If Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin beats Terry McAuliffe, Democrats may lose their zeal for ‘big, significant’ spending plans.
If Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin beats Terry McAuliffe, Democrats may lose their zeal for ‘big, significant’ spending plans.
D emocrats are running out of time to pass their plan for $5 trillion in new social spending. It includes expansions of Medicare, Medicaid, child care, and green energy that would be the biggest expansion of government since the Great Society.
But they are up against the clock as Congress approaches the August recess. The U.S. will hit another debt ceiling in the next few weeks, sparking a bitter political battle. Before the end of September, Congress also needs to vote on must-pass spending bills to fund the government. “Time is running out for the administration to get big, significant things done,” Obama Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro told the Washington Post.
The delay in getting final votes on President Biden’s legislative package may mean the Virginia governor’s race could play an outsized role in determining success or failure. If Republicans succeed in recapturing the governor’s office for the first time since 2009 — and in a state that Joe Biden won by 10 points — the political tremors may spook moderate Democrats in Congress. They may come to believe that passing Biden’s big-spending plans won’t help them survive the 2022 midterm elections.
The conventional wisdom is that Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe is the odds-on favorite to return to the governor’s mansion he occupied from 2013 to 2017. Polls show him narrowly leading GOP businessman Glenn Youngkin. But the most recent poll by the Trafalgar Group shows McAuliffe with only a 2-point lead.
Trafalgar was the only nonpartisan outlet to predict that Donald Trump would win Pennsylvania and Michigan in 2016. It has been praised for its ability to tease out “hidden conservative voters” who don’t show up in other surveys.
McAuliffe’s level of support in the Trafalgar poll is 46.8 percent. That’s less than you would expect from a quasi-incumbent facing a challenger who was unknown in the state just four months ago.
The truth is that McAuliffe hasn’t been a vote-getting powerhouse in Virginia. In 2013, aided by the presence of a libertarian candidate on the ballot, he defeated Republican Ken Cuccinelli by a surprisingly low 2.5 percentage points. That was despite outspending Cuccinelli by $38 million to $21 million.
This year McAuliffe will have plenty of money, but he is facing an opponent who will be more than competitive. Youngkin has raised millions of dollars and has a personal net worth of $250 million, which he has already shown he is willing to dip into for his campaign. There will also be no third-party spoiler on the ballot. “Youngkin is the Democrat apparatchik’s worst nightmare,” former GOP governor George Allen told me. “He is articulate, an outsider, and has a complete plan on how to combat the state’s problems, including crime.”
If Youngkin pulls off an upset in Virginia, it could have an effect on the Biden agenda’s prospects on Capitol Hill. In November 1993, the victory of George Allen for governor of Virginia dramatically slowed the momentum of Hillary Clinton’s signature health-care plan. It wound up suffering a stillborn death the next year.
Then there was 2009, when Republican Bob McDonnell won the Virginia governor’s race on a no-new-taxes platform. Massachusetts senator Ed Markey was a Democratic House member in 2009 and recalls how the calendar ran out on key initiatives proposed by President Obama. The Washington Post reports that Markey has been reminding Democrats that delays in negotiating those measures twelve years ago “eventually ended with a climate bill stalled and an imperfect version of the health law that didn’t pass until the spring of 2010.”
Former GOP House speaker Paul Ryan has also told friends that delays in finalizing the Biden package along with a Democratic loss in the Virginia governor’s race could so rattle moderate Democrats that they’d be squeamish about backing Biden expensive legislative’s agenda.
To get anything big done, Biden and Democratic leaders need to win the support of two opposing groups: skeptical Republicans in the Senate who are intent on blocking the president’s agenda, and a Democratic caucus that includes seven or eight members who privately worry the spending tsunami will fuel inflation and wonder whether shutting down fossil-fuel production to fight climate change is wise or doable.
The difficulties Democrats face are clearly surfacing in public. Exhibit A: It’s always a sign of desperation when someone rushes to push a product out the door before it’s been fully designed.
That’s what majority leader Chuck Schumer has done by scheduling a test vote to open debate on the $571 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill this Wednesday. As Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, one of the GOP negotiators, explained to Fox News on Sunday, he won’t vote to open debate on the bill. “How can I vote for cloture when the bill isn’t written?” Cassidy said.
Schumer is telling his fellow Democrats they may have to give up much of their August recess to focus on writing the $3.5 trillion social-spending package. Then they will have to finish the time-consuming chores of extending the federal government’s borrowing authority and funding the government after September 30. That will mean the crucial votes on the Biden Binge may take place just about the time that Virginia voters render their own verdict on how happy they are with how things are going in Washington.