Playing Election Games With Stimulus
Predictably, Republicans held aid funds hostage ... until right before the election.
Publisher’s Riff
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You could see this coming. When House Democrats engineered and then passed a more than $3.4 trillion HEROES Act back in mid-May (as coronavirus cases and deaths surged), Senate Republicans, under Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) sat on it. The White House was non-committal and we headed into a full summer of no additional economic relief necessary for record millions of Americans caged in unemployment, no employer-based health coverage, eviction threats and rising food insecurity. Even as the additional federal unemployment benefits expired, still no movement on the HEROES Act, just fact-less think pieces from conservatives and rationalization from Republicans that too much emergency income discouraged people from looking for work - the type of work that, by the way, wasn’t really there since the economy was in a tailspin.
As we arrive in September and now 45 days till Election Day, the White House and Senate Republicans are now, predictably, eager to cut “stimulus” checks. Currently, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is not budging until she arrives at a $2.2 trillion package while the president tweets that a bipartisan House “Problem Solvers Caucus” proposal should contain “much higher numbers.”
But, we go back to May: “much higher numbers” were already passed, awaiting Senate passage and presidential approval. Yet, that was always the plan: wait till a convenient 11th hour, less than 60 days from a major election when the president and Republicans enablers feel the pressure of poll numbers favoring Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and, potentially, lost GOP seats in the Senate. It’s the same political calculus that’s gone into the president recently announcing the release of a $13 billion aid package for Hurricane Maria-devastated Puerto Rico - a package he’s sat on or didn’t think to push hard on for more than two years. As prospects for Florida, a needed electoral college state, get dimmer for the president, realization sets in that not only are Puerto Ricans actual American citizens, but there is also a massive cluster of them in places like Central Florida, in and around Orlando … and they vote.
The play is cynical and desperate, as well as seen-a-mile-away. Voters have the shortest attention spans. They don’t care about the mechanics behind major relief deals negotiated on Capitol Hill, and they’re inability to distinguish the various stakeholders in negotiation may prompt them to blame the wrong people (like Pelosi) for hold-ups in aid when it was the Senate Majority Leader and the president all along, such as what this CNBC/Change Research poll showed back in August …
Republicans watched that closely, apparently. Interestingly enough, the latest YouGov poll shows her favorables slightly lower than the president’s …
The key is to get a deal and have stimulus checks arrive at households with the president’s signature on it, another way to coax any wavering voters over to his side. Democrats, as usual, seem to stumble about for an effective messaging response. There are questions on whether or not it will work.