Why Democrats stopped stressing over big spending

It took a recession, a pandemic, massive demographic change and an ideological re-sorting of the two parties, but the Democratic Party has finally exorcised the ghosts of Walter Mondale’s landslide 1984 defeat.

The proof? Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar spending plans.

His expansive agenda, in part precipitated by the coronavirus pandemic, represents the toppling of decades of Democratic orthodoxy on the economy and the role of government — beliefs and practices rooted in fear of the tax-and-spend label that emerged from Mondale’s ill-fated promise to raise taxes.

It’s a recognition that Democrats want more government intervention than ever — and a bet that the post-Trump, working-class-oriented Republican Party is too fractured to stop it. The aftershocks of Biden’s approach are likely to ripple through state and national politics for years to come.

“It’s an accumulation of changes both in the Democratic and Republican parties that has cut the intellectual and public opinion legs off of the idea that the problem is big government,” said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and an expert in election demographics. “I think it’s fair to say that the wind is blowing in another direction.”

“Generational turnover in the American electorate,” he said, “is definitely pushing the needle. These are not people who grew up in the Reagan era who would have absorbed that kind of view about deficits and spending.”

By altering the Democratic Party’s calculation about big government, Biden is acknowledging demographic and ideological sea changes in the American electorate. The youngest generation of voters, Gen Z, weren’t even alive when Ronald Reagan trounced Mondale. Nor were all but the oldest of millennials. Meanwhile, the composition of the Democratic electorate has grown increasingly liberal over the past 20 years, while Republicans acclimated to the GOP’s own brand of free spending during the Trump era.

Today, a majority of Americans — 55 percent — say government should do more to solve problems and help people, according to an NBC News poll last month. That’s a reversal from the 1990s, when support for more government intervention registered in the 30s and low 40s.

And the demand for more government isn’t just theoretical. Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package drew strong support from Americans, polling above 60 percent in several polls and, according to some measures, hitting or exceeding 70 percent. Biden’s big-ticket infrastructure proposals are also polling at high levels.

For Democratic politicians, the imperative to spend is greater than it has been in decades. In the early 2000s — roughly halfway between Mondale’s defeat and today — Democrats still had reason to be wary. At the time, only about half of Democrats said government should be doing more to solve the country’s problems, according to Gallup.

But by 2010, the share of Democrats wanting government to do more was ranging in the 60s, and it continued to climb steadily after that. Today, 83 percent of Democrats want the government to do more to solve the country’s problems.

Part of the shifting sentiment is a reaction to the coronavirus, which focused the public’s attention on the federal government’s ability to respond to a major health and economic crisis. Thanks to the pandemic, people no longer debate whether the federal government needs a Health and Human Services secretary, said Amanda Renteria, who was national political director of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign.

“When you have a major pandemic that you’re going through, you ask anyone on the street, ‘Do you need a government?’ They say, ‘Yes, I need it to work. I need my vaccine,” she said.

But even before the pandemic, demographic changes within the party were solidifying Democratic voters — if not yet the party’s political class — around the promise of more robust government.

Women, the pulse of the party, have long been more likely to support government intervention than men, as have people of color. Add to that millennials and Generation Z voters — an increasingly prominent part of the Democratic coalition — who are far more likely than older adults to say government should be doing more. If the Democratic Party can maintain its hold on those voters, its imperative for big government policy could resonate for generations, far outlasting Biden.

“I think it’s going to stay for sure,” said Celinda Lake, a prominent Democratic pollster who advised Biden’s 2020 campaign. “I think it could be game-changing, honestly.”

The Democratic Party, she said, is “a coalition that is increasingly solidified around perceiving a role for government, perceiving a role for safety nets.”

That’s a far cry from 1984, when Lake, then an intern on Mondale’s polling team, recalled the candidate’s political director, Paul Tully, saying during one debate that “if Mondale says he’s going to raise taxes one more time, I’m going to go out on the stage and strangle him myself.”

Mondale was venerated for his frankness about taxes when he died last month. But the lessons from his loss were internalized by Democratic politicians for decades. It wasn’t just President Bill Clinton declaring the “era of big government is over.” Four years later, Vice President Al Gore promised to make government “smaller and smarter than ever before.” Even President Barack Obama, chastened by the midterm shellacking in 2010, recognized the political salience of reduced spending.

Even today, voters are sensitive to tax increases. But they are more receptive to them when Democrats frame the question as a matter of “making sure that the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share,” Lake said. Polls show broad support for increasing taxes on the rich, where wealth has increasingly accumulated since the decade Mondale lost. Between 1989 and 2016, the wealth gap in the country more than doubled — and that was before a pandemic that laid bare vast disparities in the workforce and ways in which Americans access health care and education.

Biden was hardly the first politician to recognize the shift in public sentiment. Progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rose to prominence by tapping into Americans’ concerns about income-inequality disparities in access to services like health care and college education.

Yet enthusiasm for big government isn’t coming just from the far left. Former California Gov. Jerry Brown — who called for an “era of limits” in the first of his three failed presidential campaigns, in 1976 — has been arguing for years that the pressure of automation and outsourcing on the American workforce, among other factors, would ultimately require government to assume a larger role in people’s lives.

“Right now, even Democrats make fun of government. No, we’d better wake up and find a creative way that we can act through our collective institutions called government,” Brown told David Axelrod on his podcast in 2017, long before the pandemic struck. “And that is far from where the politics is today.”

Four years later, the politics are far more conducive to pro-government positions, Brown said in an interview.

“So here we are,” he said. “We’ve had the pandemic, which is highly disruptive, along with the recession and the destruction of many businesses, which provides quite a hardship. And then you had Trump and his very unusual, I might even say bizarre, behavior. And all of that has created a level of insecurity that makes decisive government action more plausible than it was a few years ago, and more acceptable.”

The shift in public opinion about the role of government has been so pronounced that, in some ways, Biden and other Democratic politicians are only catching up to where the party’s voters already were. The desire for government to do more was polling better among Democrats even before Biden was elected.

“The average Democrat has always been receptive to a more robust [government] response,” said Gilda Cobb-Hunter, South Carolina lawmaker influential in the Democratic Party. It was only elected Democrats, she said, “who have been too afraid” to promote a more expansive role of government.

Of Mondale’s example, she said, “That’s been almost two generations ago. … It’s time for us to … not be afraid of being called tax-and-spend, liberal Democrats. We need to say to people, ‘This is what the taxing and spending has gotten you.’”

That should be an easier case for Democrats to make now than ever before — partly because Democrats have an appetite for spending, but also because the GOP is in a weaker position to make the argument.

Just as Democrats’ outlook on government has evolved since the Reagan era, the views of traditionally Republican voters have changed, too. White college-educated voters have become more liberal in recent decades. Donald Trump’s base of white non-college-educated voters thrilled to the former president’s culture wars — and expressed less concern about the deficit that soared during his tenure. In the current political ecosystem, the traditional Main Street, austerity-minded Republican is a vanishing breed.

In a poll last year, just 49 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning adults said the national debt was “a very big problem.” And fully four in 10 Republicans say trickle-down economics, the conservative organizing principle of the Reagan era, “has never worked in America,” according to a Reuters/Ipsos measure last month.

Without a large constituency underpinning the GOP’s traditional anti-tax broadsides, the criticism Biden took from some Republican lawmakers after his address to Congress — “even more taxing, even more spending,” Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said — resembled an exercise in nostalgia more than a potent political attack.

“What’s the constituency now for deficit phobia?” said Teixeira, the political demographer. “It’s just not very large.”

The national debt isn’t a dead issue. But the economy, health care, racial inequality and crime, among other issues, consistently rank above it on voters’ list of priorities. And you don’t need to look at polls to see that spending isn’t animating the Republican base.

By this time in Obama’s presidency, the tea party was already mobilizing on the right. Today, said Sal Russo, a former Reagan aide and Tea Party Express co-founder, “we’ve gotten into this situation, which unfortunately has gotten to be a bipartisan thing, which is to skip any concerns about the deficit.”

For Democrats, that doesn’t add up to a free pass on spending. They will still take hits from Republican lawmakers. But they are not nearly as vulnerable as they were when voters worried more about the size of government and fiscal discipline.

“People’s expectations have changed,” said Mathew Littman, a Democratic strategist and former Biden speechwriter. “Because while Donald Trump would say that he’s a conservative Republican, he was a big spender. So it makes it very difficult to say that the Democratic Party when they’re in power shouldn’t spend, shouldn’t try to enact the initiatives that they think are important.”

If anything, the political imperative for Democrats may be to spend even more. Responding to the coronavirus required Biden to propose at least some government aid. But given the appetite within the Democratic Party’s base for spending, said Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster who worked on the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean, “if you’re in it for two trillion, why not make it six?”

“If you’re going to be bold, be really bold,” he said, and politically speaking, “get all the value out of it that you can.”