What happens when you pass an infrastructure bill when “infrastructure” gets defined so broadly as to be meaningless? Democrats hope to run on the only other major legislative win chalked up in this session by Joe Biden and Capitol Hill Democrats, but it turns out that voters haven’t taken notice of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, according to progressive polling reported by Politico.
That’s not surprising, and although Democrats agree, they miss the point:
Most people are big fans of President Joe Biden’s $550 billion infrastructure bill — except they don’t know it’s actually been passed. That’s the conclusion of new polling that promises to further rattle the Democratic Party.
Eight months after Congress cleared the landmark legislation to overhaul the nation’s roads, bridges, rails and broadband, only 24 percent of voters are aware it’s now a law, according to new polling by the center-left think tank Third Way and Impact Research that was shared first with POLITICO.
That damning assessment of the impact of one of Biden’s most significant domestic achievements comes after White House events promoting its investments as a fulfillment of a key campaign promise. While the infrastructure bill delivered on a decadeslong [sic] call for shoring up crumbling U.S. infrastructure, its passage was overshadowed by Democratic infighting over an entirely different piece of Biden’s agenda — one that still hasn’t passed.
Democrats blame the messaging, if not the messengers:
“We were so focused on passing the next thing, we forgot to tell people about it. And that’s a huge mistake,” said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.). “We passed a historic, bipartisan infrastructure bill. And why we weren’t crooning about that from minute one is still a mystery to me.”
First off, Democrats have talked about it, but mainly as a hostage to the Build Back Better reconciliation bill. It took months for Democrats to de-link the two over the angry objections of their progressive caucus. When they finally did pass the bill separately, the same progressives wailed and gnashed teeth over what they saw as a betrayal by Biden and Democratic leadership. Biden did tout the bill, and still does, as a major win. And he wasn’t alone, either:
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While House Democrats collectively held over 1,000 events to promote the bill, the polling shows it didn’t resonate with most people. Roughly one-third of voters said they believed it was “still being worked on in Congress,” while 9 percent believed it was “not being worked on in Congress and will not be passed.” About 37 percent said they didn’t know the status of the package at all.
There are other reasons why it hasn’t resonated with voters. For one thing, the Democrats’ ongoing internecine war over BBB keeps overshadowing it as Politico’s Sarah Ferris notes. However, Democrats have also spent the last several months debating a “gas tax holiday” that would strip the bipartisan infrastructure bill of the funding necessary for those projects.
Ferris thinks that this might be a “bright spot” if voters get educated on the bill, but that’s another problem. Eight months after the passage of the bill, not only do voters not know its actual status, they also haven’t seen any real impact from it. As Twitter follower George Purcell put it:
Turns out when “infrastructure” doesn’t involve building physical things people don’t see it.
— George Purcell (@gpurcell) July 22, 2022
This was at least the genius of Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, the $800 billion relief/stimulus bill which we called Porkulus at the time. It claimed to create “shovel-ready jobs” in public-sector projects, when all it really did was move those up the calendar. However, that bill’s focus on real-world infrastructure projects (along with a lot of green-energy busts) allowed Obama to put orange ARRA signs up everywhere. You couldn’t drive any significant distance without seeing the money put to work in your communities.
Eight months out, no one’s seeing any benefit from Biden’s infrastructure win. In fact, it’s unclear whether there has been any benefit from it yet. Voters know of the bill’s existence, but if they don’t know that it passed eight months ago, it’s because it hasn’t done anything visible in their communities. That’s more than a messaging problem … it’s a competence problem, and hardly the only one at the Biden White House.
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