Sandara Park: On Politics: Will Republicans Pay a Price for Opposing the Stimulus?

March 13, 2021

By Lisa Lerer

Politics Newsletter Writer

Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your wrap-up of the week in national politics. I'm Lisa Lerer, your host.

No Senate Republicans voted for the stimulus bill.Senate Television, via Associated Press

There are plenty of numbers in the $1.9 trillion relief plan signed into law by President Biden this week. $1,400 for stimulus checks. $130 billion for schools. $350 billion for state and local governments.

But the most politically significant number might just be zero.

Yes, zero. That's the number of congressional Republicans who supported the legislation.

Looking at the lack of G.O.P. support, you might assume the bill was unpopular, at least with Republican voters. You'd be wrong. Americans overwhelmingly support the package, including a significant portion of the Republican base. According to some analysts, the bill is the most popular piece of major legislation in over a decade.

So Republicans will definitely pay a political price for opposing a measure that the country, including a large portion of their base, seems to want, right?

Well, it's complicated.

We are now in the post-passage phase of the American Rescue Plan, a battle likely to last through the midterm elections next year.

During the weeks of negotiations over the legislation, Republicans were unable to coalesce around a comprehensive argument against the bill. Instead, they offered a scattershot list of complaints. After the legislation passed, Senator Mitch McConnell's main argument seemed to be that the economic recovery would have happened anyhow.

"We're about to have a boom," said Mr. McConnell, the minority leader. "And if we do have a boom, it will have absolutely nothing to do with this $1.9 trillion."

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Others seemed far more focused on Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head, culture war bait that fires up their conservative base. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, even took the issue to the House floor. "First they outlaw Dr. Seuss, and now they want to tell us what to say," he said during a debate over a Democratic voting rights bill. (It was the company overseeing the author's estate, not any Democrats, that recently chose to stop publishing several of his works. And Republicans' focus on Dr. Seuss did deliver some economic benefit: More than 1.2 million copies of stories by the children's book author sold in the first week of March — more than quadruple from the week before.)

The Republican predicament is simple: People like getting money, especially when they are struggling, and this bill will deliver. Roughly 90 percent of American households will be eligible for stimulus checks. More than 93 percent of children — 69 million — will receive what is essentially a guaranteed income for families. Even those who don't receive a payment will benefit from new funding for reopening schools and vaccine distribution.

Former President Donald J. Trump taught Republican voters to love that kind of government spending by championing stimulus measures that were even larger than this bill. That makes it difficult for G.O.P. lawmakers who backed those measures to argue against the cost of this legislation, without facing charges of hypocrisy or possible pushback from portions of their base.

To shift public opinion, Republicans will have to settle on a clear argument against the legislation and find the party discipline to drive it. To that end, they'll be keeping a close eye on how the money is distributed, hoping to find examples of waste or fraud that they can highlight to undercut Mr. Biden's policy agenda. One area ripe for discontent is the aid to state and local governments, which polls significantly lower among Republicans than Democrats. But it won't be easy: Republicans are already struggling to overcome deep divides in their ranks.

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Mr. Biden, acutely aware of the potential pitfalls, wants to ensure that Americans understand the benefits of this bill — and that they give him credit. His address on Thursday evening was the start of an administration-wide push to promote the legislation across the country. It's a strategy to avoid the struggles of former President Barack Obama, who some Democrats believe was not aggressive enough in selling his 2009 stimulus package to voters.

The situation isn't exactly the same: Unlike Mr. Obama, who faced the challenge of a slow recovery, Mr. Biden is likely to benefit from a quickly expanding economy, with forecasters predicting growth to speed up in the coming months as more Americans get vaccinated. He also starts his campaign with more good will. Biden's legislation is roughly 20 percentage points more popular than the 2009 bill was immediately after passage.

Still, the 2009 stimulus package provides an instructive example on how quickly public opinion can change. No House Republicans voted for that $787 billion package and only three moderate Republicans in the Senate backed it, even as nearly two in three Americans supported the bill.

Republicans calculated that they could make the bill a centerpiece of their efforts to win control of Congress in the 2010 midterm elections. They began arguing that the legislation was "chock-full of wasteful government spending" and failed to create jobs, even as dozens also trumpeted the federal dollars flowing into their states. Voters conflated the stimulus bill with the bailouts of the banking and auto industries, confusion that helped incite some of the fiercest opposition to Mr. Obama in the form of the Tea Party movement.

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By January 2010, about 75 percent said half or more of the stimulus money had been wasted. Three months later, 62 percent said the legislation had not created jobs. And in exit polls after the 2010 midterms, only about one-third of voters said the package had actually helped.

White House officials eventually conceded that they had made mistakes in framing the public discussion of the measure. But by then, it was too late: Republicans won control of the House and gained six seats in the Senate.

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We want to hear from our readers. Have a question? We'll try to answer it. Have a comment? We're all ears. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com or send me a message at @llerer.

Pressure on Cuomo is mounting.

Is Andrew Cuomo in free-fall?

That's the question many Democrats are asking after what has been an extraordinarily damaging week for the New York governor.

After six women accused Mr. Cuomo of sexual harassment, even more serious charges of misconduct surfaced: that when he was alone with a female aide in the Executive Mansion last year, he closed a door, reached under her blouse and groped her. On Thursday, Albany Police Department officials said they had received a referral about the accusation, and Democratic officials took the first step toward potentially impeaching Mr. Cuomo. The next day, most of New York's congressional delegation called on him to resign, including Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader; Senator Kirsten Gillibrand; and Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

While Mr. Cuomo's approval ratings have dropped precipitously since last spring, when he rose to liberal stardom for his pandemic news conferences, he's kept support from many voters in the state. A series of surveys have found that most voters do not want Mr. Cuomo to resign, even as a majority say that they do not want him to run for a fourth term.

His strategy is to play for time. On Friday afternoon, he asked people "to wait for the facts" to emerge from the investigation, which is being overseen by the state attorney general, Letitia James, and could take several months. "A lot of people alleged a lot of things for a lot of reasons," he said. Such a drawn-out timeline could make it more difficult for other Democrats to build support and momentum for a potential primary challenge to him in 2022.

Voters may not be willing to wait that long. There are whispers of more allegations to come. Reports are circulating describing a deeply toxic workplace in the governor's office. The investigation allows accusers to bring their claims anonymously, perhaps encouraging those who don't want to face public scrutiny of a traumatic experience. And don't forget, Mr. Cuomo also faces state and national investigations into an apparent effort to conceal the number of nursing home deaths during the pandemic and into a possible cover-up of structural problems in the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge — a signature infrastructure project named after his father.

By the numbers: $410 billion

… That's the approximate cost of sending stimulus checks to nearly every American, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

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