Biden looking to turn legislative victories into midterm momentum

WASHINGTON — As the midterm election comes into focus following a drawn out primary season, Democrats are pinning their hopes that President Joe Biden’s recent summer streak of legislative victories will help boost their chances of retaining their slim Congressional majority.

Biden, who entered the summer with some of the lowest approval ratings of any of his modern-day predecessors, has experienced a reversal of fortune and is hitting the campaign trail touting a series of new initiatives and laws enacted over the past two months.

Those include a federal student loan relief program; a $740 billion package focused on climate change, reducing health care costs and reforming the corporate tax structure; the first bipartisan gun safety bill to pass in 30 years; a law focused on expanding domestic production of microchips, and a measure expanding health benefits to veterans exposed to toxic burn pits during their military service.

Recent polls show a slight uptick in Biden’s approval rating over the past few weeks —  an average of 42% as of Aug. 28 compared with an average of 40% in the week leading into Memorial Day, according to the poll tracking website Real Clear Politics.

Even so, political analysts note the president and Democrats still must overcome consumer concerns about inflation, the potential for a fall surge in COVID-19 cases and split sentiment on the effectiveness of providing federal student loan borrowers up to $20,000 in debt forgiveness.

“The question is — is it too little, too late?” said Hofstra University Political Science professor Richard Himelfarb.

Himelfarb said Biden, 79, has struggled with public perception over his ability to govern as the oldest president to serve in the Oval Office. At the start of the summer, the administration faced record high gas prices, inflation, a nationwide shortage of baby formula and a growing number of monkey pox cases. The recent string of legislation passed by Congress, coupled with a decline in gas prices, has appeared to “neutralize” some of those concerns, Himelfarb said.

“The Democrats now have a record of accomplishment that allows them to go to their base and say — ‘We got stuff done," he said. "We passed the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan. We have passed an infrastructure bill. We have passed climate change legislation. We have passed this CHIPS bill that's going to lead to more manufacturing’, so that allows Biden to at least take that issue and neutralize it … that's been very helpful for him.”

Biden is looking to seize on some of that momentum by hitting the campaign trail, including scheduling three separate appearances in the battleground state of Pennsylvania over the course of a week as Democrats look to flip an open senate seat in the state.

The three events offer a preview of themes Biden will look to expand upon on the campaign trail. On Tuesday during a speech in Wilkes-Barre, the president made the case for providing more funding to law enforcement, looking to further distance the party from previous calls by progressives to steer money from policing to social service programs.

In a Thursday prime time speech Biden sought to make the case that the upcoming election was about protecting fundamental democratic principles such as free and fair elections, which he argued are under attack by candidates and officials closely aligned with former President Donald Trump. On Labor Day Biden is scheduled to campaign in Pittsburgh to tout initiatives, such as clean energy programs and the CHIPS bill to expand domestic microchip production, that are expected to generate more manufacturing jobs.

“We must take our case to the American people and be crystal clear about it. There’s no question it’s been a few hard years,” Biden said during a recent Democratic National Committee campaign rally in Rockville, MD, before describing his administration’s efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic and economic stresses.

Former Long Island Rep. Steve Israel, who served as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said that while “the president and congressional Democrats have in the past weeks changed the narrative from negative to positive,” it’s still “too early to know” what impact the legislative streak will have on the midterms.

“Midterm elections are generally decided during the closing arguments, and those closing arguments are in September, October,” said Israel in an interview with Newsday.

“What we've seen now is not unprecedented … the polling tends to turn slightly optimistic for any president's party in a midterm election, in August,” said Israel, director of Cornell University’s Institute of Politics and Global Affairs. “The generic favorability of the President's party tends to skip up a few points, and the polls give reason for hope. The challenge is, I saw this myself when I chaired the DCCC, voters tend to go home to their parties toward the end of the cycle … So this can be almost ephemeral … the midterm doesn't really crystallize until the final weeks.”

The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan outlet that has long tracked congressional races, recently revised its outlook for the November election, projecting that Republicans were on pace to gain 10-20 seats, down from 20 to 35 seats it projected in May. The outlet cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization to overturn federal abortion protections as a key issue pushing some voters to the Democratic column.

“One of the primary reasons the president’s party has suffered a net loss of House seats in 36 of the 39 midterm elections since the start of the Civil War is that those in the opposition party are almost always more motivated to vote than those in the president’s party,” Charlie Cook, a founder of the publication, wrote in an Aug. 25 piece. “This had been the case for much of this cycle, but the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, as well as some of the other developments previously mentioned, seemed to put a bit more starch in Democrats' shorts, all but completely closing the gap.”

The outlet noted that Democrats “maintaining control” is “not out of the question.”

Republican campaign strategist Michael Dawidziak of Bohemia said that while the GOP is still in a position to regain control of the House, the possibility of Democrats holding on to the Senate, as many political analysts are projecting, underscores some of the challenges Republicans face because of bans on abortion in states they govern.

“Republicans were poised to take both houses back, and you now have an issue which might drive women to vote more Democrat now,” Dawidziak told Newsday. “And that's going to be different from state to state, but the thing is it's probably going to affect these red states when they're passing these bills, more than it's going to affect the blue states … you might be pushing the moderates, and even moderate Republicans to vote, particularly women, to vote Democrat this year.”

Dawidziak said renewed focus on former President Donald Trump, and the federal investigation into classified documents he moved from The White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, also has the potential to hinder Republican candidates locked in tight races.

“The effect it could have is turning more moderate voters, turning their attention to something that Republicans really don't want to pay attention to,” Dawidziak said. “They really, really want voters paying attention to things that they feel the Republicans do a better job on — international affairs, national security and the economy — they would really rather focus on things like that.”

By Laura Figueroa Hernandez

laura.figueroa@newsday.com@Laura_Figueroa

Laura Figueroa Hernandez is the White House correspondent and previously covered New York City politics and government. She joined Newsday in 2012 after covering state and local politics for The Miami Herald.