As voters’ concern over inflation grows, the issue of rising costs has plagued Joe Biden’s presidency and threatened Democrats’ hold on their congressional majorities, leaving the party in need of a solution before November’s elections.
In December, the Labor Department’s consumer price index rose by 6.8% without seasonal adjustments over the 12 months ending in November, the fastest annual increase in nearly 40 years. Polls show the public growing increasingly frustrated with rising costs, with many blaming Biden.
Biden spent much of the first year of his presidency arguing that his Build Back Better legislation, a massive social welfare and green energy spending bill that contains critical portions of his domestic agenda, would address rising consumer costs. But the legislation currently lacks the votes to pass in the Senate. Instead of renewing their advocacy for the bill, the legislation’s proponents have had little luck reviving it, and it appears doomed, at least for now.
In November, the House passed the bill after much back-and-forth between centrist and liberal Democrats. But the bill stalled in the upper chamber, where Democrats hold a razor-thin 50-50 majority dependent on Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote in her capacity as president of the Senate.
The issue of inflation is partly why Senate Democrats failed to secure the support of Sen. Joe Manchin for the bill. The West Virginia Democrat said shortly before Christmas that he would not vote for the bill, citing concerns about inflation as part of his rationale.
Manchin reiterated his opposition earlier this month, telling reporters the bill is “dead.” Since no Republicans support the bill, Senate Democrats cannot pass it without Manchin’s support, leaving it without a path to Biden’s desk.
Much of the White House’s push for the bill centered on an argument from Biden that the legislation would decrease inflation if passed. The pivot away from the bill appears to contradict that earlier talking point.
Republicans, many of whom argue they are on the cusp of winning back a majority they lost in 2018, have mocked the bill as “Build Back Broke,” claiming the increase in government spending would contribute to rather than reduce inflation.
The sitting president’s party historically loses seats in a midterm election. The trend seems likely to hold this year as Biden’s approval rating dips, especially on his economic performance.
A January ABC News/Ipsos poll found that just 29% of the public approves of how Biden has handled inflation, while 69% disapprove. In a Quinnipiac University poll earlier this month, 27% of voters said inflation was their top concern, more than double the amount who said it was COVID-19 at 10%.
William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who previously worked on Democratic campaigns and in former President Bill Clinton’s administration, wrote in a recent blog post that inflation is Biden’s “biggest political problem.”
“The American people now believe that inflation is the most important issue facing the economy and the country, and they don’t think that President Biden is paying attention to it,” Galston wrote. “This explains why so many Americans disapprove of his economic performance — and why it is undermining his presidency.”
Without passing Build Back Better, the Biden administration seeks alternative steps to decrease inflation before the midterm elections, floating ideas such as cutting federal gasoline taxes or pinning rising costs on corporate price-gouging in some sectors.
Other Democrats have sought to blame price-gouging as well.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently told Yahoo Finance, “There’s a real distinction to be made between inflation and price gouging.”
“A lot of these price increases are potentially due to just straight price gouging by corporations,” the Democrat from New York said.
