Jamelle Bouie writes:

Popular or unpopular, good economy or bad, the president’s party almost always loses seats in midterm elections. That there are so few exceptions — Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1934, Bill Clinton and the Democrats in 1998, and George W. Bush and the Republicans in 2002 — proves the rule.

The upshot is that if you are a member of Congress in the majority — and you share a party with the president — the die has been cast. Your party will most likely lose seats in the next elections. You might lose your seat. With that in mind, you can fret and tinker and try to save yourself, or you can do as much as possible with the time you have in power. Voters may not reward productivity, but they almost always punish failure.

I say all of this apropos of the Democrats’ two-pronged infrastructure strategy. Moderate and conservative Democrats want a bipartisan bill for roads and transit that they can tout to their voters; progressive Democrats want a partisan bill for new programs and benefits to shore up and expand the American welfare state. Some moderates also fear that anything more aggressive than the bipartisan bill might expose them to backlash in their districts.

If, in 2020, Democrats had won the kind of overwhelming majority they enjoyed at the outset of the Obama administration, one side or the other might be able to win an outright struggle over the party’s agenda. But razor-thin margins in the House and Senate give each side the power to kill most of the other side’s top priorities. The solution is to do both bills at the same time — to link the passage of one to the other. There will be no bipartisan bill if the partisan one isn’t passed and no partisan bill if the bipartisan one does not come to a vote. If the two sides don’t hang together, then they will both go down to defeat. [Continue reading…]