WASHINGTON – A new monthly cash benefit championed by President Joe Biden is poised, supporters of the program hope, to lift families out of poverty and provide them with financial security.
Will it also nudge some of those same parents to vote for Democrats?
The president’s expansive policy agenda is testing the limits of how much direct financial assistance from the federal government can influence voters, millions of whom will or already have received thousands of dollars this year thanks to a flurry of Biden-backed measures.
The latest — and perhaps most politically significant — instance came this week, when the vast majority of families with children began receiving a monthly direct deposit as part of a revamped child tax credit program.
Coupled with an earlier wave of pandemic relief checks and a boost to unemployment insurance, the benefits form the basis of what veteran Democratic operatives say is a unique opportunity to change political attitudes among the recipients, including those who voted for former President Donald Trump.
“I don’t think we’ve had anything this solid to message on — ever ,” said Rebecca Pearcey, former national political director for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign. “And we never have delivered this big across the board — ever. So it’s on Democrats to remind voters what the Biden administration has done to help with the recovery.”
The programs could backfire politically: Republicans point out that the monthly child tax credit program began the same week the Labor Department reported that inflation is growing at the fastest rate in more than a dozen years, which critics say is a byproduct of profligate government spending. Even the most optimistic Democrats acknowledge that in an electorate racked by seemingly intractable polarization, even an immensely popular spending agenda can sway only so many voters.
And yet, no recent president has adopted an agenda more intent on delivering tangible government-funded benefits as Biden has. In addition to the child tax credit program, the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan he signed into law in March included sending $1,400 to most Americans and extended and enlarged unemployment benefits to the millions of people without a job earlier this year.
The breadth of financial assistance could swell with further legislation. For instance, Senate Democrats are considering a multi-trillion-dollar package that could expand Medicare’s benefits, such as offering dental coverage, and provide subsidies to help provide for child and elder care.
And other White House initiatives, like helping distribute vaccines or investing in physical infrastructure like roads and bridges, offer concrete benefits for citizens that were sometimes lacking during previous administrations of both parties.
“It used to be if you wanted to help at-risk people, you came out with a targeted program to help people,” said James Carville, a one-time lead strategist to former President Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. “Here, it’s like somebody has figured out that the solution to a lack of money is money, more than another program. It’s a new way of thinking about things, believe it or not.”
RAISING AWARENESS
To many Democrats, the child tax credit represents the most important and far-reaching benefit. After the pandemic relief bill was signed into law, most parents are eligible to receive a total of $3,000 per child, up from $2,000, with the parents of younger children receiving even more cash assistance.
Just as significant politically is that most of the eligible families will begin receiving half of their allotted credit in monthly payments, deposited directly into their bank accounts over the next six months. The payments — expected to reach at least 39 million families, according to the Treasury Department — began Thursday.
Top Democratic officials began promoting the plan in earnest this week. Three of the party’s political committees jointly released a digital ad in key battleground states extolling its benefits.
“We’re going to go out and sell this to the American people,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison said in an interview. “We’ll let them know in the time of the greatest need, it was the Democratic Party, led by Joe Biden, that stood up to help them.”
Biden, of course, isn’t the only recent president to offer citizens a tangible benefit.
Former Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump each signed tax cuts into law that increased the take-home pay of millions of Americans. Bush also backed a multi-billion-dollar expansion of Medicare that helped seniors pay for prescription drugs.
Former President Barack Obama, meanwhile, supported a litany of new benefits for Americans, including extending health insurance to tens of millions of citizens.
But some of the benefits, Obama allies said, were often too subtle to attract attention. They pointed to a provision in the 2009 economic stimulus package that temporarily cut payroll taxes, but made only marginal changes to Americans’ take-home pay instead of delivering the benefit in a larger lump sum.
“When they passed that stimulus bill, it was great and we got more money into the pockets of the American people,” Harrison said. “But in the end nobody knew it was President Obama and the Democrats in the House and Senate who got it done
“We aren’t making that mistake again,” he added.
At the start of summer, polling indicated that many people still hadn’t heard of the expanded child tax credit. A survey released in early June from Data for Progress, a progressive think tank, found 51% of likely voters had heard “a little” or “nothing” about it.
Democrats hope that their efforts to promote the expansion, along with the arrival of the payments themselves, help raise awareness. But many of them are cognizant that at least some of the benefits, like the $1,400 payments, will be a distant memory for many voters by the 2022 midterm elections.
Democrats were able to win a pair of runoff Senate races in Georgia in January in part because the candidates pledged to support additional stimulus checks. But party strategists say voters are much less likely to reward a party for something they did nearly two years earlier.
“We’ll see if it works across the board, with the midterms,” Pearcey said. “It worked in Georgia, but can it work somewhere else? I think we need to nuance some of the messaging.”
Other Democrats say if the enhanced benefits help Biden politically, it’ll only be at the margins of the electorate. At a time of hyper-polarization, though, that might be enough.
“It may help on the margins, but these days elections are won on the margins,” Carville said. “I don’t think it’s going to be, like, Biden’s approval is 51% and now it’s 55%, but it may go to 52. And that may be what you need.”
