Build Back Center: Biden plows a revamped lane for the midterms

After taking office promising sweeping legislation and transformed government, Joe Biden is poised to fight the midterms the same way his two immediate Democratic predecessors did: trumpeting moderation and a center-left agenda.

Underscored by his budget last week, Biden’s emerging election-year blueprint is to emphasize police and defense spending, accentuate federal deficit reduction and propose higher taxes on the ultra-rich. It’s the early centerpiece of a platform that Biden’s defenders note he’s deployed consistently over his long career. But gone is his early-presidency emphasis on bold deficit spending and revamping the social safety net to achieve long-sought Democratic priorities. In its place is an increased focus on domestic and international security and stability.

Biden’s approach, which has been evident in recent speeches and described in further detail by advisers and close allies, is the clearest sign yet that the White House is trying to reestablish his broader competency ratings, which have taken sustained hits going back to the fall. And it follows months of calls from within the party for the White House to more aggressively chart a path for what promises to be a bruising fall election cycle.

House Democrats’ own internal polling shows the party is vulnerable to Republican attacks on crime and police funding as well as high inflation. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, meanwhile, has compelled the White House to reinforce their desire to achieve global security through strong national defense.

But the administration is also attempting to play the hand it has dealt itself. While the White House continues to pursue scaled back climate and social spending initiatives with just Democratic votes, one of Biden’s biggest policy victories — a sweeping infrastructure bill — was passed with Republican help. Another legislative package to boost competitiveness through innovation also is bipartisan.

“Political reality just didn't support the expansive view of progressive possibilities,” said Bill Galston, the former Clinton administration official now at the Brookings Institution. “If you put an ideological template on it, you have to say the correction is to the center.”

The recalibrated approach has not been received well by the entirety of the party. Progressive lawmakers and strategists have taken early aim at the proposed increases in defense spending. Operatives argue that the White House’s focus on deficit reduction is merely an effort to appease moderate Democratic senators to unlock their votes on Biden’s domestic agenda. They view the billionaires tax talk as a fig leaf to the left and stress that the midterm pitch cannot simply center on attempts to stifle GOP criticism for frontline members.

“I worry that if the focus is correcting the record on things like policing, and not hammering Republicans on everything from Clarence Thomas to the investigation into January 6, or passing popular things like a Billionaires Tax, that it could result in an enthusiasm drain that we desperately need heading into the midterm year,” said Sawyer Hackett, a Democratic strategist and senior adviser to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a liberal advocacy group.

“I understand that President Biden has a vested interest in bringing the parties together and showing that he's reaching across the aisle to get bipartisan support on any number of legislative priorities that he has,” he added. “But at the same time, when the Republican Party is increasingly anti-democracy … if we keep on letting these pitches go by, we’re missing a huge opportunity to brand Republicans as the party that they are.”

Biden and Democrats have yet to settle on how prominently they will feature Republican “extremism” and fears of turning over Congress to a party effectively still run by Donald Trump. And threats to American democracy, which House Democrats were keen to elevate earlier last year, don’t appear as prevalent in battleground district communications, with strategists currently of the belief that the topic isn’t as salient as voters’ pocketbook concerns.

There are risks, however, to moving to the middle. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton respectively tried to stress fiscal restraint and project tough-on-crime stances ahead of their first midterms, and it did little to prevent the electoral bleeding.

As Biden and the rest of the party grapple with finding a unified midterm message, they’re haunted by the inability to make prior ones stick. Beginning last April, and again in October, November and March, the White House publicly said it was embarking on ambitious sales jobs for various components of the president’s agenda, only to succumb to the strong gravitational pull of immediate news cycles and the challenges of historic inflation. Russia’s war has, likewise, taken the focus off of domestic politics at a time when Democrats are trying not only to push forward with spending plans but also get credit for the passage of the infrastructure bill.

Biden advisers and allied Democrats do view their progressive tax plan on the wealthiest Americans as a rare chance to corner Republicans. Inside the White House, advisers say they have sought out contrasts with Republicans over taxes, gleefully responding to the likes of anti-tax crusaders like Grover Norquist to argue that conservatives don’t believe billionaires pay their fair share.

And over the coming weeks, Democrats plan to try and draw Republicans into skirmishes where they are forced to defend the tax prerogatives of the wealthy at the expense of spending priorities for climate and social welfare. In recent weeks, the administration and party operatives have keyed in on a plan from Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) to impose income taxes on a large share of people who don’t pay them (predominantly the poor), and potentially sunset safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security.

For Democrats fearful of being blamed for the persistently gloomy outlook of Americans and an unpopular Congress they barely control, Scott’s plan offers a welcome policy contrast.

“We’ve had problems getting [Build Back Better] passed, but the fact is Scott reinforced what we’ve been saying all the time in terms of what their priorities are. So, we’re gonna let people know about that,” said John Anzalone, the longtime pollster for Biden.

“Biden has laid out what he believes is tax fairness and then Scott comes along and apparently lays out what he believes is tax fairness, which is taxing low- and middle-income people,” he added. ”It doesn’t take a pollster or brain surgeon to understand where real people will be on that.”

Republicans will be back home for April recess as Americans are filing their taxes and the Democratic National Committee plans to use that time to highlight the Scott plan, party officials said. While GOP leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have sought to distance themselves from the Scott proposal, the DNC is planning to run digital ads and hold local events in battleground states to ensure voters see what a potential tax bill would look like if Scott, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, had his way.

Chris Hartline, Scott’s spokesperson, reiterated the senator’s point that he released the proposal in his personal capacity because he believes voters want to see a policy plan from Republicans to run on. Like Scott, Hartline contended that the tax plank would encourage people who are able-bodied to seek work. He argued that sunsetting programs and requiring reauthorization by Congress is “common sense” policy, but that “Medicare and Social Security” — safety net programs Democrats have zeroed in on as vulnerable — “should and would be reauthorized.”

Democrats, Hartline said, are trying to move focus away from Biden’s record by both going after his boss and pivoting to the center.

“It’s clear from the president’s budget and what you have started to hear from Democrats on the ballot that their 2022 strategy is to campaign against their 2021 agenda,” he said. “It’s too late for that. Biden’s numbers have tanked everywhere and as we get closer to the election the incumbent Democrats that are polling slightly ahead of Biden will come into parity with him. Voters are hurting, they are feeling the pain and they are blaming Democrats.”

Looming over the entirety of the debate around Scott’s plan and Biden’s pivot is lingering inflation, which threatens to define the midterms in ways that are deeply unfavorable to the White House.

“Many political consultants and many White Houses have an exaggerated view of the extent to which messaging can counteract reality,” Galston said. “But if you look at what's dominating people’s minds right now, it’s inflation. Survey after survey confirms that. And inflation is very much a product of direct experience and especially repeated direct experience.”

Biden has rolled out a host of initiatives to fix supply chain issues, including in the transportation, agriculture, meat processing and semiconductor sectors. Last week, he announced a plan to release millions of barrels of oil from a strategic reserve to help bring down gas prices.

And although the White House has contended that their domestic agenda is fully paid for — by raising taxes on those making $400,000 or more and big corporations — opening the spigot on early spending for Covid relief allowed opponents to paint them as out of step with the concerns of price-shocked voters.

“Democrats can’t afford to get caught focusing on anything that isn’t front of voters’ minds. Right now that’s the rising cost of living and concerns about crime,” said Tyler Law, a Democratic consultant and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee alum who is working on midterm campaigns.

Law said Biden’s budget proposal “reflects that reality,” and called it “an important guide for Democrats running up and down the ballot.”