The Battle Lines for the 2022 Elections Part II -- The Democratic Game Plan
In politics, as in sports, a good offense is often the best defense. In the 2022 election, the strategy of the Democratic Party will largely be built around its efforts to improve the lives of Americans and be responsive to their needs. That explains why the Biden administration rushed to secure the passage of its $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and is now hard at work trying to secure the passage of two infrastructure bills with a combined price tag of $4.5 trillion. The first is a $1.0 trillion bill addressing improvements in roads, bridges, waterways, and the nation’s electrical and broadband systems which has been negotiated by a gang of ten senators, five Democrats, and five Republicans. While there is hope that this bill will enjoy bipartisan support, there are still issues left to be resolved, leaving its passage in limbo. The second addresses a variety of subjects generally described as “human infrastructure” which include physical improvements to schools, daycare facilities and clean energy facilities, all of which will enable Americans to be more productive and help to combat climate change.
These bills, which House Speaker Pelosi has said must be passed in tandem, will go a long way to improving the nation’s economy and the lives of American wage earners. The larger bill will also impose heavy taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals which will help to reduce the problems of earnings and wealth inequality. The passage of these two bills will thus help Democratic candidates establish that they represent the party that gets things done. Conversely, if the Biden administration is not able to engineer their passage, the Democratic Party’s efforts to retain control of both the House and the Senate will be placed in jeopardy. This largely explains why Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has proclaimed that “Failure is not an option.”
The problem is that the Democrats only have only a single vote majority in the Senate and their Senate caucus encompasses a wide portion of the political spectrum. In addition, the Democrats have never developed the type of party discipline that their Republican counterparts enjoy. Because Democrats can’t count on receiving support from their Republican colleagues, Senator Schumer will have to get all of the members of his caucus to act together if these two bills are to have any chance of being enacted into law. In particular, he will have to find a way to win the support of Senators Manchin and Sinema, both of whom are very conservative (at least by Democratic standards) and represent red states.
To add to Senator Schumer’s burden, time is not on his side and Mitch McConnell is a master at slowing the legislative process. Schumer and his Democratic colleagues seem to understand that the Republicans may simply be engaged in what may be described as political asymmetrical warfare, the two guiding principles of which are (1) attack the enemy where he’s weakest and (2) fight and run away and live to fight another day. In this case, the Democrats’ Achilles Heel is that on top of only having a single vote majority in the Senate they have a President and a few Senators with an unrealistic desire to achieve bipartisan legislation even in the face of a history of Republican legislative obstructionism.
This is very similar to the situation the parties were in during President Obama’s first term when the Democrats were trying to enact the Affordable Care Act with a bare filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. They were confronted by a Republican charade of pretending to negotiate the terms of that legislation. Each time the parties neared an agreement, the Republican negotiators came up with a new problem that they insisted had to be overcome before they could support the bills. This went on for months until Senator Kennedy died, denying the Democrats their filibuster-proof majority. Under the circumstances the Democrats had no choice but to enact the Senate’s inferior version of the ACA which did not include the “public option” that had been among the provisions in the corresponding House bill.
There remains ample reason to be concerned that the Republicans may be employing that same tactic with respect to the so-called bipartisan infrastructure bill even though 17 Republicans have already voted to allow the bill to move to the Senate floor. There’s still ample room for Republicans to sabotage the legislation as the exact text of this bill is yet to be produced and the final bill must also be approved by at least 60 votes. Areas of potential disagreement abound in the details of how the various programs encompassed by the bill are to be administered and regulated. Should Republicans continue to draw out the negotiations, we could see a replay of what happened with the ACA. In this connection it’s worth noting that there are three octogenarian Democratic members of the Senate (Bernie Sanders who is 80, Patrick Leahy who is 81 and Diane Feinstein who is 88). Should any one of these senators die or become incapacitated before the bill is passed, the Biden administration’s legislative agenda would be stalled and possibly derailed altogether. While that may be a long-shot for Republicans, they have little to lose by trying. Remember, a similar gambit worked for them in filling the Supreme Court seat left by the death of Justice Scalia.
Another obstacle facing Democrats is that Senator Sinema has announced that she’s opposed to a reconciliation bill with a $3.5 trillion price tag and Senator Manchin appears to be of the same mind. This is undoubtedly a serious problem as the bipartisan bill will only be put to a vote in the House after the Senate also passes the larger human infrastructure bill. In the House, however, the Democrats only hold a slim majority and a $3.5 trillion bill was the smallest one the House’s Progressive caucus was willing to accept. Thus, if the Republicans don’t torpedo this legislation, the Democrats’ circular firing squad might do it for them.
Even if the Biden administration succeeds in enacting these two important bills, it will still face an additional danger. For the past 40 years the American public has received a steady stream of propaganda about the dangers of “Big Government” and how it leads to waste and corruption. The Biden administration should therefore anticipate that Republicans will be poised to seize upon any misstep in implementing the programs embodied in these two monumental pieces of legislation. You need only recall the Republicans’ reactions to the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer that had received a multi-million loan guarantee from the Obama administration. To dramatize the issue of governmental waste, House Republicans even proposed legislation entitled the “No More Solyndras Act.” In view of this danger, the Biden administration should immediately issue executive orders reminding the government’s departmental Inspector Generals to investigate all acts of waste and corruption and the Department of Justice to prosecute all criminal activity. Just to underscore his determination not to tolerate waste and corruption, the President should make a statement regarding these Executive Orders when he signs the two infrastructure bills into law.
Messaging. Even though the Obama administration successfully extricated the nation from the Great Recession, saved its auto industry and passed the Affordable Care Act providing health insurance for over 20 million previously uninsured Americans, the Democratic Party lost 63 House seats and 6 Senate seats in the 2010 mid-term election. This was largely because President Obama was not inclined to publicize his administration’s accomplishments and allowed Republicans to demonize the ACA. This lesson has not escaped the Biden administration which lost no time following the passage of the American Rescue Plan in posting billboards around the country advertising that “Help Is on the Way.” Strangely enough, Republicans have been trying to take credit for the benefits provided by that legislation even though not a single Republican Senator voted in favor of it. In short, in politics, it’s perceptions that matter. Thus, second only to enacting the two infrastructure bills will be the efforts of Democrats to publicize the benefits that this legislation will provide to the American people.
Also among the apparent achievements of the Biden administration has been its containment of the coronavirus. By quadrupling the rate of COVID vaccinations during its first three months of this year it helped avoid what could have been a huge increase in COVID infections caused by the Alpha variant. While a similar success against the much more dangerous Delta variant now seems in doubt, few are likely to blame the Biden administration which has been doing as much as possible to persuade reluctant Americans to get vaccinated. In fact, it has been regularly criticized by Fox News personalities and Republican politicians for using “Gestapo-like tactics” in this effort. Thus, if infection rates and deaths again spike it may be Republican politicians who will likely receive most of the blame. This possibility has prompted several Republican governors to issue messages encouraging their constituents to become vaccinated. Others Republican officials have chosen to double-down on their anti-vaccine messages and to impose prohibitions upon their local governments against issuing mandates that would further slow the spread of the virus.
In addition to touting their legislative achievements Democrats can be expected to constantly remind the public that their opponents are not only members of the “Party of Trump” (which they may refer to as the “Insurrectionist Party” or the “Anti-Democratic Party”), but also have been complicit in propagating Trump’s “Big Lie.” Such messages are far more likely than competing cries of “Socialism” to resonate with independent voters who will ultimately determine the outcome of the 2022 elections. What the Democrats should NOT do is address the culture war issues (discussed in Part I of this article) being advanced by Republicans. While doing so may seem both necessary and appropriate, it will not sway many independent voters and will only detract from the Democrats’ principal efforts to tout their legislative achievements and to tar their opponents with the stain of Trump.
Just as Republicans will be trying to discourage Democratic voters from participating in the 2022 elections, Republican voters may be even more vulnerable. Immediately following the 2020 election, President Trump embarked on a fund-raising campaign ostensibly to finance his efforts to overturn the election in the courts. In addition, he has continued those efforts seeking funds for the highly publicized “audit” of the vote in Maricopa County, Arizona as well as similar re-counts being explored in other battleground states. These fund-raising efforts were essentially an attempt to fleece Trump’s most ardent supporters as he has deployed little of the monies he raised for their stated purposes. Instead, he has used them to cover his own personal expenses and to support legislative candidates beholden to him. An ad campaign entitled “Trump’s Last Scam” could turn many of his follower against him as well as undermine the candidacy of those Republicans who have sought his endorsement and echoed his “Big Lie.”
Combatting Voter Suppression. Democrats are already heavily focused on countering the efforts of Republican-controlled states to suppress voting. At the very outset of the current legislative session, Democrats proposed two bills designed to improve the electoral process: (1) the John Lewis Voting Rights Act which will essentially restore the provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that have been largely eviscerated by the Supreme Court and (2) the For the People Act which contains a wide variety of provisions affecting how political campaigns are conducted and how elections can be financed and administered. While the House of Representatives has already passed these bills, Senate Democrats have been stymied by a Republican filibuster. The only hope for their passage is that Senators Manchin and Sinema will agree to approve an exception to the Senate’s filibuster rule that will permit them to be considered and passed. So far this has proven to be an insurmountable obstacle, but I remain hopeful that these two Senators may change their position to allow some version of these two bills to get to the Senate floor.
Even if these bills are ultimately enacted, there are two remaining problems. First, their constitutionality is likely to be challenged in the courts. This is no small concern as the current majority on the Supreme Court has already given a clear indication of its willingness to temper its decisions with its political bias. There is also the problem that the effectiveness of these acts will be stayed pending their journey through the judicial system with the result that they may not be in force until after the 2022 election.
The second problem is that these bills, as currently drawn, do not fully address all of the road blocks to voting and election re-engineering contained in the bills passed in Republican-controlled states. This seems particularly true of those features that empower state attorney generals and legislatures to determine the rules for elections and the counting of votes. The bottom line is that the two Democratic bills may turn out to have little impact on the 2022 election even if Senate Democrats somehow manage to enact them.
Court Actions. Not willing to rely on a legislative remedy, the Democratic Party and the Department of Justice have already begun judicial challenges to the newly adopted restrictions on voting enacted by the States of Georgia and Arizona. Since at least a dozen other Republican-controlled states have adopted similar laws restricting voting, the number of such court challenges is likely to multiply with the speed of the Delta variant. These legal proceedings, however, are not likely to prove particularly successful as the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Brnovich case has essentially limited the Voting Rights Act to restrictions expressly aimed at protected groups. Moreover, in view of that ruling, the chances of the lower courts’ staying the implementation of the new state laws pending the outcome of these cases seems equally remote.
Registering and Motivating Voters. This leaves registering and motivating their voters as the Democrats’ best chance of overcoming the obstacles they face in the 2022 elections. Although this will be a monumental task, it is not an impossible one considering (a) the large numbers of minority citizens who have never registered to vote and (b) the damage that will be done to the nation’s democratic heritage if Republicans are allowed to succeed. In the 2020 election, Democrats stood in long lines for hours facing the danger of becoming infected with the COVID virus in order to cast their votes. Just as impressive was the job done by Georgia Democrats to register 800,000 new voters to participate in their state’s elections which were not only critical in the presidential election but equally so in helping Democrats take back control of the Senate. Democrats may have to duplicate these feats in at least a handful of other states if they are to retain control of the House and the Senate in the 2022 election.
This will require the Democratic Party to change its priorities. Instead of spending its available funds on advertisements on television, radio and social media, it will need to concentrate its efforts on reaching out to voters on a one-on-one basis. This will require building large grassroots organizations as many of their potential voters will not be easy to reach through mass media. The very magnitude of this task has led Republicans to be optimistic about their chances in the 2022 election.