. But roughly as many Americans say that they view the modern Republican Party as a threat to their rights, their values, or to democracy itself.

    Based on Biden’s first two years in office, surveys show that most Americans are reluctant to continue following the policy path he has laid out. But polls also show no enthusiasm for returning to the programs, priorities, and daily chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency. In an NBC national survey released last weekend, half of registered voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and congressional Democrats want to do, but more than that said the same about congressional Republicans and Trump. About half of all voters said they had little, or no, confidence in either party to improve the economy, according to another recent national survey from CNBC.

    Read: Why this election is so weird

    It remains likely that two negatives will still yield a positive result for Republicans. Most voters with little faith in both sides may ultimately decide simply to give a chance to the party that’s not in charge now, Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who helps conduct the CNBC survey, told me. That would provide a late boost to the GOP, particularly in House races, where the individual candidates are less well known. But even if that dynamic develops, Campbell said, the Democrats’ ability to hold so much of their coalition over concerns about the broader Republican agenda has reduced the odds that the GOP can generate the kind of decisive midterm gains enjoyed by Democrats in 2018 and 2006, or Republicans in 2010 and 1994.

    If Republicans make only modest gains this fall, it will be a clear warning that the party, as currently defined by Trump’s imprint, faces a hard ceiling on its potential support. But even a small Republican gain would send Democrats an equal warning that concerns about the GOP’s values and commitment to democracy may not be sufficient to deny them the White House in 2024. “If I was advising the Biden administration, I would say this is the No. 1 priority: Fix the fundamentals,” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University and a co-author of a new book on the 2020 presidential election, The Bitter End, told me. “The biggest priority is inflation, and everything else is secondary.”

    By precedent, Democrats should be facing a rout next month. That’s partly because the first midterm election for a new president is almost always tough on his party, but also because most voters express deep pessimism about the country’s current conditions. Despite robust job growth, the combination of inflation, rising interest rates, and tumbling stock markets has generated intense economic dissatisfaction. National surveys, like last week’s CNBC poll, routinely find that on key economic measures, voters prefer Republicans over Democrats by double-digit margins. A September NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that nearly three-fifths of voters say Biden’s policies have weakened the economy, compared with only about one-third who say they have strengthened it.

    Given those attitudes, academic models predict that Democrats should lose about 40 to 45 House seats next month, Sides recently noted.

    Likewise, Democrats are swimming upstream against the growing tendency of voters to align their selections for the Senate with their assessment of the incumbent president. In 2018, Republicans lost every Senate race in a state where Trump’s approval rating in exit polls stood at 48 percent or less; in 2010, Democrats lost 13 of the 15 Senate races in states where then-President Barack Obama’s approval rating stood at 47 percent or less. This year, Biden’s approval rating does not exceed 45 percent in any of the states hosting the most hotly contested Senate races, and more often stands at only about 40 percent, or even less.

    These precedents could ultimately produce Republican gains closer to these historic benchmarks. In polling, the party out of the White House traditionally has gained strength in the final weeks before midterm voting, as most undecided and less-attuned voters break their way.

    Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster, told me that dynamic could be compounded this year because independent and less partisan voters remain focused on inflation (rather than the issues of abortion and democracy animating Democrats) and express preponderantly negative views about the economy and Biden’s performance. Campbell agreed that for those reasons, independent voters could move against Democrats, especially in House races. The number of blue-leaning House districts where Democrats are nonetheless spending heavily on defense in the final weeks testifies to that likelihood. Several House-race forecasters have recently upped their projections of likely Republican gains closer to the midterm average since World War II for the party out of the White House, about 26 seats.

    But even with all of these formidable headwinds, Democrats have remained highly competitive in polling on national sentiment for the House, and in the key Senate battlegrounds (including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). And although Democrats face unexpectedly difficult challenges in governor’s races in New York and Oregon, they remain ahead or well within reach in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. To be sure, Democrats are not decisive favorites in any of these races (except for governor of Pennsylvania), but despite the gloomy national climate, neither have any of these contests moved out of their reach.

    That’s largely because the party has minimized defections and increased engagement from the key groups in its coalition—including young people, college-educated voters, women, and people of color—by focusing more attention on issues where those voters perceive the Trump-era GOP as a threat. Weak or extreme Republican candidates have eased that work in several of these Senate and governor races.

    But another factor allowing Democrats to remain competitive is that, for all the doubts Americans are expressing about their performance, there is no evidence of rising confidence in Republicans.

    Read: What to expect when you’re expecting a Republican house

    For instance, the latest national NBC survey, conducted by the bipartisan team of Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research, found that 48 percent of voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who promised to continue Biden’s policies. That sounds ominous for Democrats, but voters were slightly more negative about a candidate who promised to pursue Trump’s policies (50 percent less likely). Only about one-third of independents said they preferred a candidate who would continue the policies of either Biden or Trump. All of that tracks with the survey’s other finding that although half of voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and the Democrats are trying to do, even more said they mostly disagreed with the agenda of congressional Republicans (53 percent) and Trump (56 percent).

    Other polls have also found this double-barreled skepticism. The latest CNBC poll (also conducted by the Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies team) found the two parties facing almost identically bleak verdicts on their ability to improve the economy: Only a little more than one-fifth of voters expressed much confidence in each party, while more than three-fourths expressed little or none.

    When a Yahoo/YouGov America poll recently asked whether each party was focusing on the right issues, only about 30 percent of voters in each case said yes, and about half said no. Only about one-fourth of women said Republicans have the right priorities; only about one-fourth of men said Democrats have the right priorities. The capstone on all of these attitudes is the consistent finding that most Americans (an identical 57 percent in the Yahoo/You Gov survey) don’t want either Biden or Trump to run again in 2024.

    In baseball, they say a tie goes to the runner. The political analogue might be that equally negative assessments of the two parties are likely to break in favor of the side out of power. Campbell points out that while a striking 81 percent of independents say they have little or no confidence in Republicans to improve the economy, that number rises to 90 percent about Democrats. In the NBC survey, voters who said they mostly disagreed with both Biden’s and Trump’s policy agenda preferred Republicans to control Congress by a margin of three to one, according to detailed results provided by McInturff.

    Democrats seem acutely, though perhaps belatedly, aware of these challenges. They now warn that Republicans, if given control of one or both congressional chambers, would threaten Medicare and Social Security, most pointedly by demanding cuts in return for raising the federal debt ceiling next year. But it’s not clear that those arguments can break through the lived reality of higher prices for gas and groceries squeezing so many families. “Inflation, rising gas prices, interest rates—those are things people feel every day,” Tony Fabrizio, the lead pollster for Trump in 2020, told me recently. “There is no TV commercial that is going to change what they feel when they go to the grocery store or the gas station.”

    The challenge those daily realities pose to Democrats is not unique: As the political analyst John Halpin recently noted, “inflation is a political wrecking ball for incumbent governments” across the Western world (as demonstrated by England’s recent chaos and the election of right-wing governments in Sweden and Italy). No democratically elected government may enjoy much security until more people in its country feel secure about their own finances. For Democrats, the risk of an unexpectedly bad outcome next month seems greater than the possibility of an unexpectedly good one.

    Republican gains this fall would only extend a core dynamic of modern American politics: the inability of either party to establish a durable advantage over the other. If Democrats lose one or both congressional chambers, it will mark the fifth consecutive time that a president who went into a midterm election with unified control of government has lost it. The prospect of very tight races next month in almost all of the same states that decided the 2020 presidential election underscores the likelihood that the 2024 race for the White House will again divide the country closely and bitterly.

    Yet the undertow threatening Democrats now previews the difficulty they will face in two years if economic conditions don’t improve. In presidential races, political scientists say voters start to harden their verdicts on the economy about a year before Election Day. That means Biden is running out of time to tame inflation, especially if, as most economists expect, doing so will require at least a modest recession. Even amid widespread anxiety about both inflation and recession, Democrats remain competitive this fall by highlighting doubts about Republicans, particularly among the voters in their own coalition. But that cannot be an experiment any Democrat would look forward to repeating in 2024.

    Ronald Brownstein

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