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.”
