After reading a few days worth of carping about Joe Biden’s performance, I decided enough’s enough and responded at New York:
Joe Biden has been president of the United States for 43 days. He inherited power from a predecessor who was trying to overturn the 2020 election results via insurrection just two weeks before Inaugural Day, and whose appointees refused the kind of routine transition cooperation other administrations took for granted. His party has a four-vote margin of control in the House, and only controls the Senate via the vice presidential tie-breaking vote (along with a power-sharing arrangement with Republicans). Democratic control of the Senate was not assured until the wee hours of January 6 when the results of the Georgia runoff were clear. Biden took office in the midst of a COVID-19 winter surge, a national crisis over vaccine distribution, and flagging economic indicators.
Biden named all his major appointees well before taking office, and as recommended by every expert, pushed for early confirmation of his national security team, which he quickly secured. After some preliminary discussions with Republicans that demonstrated no real possibility of GOP support for anything like the emergency $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief and stimulus package he had promised, and noting the votes weren’t there in the Senate for significant filibuster reform, Biden took the only avenue open to him. He instructed his congressional allies to pursue the budget reconciliation vehicle to enact his COVID package, with the goal of enacting it by mid-March, when federal supplemental unemployment insurance would run out. Going the reconciliation route meant exposing the package to scrutiny by the Senate parliamentarian, It also virtually guaranteed total opposition from congressional Republicans, which in turn meant Senate Democratic unanimity would be essential.
The House passed the massive and complex reconciliation bill on February 27, right on schedule, with just two Democratic defections, around the same time as the Senate parliamentarian, to no one’s great surprise, deemed a $15 minimum wage provision (already opposed by two Senate Democrats) out of bounds for reconciliation. The Senate is moving ahead with a modified reconciliation bill, and the confirmation of Biden’s Cabinet is chugging ahead slowly but steadily. Like every recent president, he’s had to withdraw at least one nominee – in his case Neera Tanden for the Office of Management and Budget, though the administration’s pick for deputy OMB director is winning bipartisan praise and may be substituted smoothly for Tanden.
Add in his efforts to goose vaccine distribution — which has more than doubled since he took office — and any fair assessment of Biden’s first 43 days should be very positive. But the man is currently being beset by criticism from multiple directions. Republicans, of course, have united in denouncing Biden’s refusal to surrender his agenda in order to secure bipartisan “unity” as a sign that he’s indeed the radical socialist – or perhaps the stooge of radical socialists – that Donald Trump always said he was. Progressives are incensed by what happened on the minimum wage, though it was very predictable. And media critics are treating his confirmation record as a rolling disaster rather than a mild annoyance, given the context of a federal executive branch that was all but running itself for much of the last four years.
To be clear, I found fault with Biden’s presidential candidacy early and often. I didn’t vote for him in California’s 2020 primary. I worried a lot about Biden’s fetish for bipartisanship. I support a $15 minimum wage, and as a former Senate employee, have minimal respect for the upper chamber’s self-important traditions. But c’mon: what, specifically, is the alternative path he could have pursued the last 43 days? Republican criticism is not worthy of any serious attention: the GOP is playing the same old tapes it recorded in 2009 when Barack Obama (and his sidekick Biden) spent far too much time chasing Republican senators around Washington in search of compromises they never intended to make. While they are entitled to oppose Biden’s agenda, they are not entitled to kill it.
Progressive criticism of Biden feels formulaic. Years and years of investment in the rhetoric of the eternal “fight” and the belief that outrage shapes outcomes in politics and government have led to the habit of seeing anything other than total subscription to the left’s views as a sell-out. Yes, Kamala Harris could theoretically overrule the Senate parliamentarian on the minimum wage issue, but to what end? So long as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema oppose the $15 minimum wage, any Harris power play could easily be countered by a successful Republican amendment to strike the language in question, and perhaps other items as well. And if the idea is to play chicken with dissident Democrats over the fate of the entire reconciliation bill, is a $15 minimum wage really worth risking a $1.9 trillion package absolutely stuffed with subsidies for struggling low-income Americans? Are Fight for 15 hardliners perhaps conflating ends and means here?
Media carping about Biden’s legislative record so far is frankly just ridiculous. Presumably writing about the obscure and complicated details of reconciliation bills is hard and unexciting work that readers may find uninteresting, while treating Tanden’s travails as an existential crisis for the Biden administration provides drama, but isn’t at all true. The reality is that Biden’s Cabinet nominees are rolling through the Senate with strong confirmation votes (all but one received at least 64 votes), despite a steadily more partisan atmosphere for confirmations in recent presidencies. The COVID-19 bill is actually getting through Congress at a breakneck pace despite its unprecedented size and complexity. Trump’s first reconciliation bill (which was principally aimed at repealing Obamacare) didn’t pass the House until May 4, 2017, and never got through the Senate. Yes, Obama got a stimulus bill through Congress in February 2009, but it was less than half the size, much simpler, and more to the point, there were 59 Senate Democrats in office when it passed, which meant he didn’t even have to use reconciliation.
There’s really no exact precedent for Biden’s situation, particularly given the atmosphere of partisanship in Washington and the whole country right now, and the narrow window he and his party possess – in terms of political capital and time – to get important things done. He should not be judged on any one legislative provision or any one Cabinet nomination. So far the wins far outweigh the losses and omissions. Give the 46th president a break.
The interesting thing about the ABC News poll is that it shows union household figures for Bush and Kerry, and something else I’ve not seen before: “Contact by the campaign” numbers.
The ABC News poll discusses the degree of partisanship in Wisconsin itself, as opposed to general arguments based on the 39D-35R numbers usually discussed on this site. The ABC News memo (see the section titled “Party” on p. 6) discusses how partisanship on election day has varied widely in Wisconsin — from +6 for Dems in 2000 to only +1 for Dems in 1996. Average it out (I wish ABC News had provided partisan numbers for 1992 and 1988 also, but oh well…) and that’s only +3.5% for the Dems.
Not much of a cushion. Look at the numbers: It makes Bush’s lead in the highly Republican Milwaukee suburbs +25, and Bush’s lead in the Northeast (Green Bay) +22. It’s heartening to see Kerry polling extremely strongy in the Southwest (Racine over to Walworth county). But it’s shocking to see Kerry polling LOWER in Milwaukee proper than Kerry is polling in the Southwest.
The ABC News poll says Kerry is up four points over Bush among union households. I’m hearing numbers that say that in south and west Milwaukee, as much as a quarter of all union households remain “undecided.” In some heavily union precincts, as many as 30%-35% of union households remained “undecided”! In an election with a virulently anti-union president (as Bush is), it is astonishing that union households would be anywhere this ambivalent about John Kerry as an alternative to George W. Bush.
Worse: Union turnout for Al Gore in 2000 proved decisive in pushing Wisconsin into the Democratic category. The ABC News poll points out that Gore won union voters by 16 points. John Kerry’s numbers are nowhere near that.
What makes me worried about Kerry’s campaign in Wisconsin is the following: “Registered voters are six points more apt to have been contacted by his campaign than by John Kerry’s, 25 to 19 percent. And six in 10 of those reached by Bush’s campaign support him, while Kerry’s supported by fewer than half of the Wisconsin voters his campaign has personally contacted.”
I don’t know what “personally contacted” means. Telephone? Face-to-face? In on Labor Day, many voters were saying that they had already burned out on telephone contacts, and had received almost no face-to-face contact (canvassing). Indeed, only progressive groups (League of Conservation votes, unions, etc.) had done face-to-face canvassing.
In one way, this result can be taken to mean that the Bush campaign is contacting random votes and finding massive support for Bush, while the Kerry campaign does the same and finds little support.
But, another interpretation could be that the Bush campaign is contacting its base. Meanwhile, the Kerry campaign is contacting its base but also attacking the Bush people. We’re given no analysis of whether the Kerry contacts are changing minds.
But the idea that the Bush campaign is more active in Wisconsin than Kerry’s makes me very nervous. (Will the Dems blame former Kerry campaign co-chair Matt Flynn for abandoning the Kerry ship for a Quixotic run at Congress, if Kerry loses?)
Smooth Jazz-
You do not give the source for that long article you posted. I gather it’s from someone on the right given (a) pointing out Democratic-related firms, but not Republican-related firms; and (b) various snarky comments about Democrats.
Makes me wonder about the validity of the analysis overall.
I will note one thing that stood out to me. There’s a 15% response rate for the NBC survey. I’d guess that’s fairly typical. If so, it really makes me wonder about these surveys. Some of the 85% non-response is doubtless because of random numbers that are not in fact residences. But with such a high non-response rate, small variations in people choosing not to respond would seem able to produce large variations in poll results.
I read some negative comment on RDD in an academic piece sometime in the last week or two, which also makes me wonder whether that is, in fact, a sufficient methodology for getting a random sample. It’s 9 pm here on a Friday night, so I don’t think I’m going to go searching right now. Perhaps over the weekend.
And who’s cherry-picking? I’d note that I used all the polls I could find about Wisconsin. It’s the sort of argumentation that you engage in that continually reminds me why I can’t vote Republican. And I came pretty close in ’00, when I thought about going for McCain, till Bush decided to trash him.
Loooking over the post above from Smooth Jazz:
Interesting that so many polls conducted with such similar methodologies should be coming up with such wildy different results. Although, I do note that a lot of the apparent discrepencies between polls that we have seen lately tend to be more in the “LV” subsamples than the unadulterated RV segments and the article really doesn’t get into LV screens to any meaningful extent.
So I would say this article tends to back up Mr. Tiexera’s assertion that we should give more credence to the RV data wherever available and poke the LV data with a long stick before going anywhere near it.
ABC and Gallup put Bush ahead in Wisconsin and West Virginia? That means it’s a dead heat.
Part of the problem in Wisconsin results from the poor governance by Democrats as Mayor of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County Executive, alienating goo-goos and giving suburban Republicans stories to frighten their children. We’re not seeing the movement toward Democrats in the Milwaukee suburbs that shows up very clearly in the Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City suburbs over the past 8 years.
I’ve lived in Madison for 27 years, and I would not be surprised to see Bush win here if the national election is very close. But if Kerry winds up winning nationally by 3 or 4 points, Wisconsin will very likely remain Democratic.
The last 2 times Zogby polled Wisconsin (Sep 17th and Sep 20th), they found Kerry ahead by 2.
Well Rick, if you assume that Gallup and ABC oversample Republicans in their state polls (as they did in their national polls) then these Bush leads are probably not as large as they seem, or even extant at all.
Penn and Wisconsin are two battleground states with among the worst-maintained lists of registered voters, with many erroneously purged, according to a recent study by Scripps Howard News Service.
Some other items pulled as well from Joshua Kurlantzick’s eye-popping piece, “2000, The Sequel”, in the current (Oct) issue of The American Prospect, on how the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed by Congress in 2002, may make things even worse than 2000:
(Link is: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=8544)
*Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) introduced an amendment to HAVA in May ’03 that would require touchscreen machines to have a paper record. Bob Ney, Chair of the House Administration Committee, has not allowed Holt’s legislation out of committee. House and Senate Republicans have offered similar “smokescreen” legislation–that would take effect by the 2006 election.
*There has been major WH footdragging on getting up and running the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), authorized under HAVA to disburse money to states to upgrade voting systems, issue guidelines, and hold hearings to help make voting as fair as possible. EAC was supposed to be set up within 120 days of HAVA’s passage but did not even have office space until April of this year. Congress gave the EAC $2 million out of a proposed $10 million budget for ’04 and Bush asked for less than half of the $1 billion proposed in HAVA for overall election-reform efforts.
*Under HAVA all first-time voters have to have valid ID. NY PIRG says it is illegal for local election boards to tell poll workers not to accept a student ID as proof. U Wisc and Penn State Students for Kerry, do you copy? One study showed that in NY election officials in only 18 of 45 counties even understood voter-ID requirements.
*Some states simply do not count “provisional ballots”, intended to give those wrongly denied the opportunity to cast a vote on Election Day via the usual process the chance to have their votes tallied if their wrongful exclusion is established. HAVA offers no national guidelines for counting these provisional votes. This raises just a few questions for state and local election officials and newspaper editorial boards, among others.
*After 2000, Jeb Bush rejected the recommendation of a bipartisan task force that he make state and county election supervisors nonpartisan. Shortly afterward, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature made all top election officials appointees of the governor.
I have not seen these specific items, several strongly suggesting the GOP does not want the sorts of problems that turned up in 2000 and since to be fixed, reported by any of the media bigfoots. Another shocker.
A bit OT, but I thought I’d post a version of a comment I made on the Mystery Pollster site, regarding his argument that Party ID was quite unstable, and therefore should not be used as a weighting factor. In fact, as I point out, the results he quotes from studies deal ONLY with increases in the number of INDEPENDENTS:
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One significant weakness in your [i.e., the Mystery Pollster’s] logic, as you present it, is that you don’t get at the nerve of Ruy’s argument, which assumes that the DIFFERENCE between party identification for Republicans and that for Democrats has been stable.
The particular research you’ve quoted demonstrates something VERY different, namely that the number of INDEPENDENTS has varied a great deal. This is completely consistent with the idea that the difference between Republican PID and Democratic PID are stable. And, indeed, it stands to reason that a convention might polarize independents, drive them equally in both directions into the hands of the ideologically nearest party.
Indeed, one of the very studies you quote says that the largest amount of variation in Party ID comes from movement in and out of independence. It seems very plausible to believe that politically potent events or circumstances might in general simply polarize independents, leaving the difference essentially intact.
If you have any evidence that the DIFFERENCE between Rep and Dem Party ID varies as wildly as we’ve seen across these polls, that would be very good.
Otherwise, you’ve proved exactly zero.
Another note on Wisconsin. In the ABC poll, the breakdown was 35% R, 29% D, 36% I/Other. In the Moore (GOP) poll, it was 39% R, 39% D, 22% I/Other. In 2000 it was 32% R, 37% D, 31% I/Other.
So…it’s back to that issue we keep debating. Has there really been a sizeable shift to the Republicans in registration, or is something else going on. I lean toward the latter, but I don’t think we’ll know till election day.
Rick-
I don’t know what to make of Wisconsin. As with national polls, I’d point out variability. As best I can tell, there are 10 polls of Wisconsin released 9/12 or later:
ABC, Bush +6
Moore (GOP), Bush +3
Badger, Bush +14
TNS, Bush +10
Zogby, Kerry +2
Mason-Dixon, Bush +2
ARG, tied
Strategic vision (GOP), Bush +6
Gallup, Bush +8
Rasmussen, Bush +2
The median for those is Bush up by 4.5%. That’s probably not a terribly bad guess. That’s quite a recoverable lead, and then there’s turnout.
Just keep saying the mantra…it’s a close race. Let’s work hard to get Kerry the victory. And say it if the polls show us ahead, tied, or behind.
What do we make of Wisconsin? This looks like a point of concern.