The Democrats could go even big(ger) on their economic stimulus
One experiment found the price tag of the bill has no impact on public opinion
A new CBS News/YouGov poll released earlier this week found that Joe Biden’s economic relief plan is popular with a “broad bipartisan majority” of the American public. I have written before about the popularity of giving people money, but the support numbers for Biden’s/the Democrats’ bill is even more astounding than my expectations. According to CBS, 83% of Americans approve of Congress passing the relief package, while only 17% disapprove.
What’s more, according to CBS 40% of Americans want the bill to be even larger, giving more money to families and small businesses to ease covid-related financial strain. In comparison, only half the number of people want the bill to be smaller.
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In terms of support for key legislative priorities or executive actions, this is about as good as it gets. With 83% support, Biden’s bill is more popular than every key presidential policy aside from the 2007 expansion of the minimum wage and the 1993 Brady Bill, which enacted federal background checks for most gun sales. Biden’s signature policy is more popular even than any of the Obama-era stimulus bills, and enjoys double the support of the tax, health care, and immigration policies of the Trump administration. See below (this chart comes to you via Chris Warshaw).
We would infer from this that Biden has quite a lot of room left to pursue additional priorities in the bill. Perhaps he could add expanded child credits to it. If he wanted, he could even make the stimulus payments larger. An experiment from Navigator research (shown below) finds that support for the stimulus bill would fall by only 2 percentage points if the cost was doubled. It would remain net popular with Democrats and Independents, and net support would only fall to -2 (from 0) with Republicans. (Navigator’s polling is worse for the Democrats than CBS’s, but it still finds that >70% of people favor the bill.
It is relatively safe to say that almost no other federal issue position or policy proposal enjoys such high bipartisan support from both parties.
Or, Biden could save some of his public political capital for other proposals, such as a climate or infrastructure plan. Yet even those would likely be net positive among a majority of voters.
One thing that strikes me is how… strangely normal… all of this feels. After four years of Donald Trump, including two years of unified Republican control of Congress, it is new to see the government doing things that are so popular. Perhaps that is why we have seen Congress’s approval rating increase rapidly, approaching a high for the last decade. The share of Americans who say the country is “off on the wrong track” also just hit an all-time low in YouGov’s tracker. Yet that is generally what we would expect for a president in their honeymoon period.
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The public, in summary, appears to be on board with the expansionist policy agenda of the Biden administration and Democratic-controlled Congress. Given gridlock and partisan polarization in Washington, it is unlikely they will get what they want. But left-leaning lawmakers have the polling ammo to try for something big(ger). They should go for it.