Since a handful of ‘centrist’ Democrats are threatening to torpedo the core of President Joe Biden's domestic agenda over unspecified concerns, perhaps now is an excellent time to remind them how popular it is for a party to fail.
Happily, Republicans very recently offered up an example of a bruising political defeat when the GOP enjoyed unilateral control of Congress and the White House. When Donald Trump first took office in 2017, congressional Republicans quickly turned to make good on their decade-long promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act "root and branch," as GOP Leader Mitch McConnell liked to say.
It was a mess from Day One because Republicans are all-around terrible legislators, extra burdened at the time with the dead weight of Trump. Try as they might, they couldn't even agree on the terms for repeal, much less a way to provide replacement insurance for the millions of Americans they planned to strip of coverage.
So after several months of fruitless wrangling, House GOP leaders finally pulled the flailing bill from the floor on March 24, 2017, rather than suffer the defeat. But that wasn't the last of it.
Republicans made a second try with a so-called "skinny" repeal, devoting another four months to the effort. The Republican who ultimately put an end to the madness was the late GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona, whose satisfying thumbs-down vote on July 28 narrowly saved the nation from hitting a health care iceberg.
But for Republican lawmakers and all those GOP voters who had been promised the first order of business would be obliterating Obamacare, the whole episode was a colossal failure.
The Civiqs tracking poll of the Republican Party captures perfectly how that played for a party that was already incredibly unpopular (and remains so to this day).
Among the general public, the initial March failure triggered a 7-point rise in unpopularity from 59% unfavorable to 66% unfavorable—its least popular moment in the entirety of Trump's tenure. The GOP's favorables didn't really start to tick up again until the House passed its tax bill in mid-November, setting up final passage by the Senate in December.
But the main reason the GOP's overall favorables took a hit was that their favorability rating among Republican voters plummeted in the wake of the defeat, dropping from about 58% favorability when the first bill was pulled to a nadir of 43% around mid-September.
Republicans recovered only because they ultimately passed their tax cuts for the mega rich and U.S. corporations by the end of 2017. It was a vastly unpopular bill that grew even more unpopular over time. Still, it’s also proof positive that—even when a bill is unpopular—notching legislative successes is far better for a party in power than logging legislative defeats.
That’s a lesson these so-called centrist Democrats might want to consider if they want any chance at keeping their seats in 2022.