WASHINGTON — Joe Biden will encounter an angry and impatient public when he assumes office Wednesday, one that has endured a tumultuous year of crises that have torn at the nation’s social fabric.
If the new president wants to build an enduring base of political support, Democratic lawmakers and senior political strategists say, he’ll need to swiftly deliver tangible results or face a backlash that could cost his party their slim congressional majorities.
“Keep it simple is my message,” said Democratic Rep. Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, an early supporter of Biden’s presidential bid. “People out there are desperate to see their elected lawmakers work together and pass something that doesn’t reinvent the wheel, doesn’t tear down the system, it just makes things a little easier on them in a moment of crisis.”
Biden’s inauguration as the country’s 46th president is the culmination of an unlikely campaign, one that saw him overcome a dismal start to the Democratic primary and later defeat an incumbent president for the first time since 1992 when Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush.
For the longtime Democrat, it was the highlight of a political career that began in the Senate in 1973, endured two previous losing presidential campaigns, and included eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president.
But none of those experiences compare to the situation Biden now inherits, amid a pandemic that has claimed the lives of 400,000 Americans and induced an economic downturn. The nation was also wracked last summer by racial justice protests and more recently by an attack on the Capitol from a mob that wrongly believed the election had been stolen from President Donald Trump.
Biden has responded to the challenges by urging unity from Americans across the political spectrum, a theme Biden advisers say he will make central to his inaugural address Wednesday.
But political strategists insist that while Biden must try to soothe the country after he takes office, it won’t be nearly enough to win a majority of voters’ support long term. He can’t afford to lose many voters, either: Even as Biden won more than 81 million votes, Trump earned more than 74 million votes, the most ever for a losing presidential bid.
“There are a lot of people who didn’t like Donald Trump who are going to be heartened by a Democrat in the White House who is a decent human being and likes and respects people,” said Faiz Shakir, who managed Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. “But it’s not sufficient to do the work of demonstrating why Democrats should be in power in the White House, House, and in the Senate.”
Shakir, echoing the sentiment of many liberal activists, said Biden cannot become bogged down by questions of legislative procedure, including the filibuster in the Senate that will require the support of GOP legislators to overcome. Voters simply don’t care about that, he said.
“If you had power, what did you do with it? That’s what people want to know,” Shakir said. “Simple questions, simple answers. That’s how they make their judgments and determinations.”
Biden will immediately be forced to balance demands from more liberal members of his party as Democrats take full control of Washington for the first time in 10 years with his pledge to pursue bipartisan compromise.
The first test will come with his recently unveiled $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, which includes another round of stimulus checks, more unemployment aid and higher funding for testing and vaccinations. Some progressives would like to see the proposal go further, while it remains unclear if enough Republicans will support the measure to allow it to pass through the Senate.
Rep. Barbara Lee of California, a former co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said she would like to see a package that includes $2,000 stimulus checks every month, rather than the single $1,400 payment that’s in the current plan.
But she thinks Biden’s experience working across the aisle as vice president and as a senator will allow him to ultimately forge a deal palatable to members of both parties.
“Biden can pull Republicans together to make sure they support the package,” Lee said. “This is not a regional issue, it’s not a partisan issue. This is a matter of life or death.”
Some former Republican political operatives say that if Biden manages the pandemic well, including accelerating distribution of the vaccine, it could help him maintain the support of moderate GOP voters who backed him last year, even if they’re otherwise ambivalent about some of his policy goals.
“There’s going to be a trade-off,” said Sarah Longwell, founder of Republican Voters Against Trump. “He’s going to do some progressive things that Republicans are not going to like, but he also has an opportunity to do a lot of things that people like and make people’s lives better because of the virus.”
Longwell added that she was wary about some of the proposals in the relief package, like raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, saying it would unduly harm small businesses amid a difficult economy.
Lamb said Biden’s $1.9 trillion proposal was a “solid opening bid,” adding that the price tag was high but the overall package was focused on delivering relief to the right areas.
He is still cautious, however, about Biden pursuing an aggressively liberal agenda across the board, citing the narrow edge the party holds in both the Senate and House.
“The American people did not give us a license to pursue an extremely far-left agenda,” Lamb said. “They just didn’t.”
Recent polling suggests Biden will assume office with more goodwill from the public than Trump had. A new NBC News survey found that 60% of voters approve of Biden’s handling of the presidential transition. That figure stood at just 44% for Trump four years ago.
But Biden’s rating still falls below where Obama was in 2009, when 71% of voters said they approved of his transition.
“The divisions that were there prior to the election are still there, and they’re not going to be easily melted away,” said veteran Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who worked on the NBC survey. “What President-elect Biden faces is not the same environment that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama had, where there was a natural support for the person coming in.”
Narrow margins in the House and Senate also mean both parties will view all of Biden’s moves through the lens of the 2022 midterm elections. History is not on Biden’s side: Since Franklin Roosevelt took office, George W. Bush is the only first-term president whose party gained seats in the House in a midterm election.
While the nation’s crises present daunting challenges for Biden, Democrats also say they could present him with a political opportunity to buck that trend.
“We’re past the point of blaming Trump or a variety of other factors,” said Paul Maslin, another seasoned Democratic pollster. “He’s got to fix it.”
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