Almost immediately after Senate Democrats reached a tentative agreement on a $3.5 trillion spending plan this summer, polls showed the plan to be a political winner. Monmouth University asked people whether they generally supported the plan to “expand access to healthcare and childcare, and provide paid leave and college tuition support.” Americans said 63 percent to 35 percent that they did.
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Today, with Democrats struggling to get the plan across the line, two of the three pillars described in that poll question, which drew such strong support, have either been eliminated or drastically scaled back.
The whole thing demonstrates both the tenuousness of Democrats’ majorities and the limits of popular support for such spending initiatives. It’s also a marked contrast to how Republicans were able to run Congress during the first year of the Trump administration.
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There were two big initiatives in Donald Trump’s first year: an Obamacare replacement and his tax-cut package. Support for the health-care bill was as low as the teens in some polls, yet it would have passed in the closely divided Senate were it not for Sen. John McCain’s thumbs-down. A few months later, Republicans passed and Trump signed a tax-cut package that polled as perhaps the most unpopular major bill in decades.
Fast forward to today, and Democrats can’t unite their party not just behind a broadly quite popular bill, but also behind some of the more popular proposals within it.
Among the cuts in the final package President Biden announced Thursday: two years of free community college tuition, allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, and paid family and medical leave.
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All have been major Democratic priorities for a reason: They are quite, if not overwhelmingly, popular. And these popular proposals are now out.
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A recent Axios-Ipsos poll showed that 75 percent of Americans favored providing free trade programs or community college. Support for free community college by itself was at 81 percent in an interest group poll last year. Even polls showing a tighter verdict showed this was much more popular than unpopular; an AP-NORC poll showed Americans favored free community college 54 percent to 31 percent.
(Biden’s plan still includes other forms of higher-education and workforce spending, but that funding is a fraction of what it once was, and free community college was his big initiative.)
The situation is similar with letting Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll recently showed 83 percent supported this idea. Even when it detailed the argument against it — that it would get the government too involved and could reduce innovation by pharmaceutical companies — support stayed at 82 percent. Support was again less resounding in an AP-NORC poll in March, which asked about “cuts in how much Medicare pays to pharmaceutical companies,” but it was still 41 percent in favor to 28 percent opposed.
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Paid family and medical leave is also an overwhelming consensus issue, according to most polls. An AARP poll showed 75 percent of Americans said they would be more likely to support a politician who voted for requiring paid leave. Americans supported expanding paid leave 51-30 in another poll. Polls in states like Virginia and Wisconsin have shown support for 12 weeks of paid leave at 70-75 percent. That 12 weeks was initially reduced to four weeks in Democrats’ plan, and now it’s been eliminated.
Polls like these can be a little misleading. When you ask people whether they like the government spending money on something, they’ll often be inclined to say yes. It’s difficult to ask these questions while considering the practicality of the proposals and the costs.
It’s also worth emphasizing that Trump had two votes to spare in the Senate and a much bigger House majority, whereas Biden can’t lose a single Senate Democrat in the 50-50 chamber or more than a handful of votes in the House. If Biden had 52 Senate votes like Trump did, and the votes of Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) weren’t necessary, we’d likely be in a much different situation.
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But the fact that getting this bill across the line seems to involve shelving some quite-popular policy ideas is certainly a commentary on the tightrope Democrats have had to walk here. These are things that would seem reasonably popular even in a pretty red state like West Virginia — even if the overall price tag of Biden’s proposal might not be. They’re also in many cases, as The Washington Post’s Marianna Sotomayor writes, things vulnerable Democrats would very much like to be able to run on in the 2022 midterms.
And yet, here we are.