Dems crave new midterm message
White House signals Biden to emphasize pragmatism in goals
WASHINGTON — After offering her customary lavish praise of President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi got to the business at hand at a White House meeting last month on the midterm elections.
Democrats, Pelosi told Biden and a group of his aides, need a more consistent message. The speaker, who has long been fond of pithy, made-for-bumpersticker mantras, offered a suggestion she had heard from members: Democrats deliver.
What Pelosi did not fully detail was that some of her party’s most politically imperiled lawmakers were revolting against Biden’s preferred slogan, “Build back better,” believing it had come to be a toxic phrase that only reminded voters of the party’s failure to pass its sweeping social policy bill. And what the president and his advisers did not tell the speaker was that they had already surveyed “Democrats deliver” with voters — and the response to it was at the bottom of those for the potential slogans they tested, according to people familiar with the research.
No new campaign message was agreed to that day — or since. Biden is now absorbed by the war in Europe. Facing the biggest foreign policy crisis of his presidency, he is hardly consumed with the looming midterm elections, let alone trying to devise a catchy slogan.
Still, his advisers acknowledge that the crisis in Ukraine presents a chance for a reset, perhaps the president’s best opportunity to restore his standing before November.
Democrats are pleading with him to come up with
a sharper message. With inflation hitting another 40-year high and gas prices spiking because of a boycott on Russian oil, they remain angst-ridden about their prospects in the fall, in large part because the president’s approval ratings remain in the 40s, and lower in some pivotal states, even after a recent bump.
Democrats who once thought the key to their political success would be beating back the pandemic and restoring the economy are deflated to find that falling coronavirus positivity rates and rising employment numbers — and even foreign policy leadership — have barely moved public opinion.
“The economy is strong, and America is once again leading in freedom’s fight against tyranny,” said Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn. “But we all know that politics isn’t predicated on what’s real, rather on how people
feel.”
The president’s advisers point to the State of the Union address — which emphasized pragmatism over bold progressive goals — as a blueprint for his message in coming months and note that, according to their research, cutting drug costs was among the most popular proposals in the speech.
They also are considering a handful of executive orders that would please their base, on matters including the cancellation of some student loan debt, and are determined to enact legislation lowering the costs of prescription drugs, according to Democrats familiar with his plans.
Some Democrats say they have been cheered by signs that the White House and particularly chief of staff Ron Klain are now focused on inflation after initially arguing last year that the increase was transitory. During a
recent meeting with a group of House Democrats, Klain resisted a request to spend more federal dollars aiding restaurants, in part because it could be seen as adding to inflationary pressures, according to an official at the meeting.
Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat who is on the ballot this fall, said he had privately urged Biden to put reducing consumer costs at the center of his agenda.
“The president and the administration need to be attentive to the difficulties that real people are facing in the real world,” Polis said, recounting his message to the president on a phone call with other governors last month. “He’s a good listener. It’s just a matter of how it gets translated into policies, and we haven’t seen that yet from the White House.”
Nowhere is there more alarm in the party ranks than among House Democrats,
many of whom have long felt that Biden and his aides, with their decades of service in the Senate, were overly focused on the other chamber.
Most outspoken are incumbents facing difficult elections.
One of them, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., had been privately pushing party leaders to salvage some elements of the sweeping social welfare legislation that Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., appeared to have torpedoed at the end of last year.
Slotkin’s idea: Hold a summit-style gathering with House and Senate leaders and find consensus.
That did not happen. Pelosi did hold a meeting in her office last month with Slotkin and other Democrats from competitive districts. The gathering devolved into a session of griping about the White House and pleas with the speaker to tell Biden to stop using the phrase “Build back better.”
Slotkin was blunt about her exasperation.
“It would be helpful if the White House, the Senate and the House were all on the same page on those priorities,” she said.
Some of her colleagues are voting with their feet: 31 House Democrats have said they will not run for reelection, the highest number in the caucus since 1992.
Not all of the ire is aimed at Biden.
Lawmakers view Pelosi as a political force but a de facto lame duck who is all but certain to join the exodus if Republicans reclaim the majority. They complain that they have received little guidance from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has sought to mollify members by talking up better-than-expected results from the redistricting process.
The new maps, though, are little comfort to lawmakers like Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev.
Titus sought an ambassadorship but did not get one because Democrats could not risk losing her seat. Her district became more competitive through redistricting. She is facing a primary from the left despite her largely progressive record. And she is running in tourism-dependent Nevada, which still has some of the highest unemployment levels in the country.
Biden has set foot in the state only once as president, when he flew in for former Sen. Harry Reid’s funeral.
“They haven’t had time to come up with a plan because every day is some new crisis,” Titus said of the White House.
Maybe, she wondered, there is no return to normal in polarized times.
“You get expectations up that you can bring people together, you can negotiate, you got international experience, and then it’s a new world,” she said.