Americans love Biden's plans — and it's driving the GOP nuts

Polling released over the past two days shows both of President Joe Biden’s major pieces of legislation — the American Rescue Plan coronavirus relief package and the American Jobs Plan infrastructure bill — are overwhelmingly popular with the American public.

The legislation remains popular even after continued GOP criticism that the plans are “radical” and “socialist” and will increase the national debt.

Now Politico is reporting that moderate Republicans are “seething” over their failure to move Biden’s policies to the right. One aide to a GOP lawmaker said, “Everything they support is defined as either Covid relief or infrastructure, and everything they oppose is like … Jim Crow voter suppression and evil. And you constantly just feel like you’re in this gaslighting chamber of insanity. But it’s working.”

A look at the polling shows just how badly the GOP’s attempts to make Biden’s policies unpopular have gone.

A Monmouth University poll released Wednesday found 63% of Americans support the coronavirus relief package Biden signed into law, which authorized a round of $1,400 relief checks, extended more generous federal unemployment benefits, and expanded the child tax credit in a manner that some analysts said would help drastically cut child poverty rates.

Monmouth said the rate of support for the relief package is actually now higher than the 62% it saw in March, when the bill first passed without a single Republican vote.

The recent polling finds that GOP attacks on Biden’s $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan infrastructure package are also falling flat.

Republicans have slammed the legislation, saying that only a small fraction goes towards infrastructure, and that the mechanism to pay for it — increased taxes on the rich and corporations — is going to hurt the economy.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) complained that the plan contained billions in spending for elder care, which she said is not infrastructure.

However, a Politico/Morning Consult poll released on Wednesday found 54% of voters believe that caregiving should be considered infrastructure. That poll also found a majority of voters consider funding for child care, public schools, water pipes, internet access, and housing to be infrastructure as well.

The poll found that 57% of voters support the American Jobs Plan.

Other recent polls also show that a majority of the public supports the plan, including a New York Times/SurveyMonkey poll released Thursday that found 64% of Americans support it.

This is despite Republicans’ ongoing attempts to scare the public away.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said that increased taxes on corporations and on wealthy Americans — such as himself, with an estimated net worth of $39.2 million as of 2018 — would damage the economy.

“Increasing the corporate tax rate won’t pull us out of the COVID recession or set up long-term economic prosperity, but keeping the American corporate tax rate competitive will help businesses recover,” Johnson tweeted on April 6. 

But a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found the plan actually got more popular among Americans when they learned it would be funded by taxes on corporations.

RealClearPolitics reported that the House Republican Study Committee, the largest GOP conference in the chamber, had former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in to give its members a pep talk on Wednesday on how to successfully vilify Biden’s agenda, telling them to call Biden a liar and saying, “When your opponent is in the midst of committing suicide, there is no reason to commit murder. The result is the same.”

“We didn’t lose the White House because the American people disagree with our ideas and support what [Democrats] are trying to do right now,” Christie claimed.

Current polling is pointing in a different direction.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.