Memo to Democrats: Voters don't reward bold lawmaking

Follow Us Get the newsletter Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. What's the relationship between legislative productivity and subsequent election outcomes? Political scientist Seth Masket of the University of Denver has it exactly right: There's no reason to believe that major legislative action is what will impress voters. Masket, reacting to a recent essay by the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein (and see also a Times column by Jamelle Bouie), notes that the incredibly productive 111th Congress during the first two years of Barack Obama's presidency preceded a disaster for Democrats in 2014. He could go back further. The most famously productive Congress since the New Deal was the 89th — the Congress that produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicaid and Medicare, and lots more. After which Democrats lost 47 seats in the House of Representatives along with other losses in the Senate and elsewhere.  Sure, it's easy to say that Democrats should enact popular ideas, and should try to make their programs visible to those who benefit from them. All things equal, those are good strategies. But programs that poll well now may be less popular as they go through the legislative process. And there's no guarantee that those who benefit from a government program, even one that's highly visible, will reward the party that passed it.  Meanwhile, there are good reasons why party groups will push for measures they care about but that might be less than popular, and it might be hard for the rest of the party to turn them down in the interest of keeping the party coalition together and strong. As for making programs visible, that value has to compete with making them easy to administer — and also with wariness of being held responsible when things go wrong. If West Virginia's Senator Joe Manchin is willing to vote for climate measures as long as they're not overly visible in his state, then Democrats won't have much choice but to go along, even if it might also mean a lot of frustrated liberals who don't realize how much the party has done.  Democrats will be helped in the midterm elections of 2022 if the economy is strong, and if President Joe Biden is popular. To the extent that Democrats in Congress can make those things happen, they certainly have a strong electoral incentive to follow through in their bid to protect their thinnest of legislative majorities. Beyond that? All the things that they might want to do that won't directly help the economy? There's no way to know whether passing a lot of stuff will make Biden more or less popular, or have no effect at all on his approval ratings. Instead, the reason to do them, as Masket writes, is "because they care about it, because that's what majorities are for." It's not clear what measures they'll have the votes to pass, but when they act, the reason is because they are there to enact what they see as good public policy. After all, between January 1981 and January 2021, Democrats had all of four years of unified government. If they don't get it done now, there's no way of predicting when their next opportunity might be.  1. Sarah Binder at the Monkey Cage on the end of the showdown over organizing the Senate. 2. Dan Drezner on Biden's "Buy American" plans. 3. Josh Putnam on the possibility of a Nevada presidential primary. 4. Geoffrey Skelley on honeymoon approval ratings. 5. Here at Bloomberg Opinion, Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe on the effects of Kamala Harris's vice-presidency. 6. And Adam Serwer on the lies that Biden will tell. Yes, Biden will lie like a politician. Not nearly as frequently and flagrantly as former President Donald Trump, but yes, he will. And we will all be challenged to challenge misleading spin, exaggeration and misstatements. The standards should not drop just because he will be less deceitful than Trump or his allies, who continue to spew their blizzards of falsehoods. Nor should we neglect to remind citizens of Trumps record-breaking mendacity.  Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Early Returns newsletter. Unsubscribe | Bloomberg.com | Contact Us Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022