Jonathan Bernstein: “What we’re seeing right now are the effects of 1994 and 2010. Republicans are repeating their approach from those years: Oppose whatever the Democratic president proposes. It appears at this point that President Joe Biden will fail to get any Republican votes on his first major bill, and opposition to his cabinet picks is growing. Biden and the Democrats, for their part, are determined to have a different outcome than what happened in those years, drawing the lesson that the risks of underreaction are worse than the risks of overreaction.”
“Here’s the thing: In the old days, what happens over the next 10 months or so would be critical… To the extent that elections are nationalized now, all that changes. Voters still have short memories; what they think about Biden and how he’s handling things this year probably won’t matter much next year. Perhaps that means that Biden has more leeway for a slow start than, say, Clinton or Reagan did. But there’s still nothing certain about it. So the Democrats are probably correct to tackle the pandemic and boost the economy as quickly as possible if they want to avoid yet another midterm debacle.”
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