With the Senate poised to pass a massive pandemic relief bill, the House of Representatives passing several other bills in the opening weeks of the session, and President Joe Biden going full steam ahead on various executive actions, a lot of commentary has focused this week on the impact of passing popular bills on the next election.
I think that’s the wrong way to think about things.
That’s because there isn’t likely to be a significant direct relationship between the popularity of presidential policy actions and election results. That would even be true if the election was around the corner, which it is not — neither the November 2022 midterms nor, certainly, the 2024 general election. There’s too much intervening time and too many other competing effects.
It’s not impossible for particular policy initiatives to move voters; for example, there’s at least some evidence that the unpopularity of Obamacare hurt Democrats in 2010, although I continue to be skeptical of that finding. (The problem? It’s not easy to compare the apparent effects of the Affordable Care Act with what would have happened had there been no health-care bill and Republicans selected some other presidential initiative to campaign against).
What will probably matter most in 2022 isn’t whether the relief bill is popular, but whether the big-picture outcomes — the economy and the pandemic — wind up making the electorate happy with the incumbent president and his party. A strong economy will make Biden popular. If unemployment is high and growth is slow, it won’t help him much that the current bill polls well now.
Granted, there’s more to presidential popularity than just the economy, and supporting popular policies can’t hurt. In the short run, it can help. But there are already lots of policy choices in play (indeed, there are a whole bunch of policy choices within the bill on the Senate floor right now!), and there will be a lot more over the next 18 months and then during the two years after that. Electorates have short memories.
So can incumbent presidents just do whatever they want, since voters aren’t paying enough attention to notice most of it, will forget what they do hear, and only care about a small subset of it anyway? Not really. Representation doesn’t work that way. Attentive segments of the public — organized groups, political parties and others — can care deeply about the promises politicians make within their areas of interest. That constrains the president. Should a president betray those promises, those groups can be alienated and reduce the president’s ability to get things done, which in turn can lead to further broken promises.
This whole sequence can probably have a variety of indirect electoral effects; for example, by generating bad publicity, or by deflating the enthusiasm of the party during the campaign, or by making it harder to do things that the electorate does care about. But it also can have large, important effects by restricting the incumbent’s policy gains when things go wrong, or enhancing them when things go right.
In other words: It’s easy to get carried away by opinion polling and a focus on elections, but most of the time, on most issues, policy is important for how it affects the nation, not by how popular it is or how it might play in November.
Bloomberg
