A former Obama pollster warned Democrats are “endangering” the wafer-thin House majority in the midterms when they bloat spending packages with their radical partisan agenda items.
Joel Benenson, the lead Obama pollster, told Axios “You gotta win the middle to win.” This means you need to keep the swing voters on your side to win. However, Benenson said his years of data show only a small amount of swing voters tolerate massive spending bills.
Benenson said he did polling on “infrastructure” in 2019 in key states like Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Texas. He said that the “Overwhelming majorities, of all political stripes, support infrastructure spending.”
But, the Democrats are trying to use the “infrastructure” package with a reconciliation deal as a Trojan Horse to cram their radical partisan agenda items into the bill.
For instance, Democrat Rep. Lou Correa (CA) insisted that there needs to be an “immigration overhaul” in the package, which adds pressure on Democrats trying to pass the bills.
“I will not support any budget reconciliation deal that continues to leave hard-working undocumented taxpayers in limbo,” Correa said in a statement Sunday. “Anything less would be fiscally irresponsible.”
Last week a pollster for President Joe Biden, Celinda Lake, had also advised the administration that Americans are starting to worry about inflation. Lake noted inflation could be a key issue in the midterms. “Democrats can’t afford to ignore the inflation issue or hope it goes away; they need to tackle it head on,” Lake told Axios.
Despite that, reports show that the Democrats are not caring about inflation and have no problem with spending more. NBC News reported that for Democrats, “The suggestion is that more federal spending will more than counteract inflation, and the reason for that framing, according to the slide deck, is ‘polling’ from the firm run by Biden’s pollster, John Anzalone.”
During the CNN town hall, Biden even said, “If we pass the other two things that I want to get done, we will, in fact, reduce inflation.”