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NDN News: Time for Dems To Come Together, Facebook Event Wed 1pm ET

Upcoming Events: This Wed, 10/6 1pm ET – Facebook After the Whistleblower (More, RSVP).  Fri, Oct 15^th 2pm – With Democrats Things Get Better (More, RSVP).  Fri, 10/22 2pm ET - NDN’s Monthly 2022 election preview (More, RSVP). 

New Video: NDN has posted a video recording of Simon’s latest “With Democrats Things Get Better” 25 minute presentation.  This was a really good one – hope you can check it out.  

Press: NDN is in a new LA Times piece on the youth vote; a Washington Post piece on the lessons of the Newsom win; a Politico article about Biden and the impact of COVID’s return; a Real Clear Politics article about the debate inside the Democratic Party; a Political Courage podcast about Afghanistan and other matters; a WaPo Greg Sargent column on the GOP’s radicalization around COVID; and a USA Today essay on the success of the Biden economic agenda. 

Time for Dems To Come Together – Over the last few weeks we’ve talked about how an early, compelling 2022 election narrative had emerged for Democrats – lean into defeating COVID, sell the rest of the agenda (growing economy, climate, health care, etc) and brand the GOP as extremists, unfit to govern.   Given the threat an unrepentant MAGA/GOP is to our democracy, keeping them out of power next year may be the single most important thing we can do to defend our democracy and advance the President’s democracy vs autocracy agenda. Given the stakes here, 2022 is no ordinary election and we simply must be doing everything we can to make sure we can prevail. 

Which is why all Democrats should be more alarmed by the drop in the President’s approval rating since a rancorous debate has broken out over his agenda post-American Rescue Plan.  Since June 24^th when the two separate bills, infrastructure and reconciliation were joined and a more intense internal party in-fighting broke out, the President’s approval rating on 538 has dropped from 53.2-43 (+10.2) to 45.8-48.4 (-2.6) – a drop of 13 points.  This drop came at a time when the economy was creating 1m jobs a month, GDP growth was at 6.5% and tens of millions were receiving child tax credit payments. In our view the drop can be explained by the public believing the President was not attending to the big job at hand, defeating COVID, and thus even through the economy had started to truly boom the President got no credit for it.  It is widely believed that the President will need to be at 50-51-52 for the 2022 election to be competitive.  At 46-47-48, where we are now, we absolutely lose both chambers next year. Thus his decline is no small matter, and the longer he stays down the harder it will be to get back up. 

What this means is that we need to put this debilitating period of rancor, of process and tactics behind us as soon as possible.  All Democrats need to come together and get a deal done, recognizing the more time we spend fighting and not doing what the people want right now the harder 2022 is going to be. The President needs to have a fierce urgency in his work to get a deal done, allowing us to once again refocus on what voters want more than anything else – defeating COVID and ensuring our recovery.  As we talk about our agenda, any part of it, it needs to begin with “as we work to defeat COVID, create a strong, growing economy again, return to normal, we also need to (climate, health, child tax credit etc).”  For many/most voters there is no Biden agenda outside of COVID and recovery, the ARP now – all of the rest of the agenda needs to be seen as a complement to these core issues which are dictating our politics now, and are very likely to do so in the next election.  The work of defeating COVID and ensuring our recovery isn’t done, and that is simply where our governing and political focus must be. 

It is time now to come together, get a deal done and spend the next year leaning in hard to the promising frame we’ve seen emerge in recent weeks.  Winning this next election is going to be very hard – the longer we keep fighting the harder it is going to be.  And it all starts and ends with defeating COVID.  It remains job #1.  

Best – The NDN Team

 

 

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