Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Biden’s policies are popular. What does that mean for Republicans?
The American public has given President Joe Biden favorable reviews since he took office last month, and the policies that he is hurrying to put in place appear broadly popular, according to polls.
And notably, as he signs a wave of executive actions and pushes a major $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill, Biden is facing muted opposition from Republicans so far — a reflection of the party’s weakened position as it juggles two increasingly divided factions.
“I think that Republicans have found Biden to be much more progressive than they thought he was going to be, but I think we’re too busy trying to kill each other to really focus on it,” said Sarah Chamberlain, president of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a group of centrist Republicans that includes more than 60 members of the House and Senate.
This past week, the House’s GOP caucus met to discuss the fate of two lawmakers representing opposite ends of the party’s identity: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the chamber’s No. 3 Republican. Greene is one of the chamber’s most fervent loyalists to former President Donald Trump, while Cheney is pushing to unlink the party from Trump’s brand of populism.
The result of the meeting Wednesday was a kind of stalemate, with the Republican leadership allowing Greene to keep her committee assignments despite a history of offensive and conspiracy-minded statements, and Cheney comfortably retaining her top position against a mutiny from Trump allies. On Thursday, the entire House voted to strip Greene of her committee positions over widespread GOP opposition.
This intraparty division gives Biden the “upper hand” as he pushes his legislative agenda forward, said Doug Schwartz, director of polling at Quinnipiac University, which released a nationwide poll Wednesday. “He’s advocating policies that have solid support in the public, so Republicans are in more of a defensive posture, as they’re opposing popular policies,” Schwartz said.
The public’s dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in the United States remains high: Roughly 7 in 10 people said they were unhappy with the way things were going, according to the Quinnipiac poll. But optimism is on the rise, and many are attaching their hopes to the new president. Asked about the coming four years under Biden, 61% of Americans described themselves as optimistic.
In a Monmouth University poll released last week, 42% of Americans said the country was headed in the right direction — considerably less than half, but still more than in any Monmouth poll going back to 2013.
The Quinnipiac survey found that more than two-thirds of Americans supported Biden’s coronavirus relief package, with wide majorities also backing certain key elements — including a permanent increase to a $15 minimum wage and a round of $1,400 stimulus checks to individuals. On the question of the stimulus payments, even 64% of Republicans supported them.
On a range of other Biden policies, the poll found widespread support: rejoining the Paris climate accord, opening a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who entered the country illegally and ending Trump’s ban on travel from some predominantly Muslim countries.
It bears mentioning that pollsters across the country undercounted support for Trump in November for the second consecutive time; until survey researchers complete a full post-mortem analysis of 2020 polling, it will be impossible to rule out the possibility that some polls may still be missing a share of his supporters.
Still, “in general, the smart Republicans are trying to pick their battles,” said Robert Cahaly, a Republican pollster in Georgia who has worked with candidates in both the party’s populist wing and its establishment.
Biden, for his part, will be looking to capitalize on Republicans’ compromised position. “In the end, America wanted a president that was more empathetic, but people do not want a president that looks weak,” Cahaly said.
But he and other Republican strategists cautioned that if Biden moved too hastily on legislation that was seen as left-leaning, he could face a backlash from some of the disaffected Republicans who supported him in November. Chamberlain said that if Biden’s environmental policies were perceived as harming the economy, he could find himself in a hole. “I think you let them pass laws left and right, and then you expose them for what they are,” Chamberlain said of her suggested strategy for Republicans.
Americans are not holding their breath for a new dawn of bipartisanship. Just 21% of respondents in the Monmouth poll said they were highly confident that Biden would be able to persuade lawmakers in Washington to work together more. Another 39% were somewhat confident.
While Biden receives favorable job reviews overall, 16% of Americans in both the Monmouth and Quinnipiac polls said they hadn’t made up their minds. Many of these people are onetime GOP voters who lost faith in the party under Trump and are waiting to see how Biden governs, said the longtime Republican pollster Whit Ayres.
“Basically, the approval numbers on Biden are the disapproval on Trump,” Ayres said. “But the disapproval numbers on Biden are lower than the approval number on Trump — which suggests there are some people who are hanging back to see what he does.”
And there is evidence that those who are hanging back are giving him the benefit of the doubt. In an Associated Press/ NORC poll released on Thursday, in which respondents were pushed to give an answer, his approval rose to 61%. Thirty-eight percent disapproved.
Opinions of the Republican Party, meanwhile, are much darker.
In the Quinnipiac poll, 64% of Americans said the GOP was moving in the wrong direction, including an overwhelming 70% of independents and 30% of Republican partisans, according to the Quinnipiac poll.
The party’s rank and file is now heavily tilted toward the Trump faithful. “The Trump base is so big as a share of the party because so many of my type of Republicans have left the party,” said Chamberlain, the head of the centrist group. “But they want to come back to the party.”
These staunch pro-Trump Republicans express deep frustration with their representation in Washington. Most GOP voters continue to think the vote in November was rigged, echoing Trump’s false claims, and many are irritated that legislators in Washington were not able to keep him in power.
Partly as a result, only 50%of Republicans said they were satisfied with GOP lawmakers in Washington, according to the Quinnipiac poll. That’s down from 83% among Republican voters nationwide in a Quinnipiac survey a year ago.
“Two people can both look at the same house and dislike it, but for different reasons,” Cahaly said. “There’s just an element of Republicans that want their old party back and hate the new populism. Then there are Republicans who like the idea of this being a working person’s party and wish the old Republicans would just go be Democrats. This fight is going to take place in primaries, in town halls. This party is in a little bit of a civil war.”