No. of Recommendations: 5
Dems need to be plastering the MAGA/GOP culpability in all of the crap Biden had to deal with. Instead they focused on issues that working class voters don't seem to care about, such as Trans people's rights. A noble cause, but can't win an election on it.
They did all that because they didn't really have a choice.
The Democrats took a huge gamble in 2021-2022....and they lost. Biden wanted a much larger recovery package than that which followed the Great Recession, because he felt that it was better to go too big than too small - so they ended up with a lot more fiscal stimulus than the economy could handle without inflationary pressures. They risked that voters would prefer a more fulsome recovery than they would more modest inflation. They lost that bet.
Then, when voters started voicing how upset they were with inflation, the Democrats political response was.....bad. Understandable, but bad. Basically, the Democrats (both leadership in Congress and the Administration) argued that inflation was transitory and/or modest. They did not treat it as an important problem. That's understandable, because the progressive wing of the party really really really wanted a huge BBB package. It was their one "train" to get their priorities into law, given the filibuster. So they kept pushing for the $2.5 trillion package....and you couldn't do that while simultaneously acknowledging that inflation was a terrible problem.
They couldn't pivot away from the big BBB package - the progressive base would have killed them. They couldn't properly address voter inflationary concerns - because that was inconsistent with the big BBB package.
Of course, they committed one last bit of political malpractice when Manchin and Sinema forced them to curtail the big BBB package. They deprioritized most of the stuff that the working class would have directly benefitted from (labor law reforms and PRO Act programs, universal prekindergarten and subsidized child care, paid family and medical leave, affordable housing programs, free community college and expanded child tax credits), and ended up with a bill that centered almost entirely on fighting climate change. The initial approach was not to prioritize anything, so that the coalition wouldn't have to make any hard choices - but when they were forced to make hard choices, they chose climate. Which might be the "right" choice in some abstract way, but it probably isn't the choice that working class voters would have picked.
