Newspaper & online reporters and analysts explore the cultural and news stories of the week, with photos frequently added by Esco20, and reveal their significance (with a slant towards Esco 20's opinions)
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had said he hoped the Senate would vote on President Biden's spending bill before Christmas, but that plan has stalled.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
President Biden in a Thursday evening statement acknowledged the roadblocks his nearly $2 trillion social spending package faced, saying that it could take weeks before the package was ready for a vote. Still, he said he would continue to push for the bill to get enough Democratic support to pass through the Senate.
"It takes time to finalize these agreements, prepare the legislative changes, and finish all the parliamentary and procedural steps needed to enable a Senate vote. We will advance this work together over the days and weeks ahead," Biden said.
The statement came after Senate Democrats appeared on the verge of abandoning their pledge to pass Biden's plan before Christmas.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had insisted over the past several weeks that the bill would pass the Senate before the holiday. But Democrats have been unable to convince Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., the key holdout on the bill, to pledge his support.
Schumer avoided admitting defeat this week even as it became clear that plans for a vote were slipping.
"The bottom line is there are good discussions going on," Schumer told reporters on Wednesday. "We are moving with progress."
But by Thursday afternoon, little progress had been made.
Biden said he had spoken to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Schumer and briefed them on discussions he and his staff have had with Manchin.
"In these discussions, Senator Manchin has reiterated his support for Build Back Better funding at the level of the framework plan I announced in September," Biden said. "I believe that we will bridge our differences and advance the Build Back Better plan, even in the face of fierce Republican opposition."
Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., downplayed the severity of the delay for the bill.
"I don't think it's going to be before Christmas," Kelly said. "But you know it shouldn't be, it should be when we're ready."
"It's likely to be one of the first things to take up after the holidays," he added.
The months-long struggle stalled out in the Senate after House Democrats mustered the votes to pass a version of the bill last month. The bill was snarled in familiar fights between Manchin and virtually every other member of his party over the cost of the bill and plans to significantly expand the social safety net.
Democrats hope to pass the legislation using a feature of the budget process, known as reconciliation, that would allow them to avoid a GOP filibuster and pass the bill with a simple majority. That requires unanimous support within their party, giving holdouts like Manchin veto power over the entire bill.
Manchin has raised concerns about a number of elements of the bill but his latest objections were related to the cost of the child tax credit. The American Rescue Plan, which was approved without GOP votes earlier this year, expanded the credit to reach more low-income families, increased the overall value of the credit and turned a portion of the credit into an monthly payment of up to $300 per child.
That expansion is set to expire at the end of the year.
Democrats planned to extend the monthly payments for one year but Manchin has raised concerns about the total cost, particularly if Democrats eventually try to make the changes permanent.
"I'm not opposed to the child tax credit," Manchin said in a testy exchange with reporters this week. "I've never been opposed to the child tax credit."
But Manchin has refused to publicly commit to what specific changes to the bill or the credit would satisfy him enough to win his support.
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden return to the White House on Friday, June 4, 2021. (Erin Scott/The New York Times)
Democrats defeated President Donald Trump and captured the Senate last year with a racially diverse coalition that delivered victories by tiny margins in key states like Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.
In the next election, they cannot count on repeating that feat, a new report warns.
A review of the 2020 election, conducted by several prominent Democratic advocacy groups, has concluded that the party is at risk of losing ground with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters unless it does a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far-left.
The 73-page report, obtained by The New York Times, was assembled at the behest of three major Democratic interest groups: Third Way, a centrist think tank, and the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund, which promote Black and Hispanic candidates. It appears to be the most thorough act of self-criticism carried out by Democrats or Republicans after the last campaign.
The document is all the more striking because it is addressed to a victorious party: Despite their successes, Democrats had hoped to achieve more robust control of both chambers of Congress, rather than the precarious margins they now hold.
In part, the study found, Democrats fell short of their aspirations because many House and Senate candidates failed to match Joe Biden’s support with voters of color who loathed Trump but distrusted the Democratic Party as a whole. Those constituencies included Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas, Vietnamese American and Filipino American voters in California, and Black voters in North Carolina.
Overall, the report warns, Democrats in 2020 lacked a core argument about the economy and recovering from the coronavirus pandemic — one that might have helped candidates repel Republican claims that they wanted to “keep the economy shut down” or worse. The party “leaned too heavily on ‘anti-Trump’ rhetoric,” the report concludes.
“Win or lose, self-described progressive or moderate, Democrats consistently raised a lack of strong Democratic Party brand as a significant concern in 2020,” the report states. “In the absence of strong party branding, the opposition latched on to GOP talking points, suggesting our candidates would ‘burn down your house and take away the police.’”
Former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat who lost reelection in South Florida in November, said in an interview that she had spoken with the authors of the report and raised concerns about Democratic outreach to Hispanic voters and the party’s failure to rebut misinformation in Spanish-language media.
“Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has in some ways lost touch with our electorate,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “There is this assumption that of course people of color or the working class are going to vote for Democrats. We can never assume anything.”
The report, chiefly written by a pair of veteran Democratic operatives, Marlon Marshall and Lynda Tran, is among the most significant salvos yet in the Democratic Party’s internal debate about how it should approach the 2022 elections. It may stir skepticism from some quarters because of the involvement of Third Way, which much of the left regards with hostility.
A fourth group that initially backed the study, the campaign finance reform group End Citizens United, backed away this spring. Tiffany Muller, the head of the group, said it had to abandon its involvement to focus instead on passing the For the People Act, a sweeping good-government bill that is stuck in the Senate.
Marshall and Tran as well as the groups sponsoring the review have begun to share its conclusions with Democratic lawmakers and party officials in recent days, including Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee.
The study spanned nearly six months of research and data analysis that scrutinized about three dozen races for the House and the Senate and involved interviews with 143 people, including lawmakers, candidates and pollsters, people involved in assembling the report said. Among the campaigns reviewed were the Senate elections in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina as well as House races in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas and in rural New Mexico and Maine.
The study follows an internal review conducted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that was unveiled last month. Both projects found that Democratic candidates had been hobbled by flawed polling and pandemic-imposed limitations on campaigning.
In the DCCC report, the committee attributed setbacks at the congressional level to a surge in turnout by Trump supporters and an inadequate Democratic response to attacks calling them police-hating socialists.
Some lawmakers on the left have complained that criticism of left-wing messaging amounts to scapegoating activists for the party’s failures.
Yet the review by Third Way, the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund goes further in diagnosing the party’s messaging as deficient in ways that may have cost Democrats more than a dozen seats in the House. Its report offers a blunt assessment that in 2020, Republicans succeeded in misleading voters about the Democratic Party’s agenda and that Democrats had erred by speaking to voters of color as if they are a monolithic, left-leaning group.
Rep. Tony Cárdenas of California, who last year helmed the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ political action committee, embraced that critique of Democratic messaging and said the party should discard the assumption “that voters of color are inherently more progressive.”
“That’s been a ridiculous idea, and that’s never been true,” Cárdenas said, lamenting that Republicans had succeeded in “trying to confuse Latino voters with the socialism message, things of that nature, ‘defund the police.’”
Quentin James, president of the Collective PAC, said it was clear that “some of the rhetoric we see from coastal Democrats” had been problematic. James pointed to the activist demand to “defund” the police as especially harmful, even with supporters of policing overhauls.
“We did a poll that showed Black voters, by and large, vastly support reforming the police and reallocating their budgets,” James said. “That terminology — ‘defund’ — was not popular in the Black community.”
Kara Eastman, a progressive Democrat who lost her bid for a House seat based in Omaha, Nebraska, said Republicans had succeeded in delivering a “barrage of messages” that tarred her and her party as being outside the mainstream. Eastman said she had told the authors of the 2020 review that she believed those labels were particularly damaging to women.
Matt Bennett, a Third Way strategist, said the party needed to be far better prepared to mount a defense in the midterm campaign.
“We have got to take very seriously these attacks on Democrats as radicals and stipulate that they land,” Bennett said. “A lot of this just didn’t land on Joe Biden.”
Democrats maintained a large advantage with voters of color in the 2020 elections, but the report identified telling areas of weakness. Biden and other Democrats lost ground with Latino voters relative to the party’s performance in 2016, “especially among working-class and non-college voters in these communities,” the report found.
The report found that a surge in Asian American turnout appeared to have secured Biden’s victory in Georgia but that Democratic House candidates ran behind Biden with Asian American voters in contested California and Texas races. In some important states, Democrats did not mobilize Black voters at the same rate that Republicans did conservative white voters.
“A substantial boost in turnout netted Democrats more raw votes from Black voters than in 2016, but the explosive growth among white voters in most races outpaced these gains,” the report warns.
There has been no comparable self-review on the Republican side after the party’s setbacks last year, mainly because GOP leaders have no appetite for a debate about Trump’s impact.
The Republican Party faces serious political obstacles arising from Trump’s unpopularity, the growing liberalism of young voters and the country’s growing diversity. Many of the party’s policies are unpopular, including cutting social welfare and retirement security programs and keeping taxes low for the wealthy and big corporations.
Yet the structure of the American electoral system has tilted national campaigns toward Republicans because of congressional gerrymandering and the disproportionate representation of rural white voters in the Senate and Electoral College.
Democratic hopes for the midterm elections have so far hinged on the prospect of a strong recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and on voters’ regarding Republicans as a party unsuited to governing.
Rep. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J., a moderate who was briefed on the findings of the report, called it proof that the party needed a strong central message about the economy in 2022.
“We need to continue to show the American people what we’ve done, and then talk incessantly across the country, in every town, about how Democrats are governing,” Sherrill said.
Largely unaddressed in the report is the immense deficit Democrats face among lower-income white voters. In its conclusion, however, Marshall and Tran wrote that Democrats need to deliver a message that includes working-class whites and matches Republicans’ clear “collective gospel” about low taxes and military strength.
“Our gospel should be about championing all working people — including but not limited to white working people — and lifting up our values of opportunity, equity, inclusion,” they wrote.
President Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic probably cost him re-election. Yet it seems mind-boggling that he still won more votes than any incumbent president in American history despite his dereliction of responsibility at a time of a once-in-a-century health crisis and economic devastation.
Why are President-elect Joe Biden’s margins so thin in the states that clinched his victory? And why did the president’s down-ticket enablers flourish in the turbulent, plague-torn conditions they helped bring about?
But Democrats should understand that there was really no way to avoid disappointment. Three factors — the logic of partisan polarization, which inaccurate polling obscured; the strength of the juiced pre-Covid-19 economy; and the success of Mr. Trump’s denialist, open-everything-up nonresponse to the pandemic — mostly explain why they didn’t fare better. This shocking strategy worked for Republicans, even if it didn’t pan out for the president himself. Moreover, it laid a trap that Democrats walked into — something they should understand and adjust for, as best they can, as they look ahead.
Mr. Trump has a knack for leveraging the animosities of polarized partisanship to cleave his supporters from sources of credible information and inflame them with vilifying lies. This time, it wasn’t enough to save his bacon, which suggests that polarization hasn’t completely wrecked our democracy’s capacity for self-correction: Sweeping a medium-size city’s worth of dead Americans under the rug turned out to be too tall an order.
However, Mr. Trump’s relentless campaign to goose the economy by cutting taxes, running up enormous deficits and debt, and hectoring the Fed into not raising rates was working for millions of Americans. We tend to notice when we’re personally more prosperous than we were a few years before.
But the president’s catastrophic response to Covid-19 threw the economy into a tailspin. Mr. Trump abdicated responsibility, shifting the burden onto states and municipalities with busted budgets. He then waged a war of words against governors and mayors — especially Democrats — who refused to risk their citizens’ lives by allowing economic and social activity to resume.
He spurred his supporters to make light of the danger of infection, made the churlish refusal to wear masks into an emblem of emancipation from the despotism of experts and turned public health restrictions on businesses, schools and social gatherings into a tyrannical conspiracy to steal power by damaging the economy and his re-election prospects.
He succeeded in putting Democrats on the defensive about economic restrictions and school closures. As months passed and with no new relief coming from Washington, financially straitened Democratic states and cities had little choice but to ease restrictions on businesses just to keep the lights on. That seemed to concede the economic wisdom of the more permissive approach in majority-Republican states and fed into Mr. Trump’s false narrative of victory over the virus and a triumphant return to normalcy.
But Democrats weren’t destined to get quite as tangled in Mr. Trump’s trap as they did. They had no way to avoid it, but they could have been hurt less by it. They allowed Republicans to define the contrast between the parties’ approaches to the pandemic in terms of freedom versus exhausting, indefinite shutdowns.
Democrats needed to present a competing, compelling strategy to counter Republican messaging. Struggling workers and businesses never clearly heard exactly what they’d get if Democrats ran the show, and Democrats never came together to scream bloody murder that Republicans were refusing to give it to them.
Democrats needed to underscore the depth of Republican failure by forcefully communicating what other countries had done to successfully control the virus. And they needed to promise to do the same through something like an Operation Warp Speed for testing and P.P.E. to get America safely back in business.
Instead, they whined that Mr. Trump’s negligence and incompetence were to blame for America’s economic woes and complained that Mitch McConnell wouldn’t even consider the House’s big relief bill. They weren’t wrong, but correctly assigning culpability did nothing to help working-class breadwinners who can’t bus tables, process chickens, sell smoothies or clean hotel rooms over Zoom.
The Republican message couldn’t have been clearer: Workers should be able to show up, clock in, earn a normal paycheck, pay the rent and feed their kids. Democrats were telling the same workers that we need to listen to science, reopening is premature, and the economy can’t be fully restored until we beat the virus. Correct! But how does that help when rent was due last week?
Make no mistake, it was unforgivably cruel of Republicans to force blue-collar and service workers to risk death for grocery money. Yet their disinformation campaign persuaded many millions of Americans that the risk was minimal and that Democrats were keeping their workplaces and schools closed, their customers and kids at home, and their wallets empty and cupboards bare for bogus reasons.
The president’s mendacious push to hastily reopen everything was less compelling to college-educated suburbanites, who tend to trust experts and can work from home, watch their kids and spare a laptop for online kindergarten. Mr. Trump lost the election mainly because he lost enough of these voters, including some moderate Republicans who otherwise voted straight Republican tickets.
Democrats need to rethink the idea that these voters would have put Democratic House and Senate candidates over the top if only Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were less radiantly socialist. They need to accept that they took hits on the economy by failing to escape the trap Republicans set by doggedly refusing to do anything about the uncontained contagion destroying it.
And they need to understand how Mr. Trump saved his party by weaponizing polarization. Conservatives....steadied themselves by reaffirming their loyalty down the remainder of the ballot. They were voting against a personal crisis of identity, not the Green New Deal
Democrats might have done better had sunny polls and their own biased partisan perceptions not misled them into believing that backlash to indisputably damning Republican failure would deliver an easy Senate majority — but not much better. Until the mind-bending spell of polarization breaks, everything that matters will be fiercely disputed and even the most egregious failures will continue to go unpunished.
