WASHINGTON — Mitch McConnell can see the future — and knows it’s likely to place Republicans in a pickle.
He sees a rapidly recovering economy, an increasingly vaccinated population and general optimism budding across the country like bluegrass at the start of springtime. And he’s realized the GOP needs an explanation for the shower of good news coming in the opening months of a new Democratic administration.
McConnell’s response, sprinkled in a drumbeat of speeches and media appearances during the month of March, is that the past is prologue. President Joe Biden and Democrats shouldn’t get the credit for all of this, he says, when it was the Republican-led work during former President Donald Trump’s final year in office that set the stage for this moment to begin to emerge from the pandemic.
“Because of last year’s bipartisan work, our economy was already poised for an historic comeback,” McConnell said on the Senate floor last week before the chamber adjourned for a two-week recess. “So I’ll be joining Kentuckians to celebrate what’s gone well, thanks to our bipartisan work last year.”
It’s a message he’s been carrying ever since Democrats were on the cusp of passing their $1.9 trillion COVID-19 rescue plan earlier this month with zero Republican votes — and a message that he’s been plugging with more urgency now that Americans are receiving their stimulus checks and Biden is receiving the preponderance of the credit.
“What I’m saying is the economy is about to come roaring back. What the administration is trying to do here, Judy, is to get in front of the parade so they can take credit for what’s already happening based upon what we have already done,” McConnell told Judy Woodruff on "PBS NewsHour" after Biden signed the bill into law.
A few days later, he added, “This brighter horizon is not a product of a partisan bill that was signed last week, or an administration that was sworn in less than two months ago.”
And before that, McConnell proclaimed, “The Biden administration inherited a tide that was already turning.”
McConnell’s problem is that while the economic argument is at best debatable, the politics are pointed emphatically against him right now.
“It’s hard for them to argue they should take credit for this,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics.
Zandi said while last year’s two biggest bipartisan economic packages were indeed crucial to the economic rebound, the American Rescue Plan will “hyperdrive” the recovery through this spring and summer.
“That takes an economy that was going to come back, and allows it to come roaring back,” he said. “March is going to be a very strong month … but it’s really going to show up in April, May, June.”
The indications are everywhere. Restaurant, hotel and Airbnb bookings are climbing up, as are purchases of airline tickets, as higher-income consumers eagerly tap the savings they stored away at home for the past year. Investment giant Goldman Sachs is projecting 8% growth in 2021 with unemployment dropping to 4% by year’s end.
Kentucky’s unemployment rate is 5.2%, just a point higher than the 4.2% rate it had in March of 2020 when the pandemic struck.
The vaccination surge — Biden announced on Monday 90% of all American adults would be eligible for their shots in three weeks -- is driving most of the current economic tailwinds.
McConnell is acknowledging the good news, calling 2021 “our comeback year” and the coming months an “optimistic springtime,” but even Republicans concede that his attempts at seizing credit from a president is complicated.
“There’s no question that the groundwork laid in the past is important for whatever growth we’re seeing today. It’s also true that whoever is president gets more blame than he deserves and more credit than he deserves when the economy is bad or good,” said longtime GOP pollster Whit Ayres.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll shows Biden’s broadest support is for his response to the pandemic (75%), vaccine distribution (72%) and his handling of the economy (60%). In an attempt to prolong the political momentum, the Biden administration continues to deploy officials across the country to herald the benefits — “Help is here,” is the refrain — including a monthly child allowance of up to $300 that will continue to deposit into family bank accounts through the end of the year.
The immediate and tangible impact of direct payments is difficult to campaign against, so Republicans may be better off pivoting to other issues or at least attempting to reframe the economic debate.
Grover Norquist, president of the fiscally conservative-driven Americans for Tax Reform, said the real stimulus came before the coronavirus hit when former President Donald Trump’s 14% corporate tax cut went into place.
“The best message for Republicans is: We had an incredibly strong period of economic growth before COVID. Because the corporate rates are down, the individual rates are down,” said Norquist, who wants conservatives to focus on “the underlying tax policy that Biden wants to change.”
Tax hikes are historically riskier turf for Democrats. And polls already show Biden is considerably weaker on the confounding issues of immigration and gun control, which Democrats are promising to move on at some point in the coming months.
In Washington, the debate can be reframed quickly and popular policies can lose favor over time -- but the country’s economic trajectory emerging from a 100-year pandemic is one storyline that won’t be fading anytime soon.
The question is when McConnell decides to target his arguments elsewhere.
