“We’ve Chosen the Harder Lane”: Biden’s Big Make-or-Break Bills Could Change Everything in 2022

The fighting has consequences more serious than Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s hurt feelings. Whether social security checks arrive on time; whether a decrepit interstate highway bridge spanning the Ohio River is finally replaced; whether struggling parents can afford child care—all those life-changing events are chips in the messy federal-budget game being played by Senator Joe Manchin, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, and their colleagues. The ongoing Washington sausage-making spectacle is crucial to millions of day-to-day civilian lives.

Yet the next several weeks also come with enormous political stakes, and not simply for President Joe Biden. Democrats were already facing steep odds for maintaining their slim majorities in the Senate and the House. Now the wrangling over the debt ceiling and multi-trillion-dollar bills to pay for hard and soft infrastructure upgrades threaten to crater Democratic midterm chances long before anyone votes in November 2022. 

Mitch McConnell knows this. That’s why the Republican Senate leader is dragging his feet on raising the debt ceiling, wagering that Biden will get the blame if the economy tanks. The tactic also helps McConnell claim the Democrats can’t govern and that the president’s party is hostage to crazy left-wing spendthrifts. Which is deeply cynical, of course: McConnell’s party is the one that has repeatedly exploded the federal deficit, and it was the Republicans who provoked the most recent government shutdown. But cynicism is McConnell’s brand.

The Republican obstructionism also forces Biden to confront a fundamental Democratic split between moderates, who want to pass the infrastructure plan right now, and progressives who are holding back their support in hopes of passing a $3.5 trillion spending package that ranges from expanding Medicare services to boosting renewal energy sources. Manchin and Sinema are demanding that “reconciliation” dollars be cut—Manchin wanting the price to be at least 50% less—and last week Biden seemed likely to side with the half-a-loaf moderates and push for the infrastructure plan to be approved. This would have been expedient—and inflammatory to a key segment of voters who delivered Biden to the White House last year. “Infrastructure is important, and it is popular in poll after poll,” says Cornell Belcher, a Democratic strategist who was part of Barack Obama’s two winning runs for president. “Hooray infrastructure—but can you stop the police from beating my ass and the Republicans from disenfranchising us? You’re telling progressives, particularly people of color, that you aren’t going to get these things done even after they’ve given you the House and the Senate and the presidency? Yeah, that might be a problem in the midterms.”

Biden and his political team, to their credit, seemed to recognize this late last week. The president went to Capitol Hill, met with Jayapal and others, and effectively sided with liberal Democrats. At least for the moment: The longer negotiations drag, the more likely it becomes that Biden tells progressives he’s done everything possible and the lefties need to cave in order to salvage the infrastructure agenda and preserve any shot at heading off a midterm deluge. 

No one has a keener interest in the outcome than Sean Patrick Maloney. The New York congressman isn’t simply chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—Maloney is one of the 47 House Dems targeted for defeat next year by Republicans. In a late-July meeting with battleground-district incumbents, Maloney delivered a stern warning: If the election were held today, Democrats would lose their House majority. One major problem, according to DCCC polling, is that Biden’s party isn’t getting sufficient credit for reviving the post-pandemic economy. Which is one reason passing the infrastructure and social welfare bills has taken on such political urgency. “Both are critically important for the country, and we can do both,” Maloney says. “We’re trying to build, we’re trying to fix. The other side is simply trying to divide. We’ve chosen the harder lane, and it is never certain whether doing the hard things will carry short-term political benefit or cost. But it’s called leadership, and it’s what the country needs. There’s only one group of responsible adults right now in American politics, and it sure as hell isn’t in the Republican Party. You might have noticed they don’t have any ideas for the future. What they’ve got is a bunch of racism and a bunch of anger and a bunch of cynical tactics to try to win power. We’re betting that we can impact people soon enough that the politics will come around.” 

If Biden somehow pulls off a budget compromise that satisfies, even grudgingly, both moderates and progressives, the political path could improve for next year. And then the Democrats might well find a midterm campaign model in California. The state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, is hardly beloved. But in September he beat back a recall effort—decisively. Newsom’s campaign attracted independent as well as Democratic voters by playing offense on COVID vaccines. Equally, if not more, important was that Newsom turned the recall into a stark question of us versus them. “Negative partisanship,” is how Sean Clegg, one of the governor’s top advisers, defines the approach. “We made this into a red-blue contest. We made it about Larry Elder in particular, and about Trumpism. Where Trump polls in a congressional district, or statewide in a U.S. Senate race, tells you how partisan you can get. But here’s the important thing that I think is the transferrable lesson for the midterms: The swing voter is gone. American politics has become a game of mobilizing your army. How do you motivate turnout? You need to talk to the base about the opposition. They hate the other guys a lot more than they love their team.”