WASHINGTON — Stephen Webber remembers when he started to get worried about next year’s midterm elections. In March, he met a woman who tearfully explained how she had just paid for long-overdue car repairs after receiving an unexpected government payment.
But, politically speaking, there was a problem. This woman — a card-carrying member of a politically active grocers’ union — didn’t know Democrats had led the effort that was responsible for the influx of cash.
“She was surprised, she was taken aback,” said Webber, the political director for the AFL-CIO in Missouri, who told her the money was a stimulus measure approved by Democrats as part of the American Rescue Plan passed that month. “She hadn’t made the connection between the political work we had done and winning the races in Georgia, and the fact she was getting [money] in her bank account.”
Webber says he has had many similar conversations across Missouri in the following months that expose how little average voters — and even some local Democratic leaders — know about President Joe Biden and the party’s legislative achievements, even if they’ve personally benefited from them.
“I don’t think 1% of reliable or frequent Democratic voters have even a decent understanding of what Democrats are trying to do in Washington, D.C., right now,” said Webber, a former chair of the Missouri Democratic Party. “The disconnect between what folks in Washington, D.C., are talking about and what folks on the ground know is massive.”
His worries aren’t isolated within the Democratic Party. A broad cross-section of lawmakers, party officials and strategists around the country say they are growing increasingly frustrated that their economic agenda — starting with the pandemic relief package passed in March — hasn’t yet broken through to the public.
The troubling bottom line, as they see it, is that after authorizing nearly $2 trillion in immediate financial aid, voters who directly benefited don’t seem to be aware of its existence or credit Democrats for engineering it.
It’s a gap that underscores just how much work the party has to do before the 2022 midterm elections to make voters aware of even the basics of their policy agenda, especially as they attempt to move forward with trillions of dollars of new spending on infrastructure and social programs this fall.
“It goes back to kind of an old formulation that while you’re legislating, you’re not communicating,” said Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa. “I think it’s very difficult, when you’re a governing party, to do both well. If you spend your whole days communicating, you’ll never get the legislation done.”
Casey said he spent two weeks during the August congressional recess traveling across Pennsylvania talking to voters, and was disappointed to find “they knew a little, but not a lot” about his party’s agenda.
“I don’t think we’ve done a particularly good job of telling people that the Rescue Plan was achieved with only Democratic votes,” Casey said, referring to the pandemic relief bill.
Casey and other Democrats, while not panicking, are alarmed that they haven’t made further inroads with the public by now.
A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 40% of Americans think Biden has accomplished very little as president. The latest Economist/YouGov survey showed that 37% of adults think the Democratic-controlled Congress has accomplished less than usual at this point in a two-year term.
Most glaringly of all, 57% of voters said the Biden administration has not done anything that has benefited them personally, according to a new Daily Kos/Civiqs poll. Despite programs that included stimulus checks issued to more than 100 million households and a revamped child tax credit that nearly all parents received, that perception is a damaging one for Democrats.
“It’s pretty clear from most data sets that the American public doesn’t have a clear idea what the president and Democratic Congress have been able to accomplish for them,” said Dan Sena, who was executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2018, the last midterm election.
The lack of awareness has challenged the growing belief within the party that an expansive agenda replete with easily understood benefits would earn immediate recognition with the public, much more so than previous Democratic initiatives.
That mindset was part of the political rationale for the American Rescue Plan, approved on a party-line vote, to include $1,400 stimulus checks, increased unemployment insurance, greater subsidies for health care exchanges, and a child tax credit program.
At the time of its passage, progressives highlighted how it was different from the stimulus package that former President Barack Obama signed in 2009, which they widely considered too small and its benefits too discreet.
Some Democrats now say hopes the pandemic relief package would be widely embraced by the public soon after passage were misguided.
“This isn’t the New Deal anymore, a country coming together in the wake of a crisis to support broad relief,” said Jeff Smith, a former Democratic state lawmaker from Missouri.
Adding to the challenge recently has been the chaotic withdrawal of U.S troops from Afghanistan and surge of coronavirus cases, which have largely overshadowed other political issues.
“These things get lost in the shuffle so fast,” said Bradley Beychok, a veteran Democratic strategist. “It’s not political malpractice, it’s that we’re living in a crazy world. And when delta comes back, people aren’t thinking about what the government has given them. People less fortunate are thinking about how to survive.”
Biden and his allies have attempted to correct the problem. The nonprofit group Building Back Together has spent millions of dollars on ads touting different aspects of the party’s agenda, including the child tax credit and aid for small businesses. Officials with the organization also say they’ve held more than a thousand events across the country advocating for Biden’s agenda.
The president has also held events at the White House and outside Washington to build awareness for his plans. White House officials stress that they plan to remain aggressive in selling an agenda they think remains deeply popular with the public.
“We’re digging out of a deep hole, but thanks to President Biden’s Rescue Plan and vaccination campaign, our economy is on the move again with more than 4.5 million jobs created, unemployment down, and our economy on track to grow at the fastest rate in four decades,” Michael Gwin, a White House spokesman, said.
Some Democrats say privately that the key for Biden and congressional Democrats to receive credit from the public was less about making voters aware of their agenda and more related to whether the country, by next summer, has made progress beating back the pandemic and repairing its economy.
Until then, however, frustrated Democratic strategists say it’s difficult for those efforts to break through at a time when, in the aftermath of former President Donald Trump’s tumultuous tenure, some voters are tuned out of politics.
“What the last couple of election cycles have shown is that the appetite and attention span of the American public has gotten shorter, shorter and shorter,” Sena said. “And I think that has presented a real challenge for Democrats.”
Still, some Democrats say they are hopeful the public’s attitude will shift over the next year, particularly once the party’s political machinery kicks into high gear closer to the election.
Nick Ahamed, the deputy executive director of the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, said that when his group conducted a round of recent focus groups with new voters who backed Biden in 2020, they quickly grasped the impact of the president’s policies.
“The reality is it takes time and communication to take folks who are not in Washington and not thinking about it every day up to speed on that,” Ahamed said. “If two months before an election, people don’t know what Democrats had done or if they thought Democrats hadn’t done anything, it’d be a different issue. So we’re spending the next year resolving that.”
Democrats are buoyed by polls consistently showing that the various elements of their legislative packages are broadly popular, including a $3.5 trillion budget bill that is expected to become a major component of the party’s pitch to voters if passed.
For instance, a new poll from the Democratic firm Navigator tested 15 policy proposals — ranging from expanding Medicare to raising taxes on the wealthy to clean energy investments — that are included in the party’s budget plan that Congress is currently debating. All received between 64% and 86% support from voters.
“The components of the package — all of those pieces individually are really popular. The gap is they don’t know that Biden is pushing for all these pieces in a larger package,” said Martha McKenna, a veteran Democratic strategist.
Some Biden allies dispute that the president needs to do much work to earn credit with voters, especially if his vaccine distribution efforts are taken into account.
Matt Barreto, an adviser to Building Back Together and longtime pollster, said he’s seen a similar conversation occur in focus groups he’s watched all year.
“If the moderators ask something about the American Rescue Plan, a lot of people scratch their heads,” Barreto said. “But if she pivots and says, ‘Well, what do you think the Biden administration has done for you?’ Without pause, everyone in the room mentions the vaccine rollout.”
Party operatives stress they have nearly 14 months to communicate with the public about their agenda. The party needs to acknowledge its problem, they say, and get to work fixing it.
“Sometimes it would be better if Democrats spent less time worried that people don’t know what we’ve done, and more time talking to people about what we’ve done,” said Jesse Ferguson, a senior Democratic strategist. “The problem is real, but the solution isn’t to lament it. The solution is to solve it.”
