The GOP Is Turning to White Grievance to Undermine Biden’s Relief Bill. But Will It Work?
The GOP playbook has long been about stirring up and exploiting racism to win white voters over, from bashing on “welfare queens” to claiming immigrants are streaming across the border to steal American jobs. To keep working white voters from turning their ire upon the wealthy, whose donations have helped keep the GOP in power and whose priorities they seem to always serve first, Republicans have pointed to the poorest and darkest-skinned among us and said, “See them? They are the ones taking what they don’t deserve.”
Joe Biden is now hoping to flip the script on white grievance through general but massive economic support for middle class and working families, with an array of child credits and health insurance subsidies that will benefit white families as powerfully as the poorest minority ones.
For decades, the strategy of white grievance has proven painfully effective, with white non-college educated workers flocking to the GOP. White, working class voters backed Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by 66 to 29 percent, the strongest imbalance since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Biden fared no better in 2020 nationally, though he did better in the critical states of Wisconsin and Michigan among these voters, capturing 40 percent of them and the White House along with it.
The GOP is banking on these voters to deliver them the House and the Senate in 2022 and maybe even the White House in 2024. To that end, Republicans have already started to label the Covid-19 relief bill as “welfare” that goes to people who don’t even work.
Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee trotted out the trope again recently. “That is not tax relief for working parents; it is welfare assistance," the two insisted in a dog-whistle filled joint statement last month. "An essential part of being pro-family is being pro-work. Congress should expand the Child Tax Credit without undercutting the responsibility of parents to work to provide for their families."
Fox News took it a step further and went down to Tennessee to interview white farmers about what they thought about minority farmers receiving roughly half the $10.9 billion in farm assistance that the relief bill contains. The set-aside for minority farmers was to make up for the way minority farmers have been shut out for decades from government agricultural programs. Fox News failed to mention this history of exclusion or the intent of the set-asides to its viewers, only that minority farmers were getting half of the farm relief. (The network also said that they tried to interview minority farmers but couldn’t find any.)
President Biden is betting, however, that money will talk louder than appeals to racism. The relief bill’s child credits will give middle income American families a huge lift, with white, working class families standing to gain around seven percent in income as a result. Some 90 percent of children will be covered under the bill, most of whom are white. A married couple earning about $40,000 annually with one child at home could see their income rise by nearly $6,000—a 15 percent increase. And this doesn’t even count the assistance coming to those who rely on the ACA marketplace, where premiums are set to drop by nearly $200 per month for a family earning $50,000. The credits and subsidies are set to expire in two years, setting up a rhetorical and policy showdown in the midterm elections that the Dems believe they can win.
The breadth of the assistance may make it difficult for the GOP to paint this relief as “welfare” because voters do not like to think of themselves as welfare recipients. “This rescue plan isn’t solving somebody else’s problem; it’s solving everyone’s problem,” said Jesse Ferguson, a longtime Democratic consultant, to CNN. “People are not going to view this as a zero-sum policy solution where somebody else is benefiting and they are losing. Instead, they view this as a rescue from a pandemic where everyone was losing.”
Will Biden’s plan be enough to bring some white, working class voters back into the Democratic fold? It’s too soon to tell for sure, but there are some positive signs. For example, in deeply red Iowa, which voted for Trump by 8 percent, Biden’s popularity has risen to a majority of 51 percent favorable over 46 percent unfavorable on the strength of the relief bill and his pandemic response. Biden had been viewed unfavorably by 51 percent of voters in that state just six months ago, so this represents a dramatic shift of around 8 percent.
And that’s got to have the GOP worried—and busy preparing even more divisive tactics in response.