At a party retreat in Philadelphia, House Democrats hoped the president would offer a winning strategy heading into a challenging midterm election season.
PHILADELPHIA — House Democrats planned a retreat here this week hoping for a reset after a difficult period during which President Biden has been buffeted by rising gas prices, soaring inflation and sagging approval ratings.
Instead, they arrived in buses in the middle of the night after the president’s latest coronavirus aid package collapsed in Congress late Wednesday, a grim reminder that his legislative agenda has stalled on Capitol Hill as they head into a midterm election season in which they are bracing for big losses.
One year to the day after the enactment of Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan — a law that remains broadly popular even if the president, at the moment, is not — Democrats are toiling to retool their message and refocus their agenda. They are worried that the accomplishments they helped deliver to Mr. Biden are being drowned out by concern over the rising price of gas and a focus on their legislative failures.
And they are looking to the president, who addressed them at the retreat on Friday, to help them reframe the conversation.
“This may be the most important off-year election in modern history,” Mr. Biden told lawmakers on Friday afternoon. If Democrats lose their majorities in the House and the Senate, he said, “the only thing I’ll have then is a veto pen.”
The president outlined his administration’s achievements over the past year, noting that few pieces of legislation have had the impact of the stimulus plan he proposed during his first month in office. He criticized Republicans for wrongly blaming him for gas prices.
But it was not clear from his remarks how Mr. Biden planned to help his party refashion its message before November.
Gone was the talk of a transformative agenda to remake the country’s social safety net, which was once a centerpiece of Democrats’ sales pitch to voters. The words “build back better” were all but forbidden among the groggy lawmakers who arrived in Philadelphia in the wee hours of Thursday morning.
Speaking to reporters, Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, joked that the slogan for Mr. Biden’s defunct social policy and climate bill had become like the evil Voldemort in “Harry Potter”: that which must not be named.
Instead, after a year of supporting his agenda, House Democrats have pivoted to beseeching Mr. Biden to act on his own through executive actions to address the outstanding issues they care about before they face voters in November.
Ms. Jayapal said the president could pass executive actions to cap the price of insulin, raise the overtime eligibility threshold to increase wages for tens of millions of people, and fix the so-called family glitch in the Affordable Care Act, which can make it impossible for some workers with modest incomes to afford health insurance.
Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 Democrat, said he recently met with White House officials to discuss executive actions that Mr. Biden could take to protect voting rights and overhaul policing after the demise of his efforts to pass major legislation tackling both issues. And Representative Raul Ruiz, Democrat of California and the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said he wanted the president to use his executive power to raise the cap on the number of refugees who can be resettled in the United States this year.
Other lawmakers said they hoped a shift to the center debuted at Mr. Biden’s State of the Union address last week, along with strong support for his handling of the war in Ukraine, would be enough to persuade voters that Democrats were focused on kitchen-table issues.
“We care about everyday Americans, and they don’t,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said when asked to sum up his party’s pitch to voters.
The retreat was the group’s first in-person gathering in three years and a chance for Democrats — who have seen 31 colleagues opt to retire — to talk up their achievements and compare notes on how to move forward.
“We have passed two major pieces of legislation that, in any other Congress, would have been historic in and of themselves,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, referring to the American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
He acknowledged that the landscape might look bleak, but he said the political environment this summer would matter more.
“The polls don’t look particularly good now,” Mr. Hoyer said, “but that’s happened in the past.”
Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said on Thursday that keeping the majority depended on speaking to voters in a way that was not too preachy or condescending.
“We spent a bunch of time talking about attributes in addition to issues,” Mr. Maloney said of a closed-door presentation he delivered on Thursday. “Whether voters think we care about them, whether they think we share their values, whether we have the right priorities.”
Every vulnerable Democrat, Mr. Maloney said, was “in the business of having to say, ‘You may not like everything about my political party, but I’m getting it done.’”
Some of the moderate Democrats whose seats are most at risk said the tone of the president’s State of the Union address — in which he underscored funding the police, capping the cost of insulin and fighting the opioid epidemic — raised their hopes that he had moved away from simply championing progressive proposals that pleased the party’s left flank but could alienate constituents in conservative-leaning districts like theirs.
“Veterans, opioids, these are things we can come together on,” said Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, one of the 32 Democrats identified by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as running for re-election in a competitive seat. “Ukraine is part of the unity message. That is what I think our caucus is hungry for, especially those of us who believe in the value of reaching out to Democrats and Republicans, and it’s certainly what we’re hearing back at home.”
That appeared to be the administration’s focus before Mr. Biden’s appearance in Philadelphia on Friday, as his team worked to highlight positive economic indicators.
On Tuesday night, administration officials circulated among House Democrats a slide show about deficit reduction, noting that Mr. Biden had lowered it by $360 billion in 2021. White House officials have also been promoting record job growth, while making clear that getting prices under control remains the president’s top priority.
Still, vulnerable Democrats said that was not necessarily enough to bolster their political fortunes.
“The metrics are strong — employment, wages — but that doesn’t matter,” said Representative Dean Phillips, who represents a suburban Minneapolis district that was long held by Republicans. “What matters is how people feel.”
Mr. Biden’s new message has also angered and concerned some progressives, who fear that their priorities were being pushed to the margins.
“People say the speech was unifying — unifying because it brought white moderates and white independents back,” said Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, who is Black, referring to Mr. Biden’s State of the Union address. “I was sitting there, like, ‘Damn, again?’”
He added: “George Floyd is dead. There’s no national database for police misconduct.”
“It’s lazy and unacceptable for the president of the United States to only keep the conversation at that shallow level,” Mr. Bowman said of the discussion about supporting law enforcement. “It’s deeper than that.”
Feelings were still raw in Philadelphia this week about the demise of Mr. Biden’s emergency request for Covid-19 aid, which Democratic leaders had stripped from a $1.5 trillion spending bill amid disputes over how to finance it. The money will have to move separately, and Democrats will need Republican support to win its approval.
“I would have preferred to just pause for another 24 hours and try to figure out” how to move forward, Ms. Jayapal said in an interview. “I’m not in control.”
Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting from Washington.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
