President Biden’s first time hearing directly from voters since taking office will be in a state he won by less than 1 percentage point, as he seeks to build support for his $1.9 trillion coronavirus package, a test of his promise to govern and “unify” the country.
The president will pitch the need for a fifth pandemic relief bill in a CNN town hall on Tuesday in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a state that former President Donald Trump won in 2016 before it flipped for Biden by a 0.6 percentage point margin in November, 49.4% to Trump’s 48.8%.
Ben Nuckels, a Democratic media consultant based in Wisconsin, said the state’s voting landscape makes it an important target for Biden.
“He’s able to reach a broad swath of the population,” Nuckels said. “It’s not a red or a blue state, it’s very much a purple state, and being able to come out here and retell his plan to middle America, so to speak, will be really important.”
Biden’s inaugural pledge for unity has been tested in his aim for a bipartisan COVID-19 relief package. Republicans who met with Biden at the White House to discuss a $618 billion counterproposal were rebuffed, with the White House stating that its plan’s size is necessary.
Biden allies have said that Democrats are prepared to go it alone, using a budget tool to bypass the typical 60-vote threshold. Vice President Kamala Harris would cast the tiebreaking 51st vote in this scenario.
Wisconsin is the kind of swing state where Biden is looking to solidify the Democratic advantage.
“Wisconsin is a quintessential battleground at the federal level, Biden narrowly won the state by less than a point, and there will be both a competitive gubernatorial and U.S. Senate race in the state in 2022,” Republican pollster Robert Blizzard told the Washington Examiner.
According to Blizzard, Tuesday’s event in Milwaukee “is more about politics than anything else.”
A Trump campaign autopsy obtained last month by the Washington Examiner showed how the former president lost ground with voters in Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, with voters in exit polls saying they were unhappy with his handling of the coronavirus.
According to the memo, a majority of voters across 10 key states “prioritized stopping the spread of [the coronavirus] over re-opening the economy.” In the five battlegrounds that Biden won, Trump scored negative marks.
Democrats in the state are looking to tie their opponents to Trump in other ways, including to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Wisconsin Democrats began airing political advertisements for the 2022 election cycle about a week before Biden took office in January, slamming Republican Sen. Ron Johnson for his role in backing Trump’s election fraud claims.
The White House and Biden allies have cited broad public support for Biden’s bill among Republican and Democratic voters to argue that even a party-line vote in the Senate could yield a “bipartisan” bill.
On Tuesday, the White House will take its message to the public while overshadowing efforts at legislative bipartisanship inside the state.
Biden’s event falls the same night as Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’s budget address, when he will call on the state’s Republican Legislature to help him pass his two-year, “bounce back” budget to aid Wisconsin’s recovery from the coronavirus.
Biden’s own “build back better” legislation is on hold until his American Rescue Plan can pass through Congress, with no date yet for the joint session in which he is expected to outline his first-term agenda.
There are other political dynamics at play that could hamper Democrats in the next elections.
Nuckels said Democrats want to see from Biden a plan for change, in addition to help for small businesses.
“People don’t want to just return to the economy that we had,” he added. “COVID has exposed a variety of problems that we’ve had and exacerbated them. And now, it’s about bouncing back and building back better, so to speak.”
But according to Tim Phillips, who runs Americans for Prosperity, a too-large package could come back to bite Democrats.
He pointed to parallels early in former President Barack Obama’s first term when Democrats sought to pass a nearly trillion-dollar economic recovery package amid the Great Recession.
Democrats “took this almost exact same approach in 2009,” passing a “massive spending bill” replete with partisan priorities, Phillips said.
“Within a few months, the support level for the actions they were taking dropped dramatically,” he said, hurting Democrats politically.
The party held both chambers of Congress when Obama was elected in 2008, but by 2010, support was waning, and Democrats lost control of the House.
“Eleven years ago, Barack Obama was even more popular than Biden,” he said. “In 2010, their party got wiped out.”
