Maybe that’s what their voters want and it could be the right thing for America. There’s also something innately appealing about the argument that the president’s party wins by delivering on campaign promises. This is in line with common sense, as well as a fundamental idea of democracy, that voters reward parties for keeping promises and formulating good policy and punish them for failing to do so.
The idea that fulfilling policy promises is the key to victory in the medium term also happens to be wrong – or at least not supported by any evidence for the past half century. As a motivator for Democrats to act, the idea that delivering major policy achievements will lead to electoral success may be a sound approach, but as a political analysis it is contrary to history.
Recent decades have been filled with examples of a new administration passing key legislation only to lose seats in midterm elections. After the completion
Elected in 1964 in landslide with
vast democratic majority In both houses of Congress, President Lyndon B. Johnson passed a battery of policies in 1965 that included the Voting Rights Act, the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, and many others.
great society program. The prize for the Democrats was a loss of 47 seats in the House of Representatives and three in the Senate.
1966 mid-term elections. For good measure, Johnson’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey was defeated in
1968 presidential election.
A few years later, in 1981, President Ronald Reagan fulfilled and passed a campaign promise
omnibus budget reconciliation act, which was the core of his economic agenda and his campaign platform from his 1980 election. Reagan’s Republican Party then held a seat in the Senate, but lost 26 of the House seats.
1982 medium term. President Donald Trump passed in recent years
major tax deduction,
critical regulation And
two supreme court judge While President Barack Obama
given the affordable care act at the beginning of his first term. Trump and Obama
saw your party drunk In his first mid-term election.
The pattern of the presidential party losing seats in the mid-term is well-known and annoying for almost all presidents. At least since the New Deal era, merely delivering on campaign promises,
was not enough to stop that trend. It is extremely unlikely that this will now turn into an era of deeply polarized electorate, highly partisan media and relative scarcity of undecided voters.
There are several reasons for this. First, it takes some time for the major policies to be realized by the voters. For example, the Affordable Care Act was passed in the spring of 2010, so voters were not experiencing the benefits, or downsides, of having a major impact on the election at the time. In today’s context this means that even if Biden was able to pass both pieces of his Build Back Better program – hard and soft infrastructure – the impact would not be felt immediately. Groundbreaking or awareness on some infrastructure projects, for example, new climate laws or expanded Medicare that will include dental coverage, will not be likely to affect many voters anytime soon in 2022.
Second, American politics would no longer work, if it ever did, by rewarding a simple principle of major policy achievements. Even when presidents are re-elected, it happens more often a
the impression that things are going well Rather than any major enthusiasm for his policies, because voters care more about results than input. In other words, the state of the economy is more important to voters than what laws the president and his party made or did not pass.
Additionally, in our current highly polarized political context, we have repeatedly seen, especially in the past year or so, external factors, whether the Covid-19 pandemic, the impeachment hearings, the Mueller Report or even January 6. Let there be rebellion. pushed people back to their political corners.
for example,
Voting at the end of March 2020 Shortly after finishing the Democratic nomination, Biden showed nearly nine points ahead of then-President Trump, but
in the next months When the pandemic broke out after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and massive protests erupted in US cities, the numbers didn’t change much and the final pre-poll polls put Biden ahead by nearly eight points. If those events didn’t significantly affect voters, why would we expect a piece of legislation or two, even the major ones, to be taken apart?
Still, the Biden administration needs to get something done before the mid-term. While it is not true that legislation is the secret to success in the midterm, it is almost certainly true that it is better for Democrats to show something for their two-year majority when they go to voters next November. Have done nothing with your majority.
Supporters of Biden’s legislative agenda should defend their position on the basis of his policies, not the Polianish opinion that passing major new laws is the secret recipe for electoral success in midterm elections. As Presidents Johnson, Reagan, Obama and Trump all learned, American politics is not that simple.
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