Liz: deliver ... or dems will lose
Pols say party must do more ahead of midterm elections
If you take U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s word for it, the Democratic Party could be in for serious losses in November.
“I think we’re going to be in real trouble. If we don’t get up and deliver, then I believe that Democrats are going to lose,” Warren told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday.
Warren said time is short to enact some of the campaign promises that handed the party the presidency and both chambers of Congress in 2020 and that voters will turn them out in 2022 if they don’t act.
“Despite pandemic relief, infrastructure investments and the historic Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, we promised more — and voters remember those promises,” she wrote last Monday.
U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, said that he’s worried about his party too.
“We do have some headwinds, as you know, and again we gotta make sure that we’re all working together. Some of the actions by the administration is not helping Democrats,” the Texan said.
Among those campaign promises was the plan floated by President Biden during his White House run to cancel some student debt, potentially up to $50,000 but at least as much as $10,000.
Biden has since paused payments on student debt several times and forgiven the debt of some select borrowers, but Warren says those actions aren’t enough.
“We’ve got millions of people across this country who say they’re not ready for their student loan payments to resume, that they simply can’t manage those loan burdens,” she told CBS’s Margaret Brennan.
“Look, we know that the president has the authority to cancel student loan debt and the best way we know that is because President Obama did it, President Trump did it, and President Biden has now done it repeatedly. The power is clearly there,” she said.
That message was echoed by U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley on WCVB, when she told the host of the “On The Record” that the president should cancel $50,000 in student debt for all borrowers now.
“He can do this unilaterally, it doesn’t require a vote from congress, he has the authority,” she said.
“It’s an economic justice issue, a racial justice issue, and finally I think it’s an effective strategy for jumpstarting the economy,” she said.
But David Hopkins, a political science professor at Boston College, said that though it’s an issue important to the party, he doesn’t think canceling student debt is enough to save the Democrats.
“The proportion of voters directly affected by unpaid student loans is not very large, and younger college graduates are already a Democratic-leaning constituency whether their loans are forgiven or not. The perceived state of the economy is likely to be a much more important factor in determining the outcome in November,” he said.
On the Republican side, US. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee said, “We feel very confident,” about the GOP’s prospects of taking the House.
“All we need is five,” he said on Fox News Sunday. “I predict we’re going to get probably at least 40 seats because this president has been so unpopular when it comes to inflation, gas prices, in my reign, the foreign policy mistakes that he’s made, and quite frankly, they see him as a weak president.”
According to UC Santa Barbara’s The American Presidency Project, the party of the president tends to lose seats in the House during the midterm elections. Former President Barack Obama lost 63 seats, the most since FDR lost 81 in 1938. Former President Donald Trump lost 40.
Since FDR, only former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton gained House seats during the midterm elections and then only 8 and 5 seats respectively.