Opinion
Biden Is the Anti-Trump, and It’s Working
If you can dial down the conflict, you can dial up the
policy.
Ezra Klein
By Ezra
Klein
Opinion
Columnist
March 4,
2021
American
politics feels quieter with Joe Biden in the White House. The president’s
Twitter feed hasn’t gone dark, but it’s gone dull. Biden doesn’t pick needless
fights or insert himself into cultural conflicts. It’s easy to go days without
hearing anything the president has said, unless you go looking.
But the
relative quiet is deceptive: Policy is moving at a breakneck pace. The first
weeks of the Biden administration were consumed by a flurry of far-reaching
executive orders that reopened America to refugees, rejoined the Paris climate
accords and killed the Keystone XL oil pipeline, to name just a few. Now the
House has passed, and the Senate is considering, the $1.9 trillion American
Rescue Plan, a truly sweeping piece of legislation that includes more than a
half-dozen policies — like a child tax credit expansion that could cut child
poverty by 50 percent — that would be presidency-defining accomplishments on
their own.
It goes on.
The White House just sent Congress the most ambitious immigration reform bill
in years. It midwifed a deal to get Merck to mobilize some of its factories to
produce Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, and now Biden is saying there should
be enough of a supply for every American adult to get vaccinated by the end of
May. Imagine! The administration is also working on an infrastructure package
that, if early reports bear out, will be the most transformational piece of
climate policy — and perhaps economic policy — in my lifetime. Biden is blitzing.
This is
roughly the opposite of how Donald Trump approached his presidency. Trump
combined an always-on, say-anything, fight-anyone communications strategy with
a curious void of legislative ambition. He backed congressional Republicans’
unimaginative and ultimately doomed Obamacare repeal effort, and then signed a
package of tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy. It was bog-standard, Paul
Ryan-conservatism — nothing like the populist revolution Trump promised on the
campaign trail. Trump signed plenty of executive orders, but when it came to
the hard work of persuading others to do what he wanted, he typically checked
out, or turned to Twitter.
Even so,
Trump convinced many that he was a political genius whose shamelessness had
allowed him to see what others had missed: You didn’t win by being liked, you
won by being all anyone ever talked about, even if they were cursing your name.
“Very often my readers tried to persuade me there’s no such thing as bad publicity,
and Trump had proven that,” Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U.,
told me. “All that mattered was you were occupying space in the spectacle — not
what was actually happening to you in that glare.”
One
rebuttal to that theory was always obvious. “Trump never got over 50 percent
approval,” Rosen says. “He’s a widely hated man, a one-term president.” For all
the talk of Teflon Don, Trump paid a price for his antics and affronts and
scandals. Bad publicity actually is bad publicity.
But another
way of looking at it is that Trump’s communication strategy was successful in
getting Trump what he actually wanted: Attention, not legislation. Biden wants
legislation, not attention, and that informs his team’s more targeted approach.
“You can be all over every newscast and insert yourself in every conversation,
but if you aren’t driving that conversation toward a focused agenda, it isn’t
doing you a lot of good,” Kate Bedingfield, the White House communications
director, told me.
So far,
Biden’s quieter strategy appears to be working. As these charts show, he gets
far less media attention than Trump — even after Election Day, the share of
news stories with Biden’s name in the headline was less than half of what Trump
got — and Google records far less search interest in his administration. But
Biden is polling at about 54 percent, around 10 points higher than Trump at
this stage of his presidency (or any stage of his presidency). More tellingly,
the American Rescue Plan is polling between 10 and 20 points ahead of Biden, making
it one of the most popular major pieces of legislation in recent decades. In
one recent poll, Republicans were asked whether Biden’s plan should be
abandoned for a bipartisan alternative, and they split down the middle, with as
many Republicans saying the plan should be passed as abandoned. That’s
remarkable.
The
American Rescue Plan is a bolder, more progressive, economic package than
anything a Democratic president has proposed since L.B.J. But it is not, for
now, a polarizing package. It’s less polarizing even than Biden, who only polls
at 12 percent among Republicans. You could chalk that up to its popular
component parts, but the Affordable Care Act’s individual policies were
popular, too, and the bill polled at around 40 percent. You could say it’s the
coronavirus crisis, but coronavirus policy is sharply polarized. I suspect
Biden’s calmer approach to political communication is opening space for a
bolder agenda.
A few
pieces of political science research are shaping my thinking here. In 2012,
Stephen Nicholson, a political scientist at the University of Georgia,
published an interesting paper called “Polarizing Cues.” In it, Nicholson asked
people their opinions of proposed housing and immigration policies, sometimes
telling them that Barack Obama supported the policy and at other times telling
them that George W. Bush or John McCain supported the policy. What he found was
that opinions didn’t much change when people heard that a political leader from
their own party supported a bill. But opinions changed dramatically when you
told them a political leader from the other side supported a bill — it led to
sharp swings against the legislation, no matter the underlying policy content.
When I
called Nicholson to ask him about the paper, he gave an insightful explanation
for the results. Humans tend to see diversity in the groups we belong to, and
sameness in the groups we mistrust, he said. A Democrat knows there are many
ways to be a Democrat — you can be a Biden Democrat, an A.O.C. Democrat, an
Obama Democrat, a Bernie Democrat, a Clinton Democrat. So a signal from any one
Democratic leader is weaker, because he or she may not be the leader you care
about. But no matter which kind of Democrat you are, Republicans blur in your
mind into an undifferentiated mass of awful, so a signal from their political
leaders is stronger. The process works the other way, too, of course. A recent
Gallup poll showed 88 percent of Republicans disapprove of Biden — the more
Biden makes the American Rescue Plan about himself, the more they’ll hate it.
Then
there’s the book “Stealth Democracy,” by the political scientists John Hibbing
and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. They marshal a mountain of survey data to show that
Americans have weak and changeable views on policy, but strong views on how
politics should look and feel. Many, if not most, Americans believe “political
conflict is unnecessary and an indication that something is wrong with governmental
procedures,” they write. The more partisan fighting there is around a bill, in
other words, the more Americans begin to believe something must be wrong with
the legislation — otherwise, why would everyone be so upset?
Mitch
McConnell understood all of this, and he ginned up political bickering to
undermine Obama’s agenda. But Biden seems to understand it, too. When I talked
to Bedingfield, she kept circling back to Biden’s preference for rhetoric and
strategies that turn down “the temperature” on American politics. But Biden
isn’t taking the usual Washington strategy toward that goal, which is to
retreat to modest bills and quarter-measures. Instead, his theory seems to be
that if you can dial down the conflict, you can dial up the policy.
I’ve argued
before that Biden’s central insight in the campaign was that negative
polarization — the degree to which we loathe the other side, even if we don’t
much like our side — is now the most powerful force in American politics. Biden
often refused to do things that would endear him to his base, because those
same things would drive Republicans wild. That strategy is carrying over to his
presidency. And in part because of it, the reaction to his signature
legislative package, which really is a collection of policies progressives have
dreamed of for years, isn’t cleaving along normal red-blue lines.
Like any
other communications strategy, this will work until it doesn’t. Biden will have
his failures, as all presidents do. But for now, it’s working, in defiance of the
lessons many thought Trump’s presidency taught.
Speak
softly and pass a big agenda. It’s at least worth a try.
Ezra Klein
joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and
then editor-at-large of Vox; the host of the podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show”;
and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and
editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. @ezraklein
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