There is no doubt that the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill is popular among Americans. Among the bill’s many provisions include a provision that sends most Americans $1,400 in stimulus money, extends unemployment benefits, and provides many poverty-reducing measures, including a tax credit that could cut child poverty in half. However, the Republican Party has been completely united on opposing the bill, a decision which may come back to bite the GOP in the foot come the 2022 midterms.
We have already looked at the bill’s numerous provisions in previous posts and there is a great Wikipedia page giving an in-depth summary of the bill as well, so we won’t go over that again here.
Poll after poll has shown that this COVID-19 relief bill, which the Democrats have named the “American Rescue Plan,” has substantial bipartisan support even during a time where political polarization is at its highest level. Data from the Pew Research Center shows that 94 percent of all Democratic voters and 41 percent of Republican voters, including 63 percent of lower-income Republican voters, support the bill.
And low-income voters typically believed the bill to be spending “too little” compared to upper-income voters. Of voters from both parties, 37 percent of low-income voters believed the bill to spend too little, compared to just 13 percent of upper-income voters who thought the same. Obviously, Republican voters were far more likely to believe the bill spent too much—81 percent of upper-income Republicans thought the bill spent too much, while just 17 percent of upper-income Democrats thought the same.
Other polls, including one from Data for Progress, also found substantial support for the bill. 69 percent of voters either “strongly support” or “somewhat support” the legislation, with just 24 percent expressing any sort of opposition.
In addition, $1,400 checks have remained popular with Americans, with 78 percent of those interviewed favoring it, compared to just 16 percent opposing it. All of the major provisions of the bill are also overwhelmingly popular.
As we all know, the bill passed the Senate with all Democrats and no Republicans supporting the bill, while it passed the House with all but one Democrat supporting the bill and with zero Republican support. That means that a whopping zero Republican members of Congress have supported the bill, despite data indicating a substantial number of Republican-leaning voters supporting the bill.
(In contrast, a number of local Republicans, such as West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice and the mayors of Miami; Fresno, Calif.; Oklahoma City; and Fort Worth, Texas, have all shown support for the bill. It seems the opposition from Republican politicians may only be limited to Washington.)
Rarely have such partisan bills garnered so much support from voters in the opposing party. For example, former President Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which gave substantial tax cuts to households in the top five percent of income groups in the U.S., and former President Obama’s Affordable Care Act of 2010, were strongly opposed to by the opposing party.
The opposition to the ACA among Republicans was likely because the party was able to portray it as a hugely liberal, big-government spending bill, but the reality is that many conservatives are simply opposed to some of the ACA’s provisions.
But this COVID-19 relief bill is different. This bill is reminiscent of the New Deal of the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, which drastically increased government spending to pull a struggling American economy out of recession. In addition, many of the provisions of this bill that Republicans now oppose, such as handing out money to state and local governments, were all provisions that the Republican-controlled Senate passed in the CARES Act in March 2020 during Trump’s presidency, so it is very difficult for the Republicans to criticize certain parts of the bill, as it would come off as massively hypocritical.
With the GOP unable to coalesce around a single issue to oppose in this relief bill (unlike the individual mandate which they opposed in the ACA and was quite successful in uniting Republicans against), there was not a strong argument on the Republican side as to why the bill should be opposed. Republicans have lately been more concerned with culture wars surrounding the gender of Mr. Potato Head and the fact that Dr. Seuss’s estate chose to stop printing several books containing racist imagery and descriptions.
So far, the only plausible reason as to why the GOP has been strongly opposed to Biden’s policies is to try and hobble his administration and make him look bad, or try and hopefully turn public opinion against the bill and Biden’s administration.
However, convincing people, especially those low-income voters, that stimulus checks are a bad thing is an extremely difficult thing to do. I mean, if you were receiving free money from the government, would you consider it a bad thing? When people are getting money from the governments into their bank accounts to pay their rent backlogs or get that needed dentist appointment, they will see in the news that not a single Republican voted to give them this much-needed money, and they will certainly take that into account come the 2022 midterm elections.
Although midterm elections typically tend to see the party currently occupying the White House fare badly (the Republicans endured substantial losses in 2006 and 2018, while Democrats lost badly in 2010 and 2014), we could really see an exception come 2022. With vaccinations occurring at rapid paces under the Biden administration, we really could see the pandemic being brought under control within a year, which is going to dramatically help the Democrats. In addition, if the economy recovers, it can go a very long way into helping the Democrats.
Therefore, at this point, there just doesn’t seem to be any real reason as to why the GOP has been so stringently opposed to the bill. It was going to pass anyhow, with or without their support, so it might have been smart to at least tack onto the bill. For instance in the previous two major COVID-19 relief bills, which were both signed into law under Trump, we saw large bipartisan majorities approve of the bills, since the Democrats, who were in the minority in the Senate, realized that helping pass COVID-19 relief, which is popular with constituents, is definitely more helpful to their election chances than trying to pull down an administration by hobbling much-needed relief.
If Biden’s approval rating holds up, the economy recovers, and COVID-19 goes away, the Republicans might pay the price for opposing such a popular bill in a year and a half’s time.