Democrat midterm chief Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) on Thursday stated he no longer believes President Joe Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ agenda is needed to win in November.
Asked by NBC News if Democrats need to pass the “Build Back Better” agenda to retain the House majority, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) said “no.”
Maloney added he believes the midterms will be decided on “whether they [voters] think we’re [Democrats] preachy or empathetic” and “whether they think we have the right priorities.” He also noted Democrats must double efforts to prove to voters that Democrats “care about them” and “share their values.”
Maloney’s Thursday’s comments do not resemble what he told the Washington Post in November before Biden’s agenda was stalled thanks to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).
Fearing the inevitable Virginia gubernatorial defeat at the time, Maloney told the Post Democrats must act quickly to enact the legislation into law because “people” are “angry is we haven’t fixed the problems of the economy and the pandemic,” adding that the Build Back Better agenda is “a real plan to do it.”
“The scale and impact of the plan we are putting in place needs to show up in the family budgets and daily lives of the people we hope to win,” Maloney claimed about the bill he now disregards as imperative.
Maloney’s November comments were supported by Democrat funds. The midterm-focused group Build Back Better Together announced in November a $10 million TV buy in the critical swing states of Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Pennsylvania to promote Biden’s now-failed agenda. Moreover, the House Majority Forward Democrat super PAC increased their investment by $20 million in the fall to push Biden’s failed agenda.
But with Biden’s agenda tanking before 2022, Democrats are left wondering how they will win the midterm elections. The New York Times acknowledged this challenge Friday in an article titled, “Bracing for Losses, Democrats Look to Biden for a Reset.”
The article detailed how the Democrats are rebooting their midterm approach while “bracing for big losses” due to being “buffeted by rising gas prices, soaring inflation, and sagging approval ratings.”
Biden is not confident he can save his party from losing big in November. On Thursday, the president issued a warning at the Democratic National Committee’s winter meeting.
“It’s going to be a sad, sad two years. Think about Republicans if they controlled the Congress these last two years,” Biden admitted.
Some Democrats, though, are unimpressed with Biden’s warning. Mocking Biden’s leadership during his State of the Union Address, radical Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) slammed Biden for his failures.
“People say the speech was unifying — unifying because it brought white moderates and white independents back,” Bowman said “I was sitting there, like, ‘Damn, again?’”
“It’s lazy and unacceptable for the president of the United States to only keep the conversation at that shallow level,” he added. “It’s deeper than that.”
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