Democrats to launch PR offensive to promote massive Covid relief package

‘The work is not done,’ Senate Majority Leader Schumer says

With the House of Representatives poised to pass Joe Biden’s historic Covid relief legislation this week, sending it to the president’s desk to be signed into law, now comes the hard part for Democrats: Selling the $1.9trn mammoth to voters.

“The work is not done,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote in a letter to his Democratic colleagues on Tuesday.

“Over the next few weeks and months, we must take every opportunity we get to explain exactly how the American Rescue Plan will work for the American people,” he wrote.

Mr Schumer exhorted his fellow Democrats to join him on a publicity campaign for the landmark pandemic relief legislation, urging them to seize every opportunity to tout the bill’s many “people-focused provisions”: $1,400 stimulus checks for more than eight of every 10 American households, an extension into the summer of the Covid-era federal unemployment benefits programme, the broadened child tax credit, and several other top-line measures.

“We cannot be shy in telling the American people how this historic legislation directly helps them,” Senate Democratic leader wrote.

When Mr Biden signs it into law, the new bill will be the second most expensive piece of legislation in US history behind last March’s initial coronavirus response package known as the CARES Act.

Despite progressives’ qualms with this new package — its narrowed eligibility for stimulus checks, a shorter unemployment check extension than expected — it has enjoyed broad support in public polling from across the ideological spectrum.

A Monmouth University poll from last Wednesday found that more than six in 10 Americans supported the Biden stimulus plan.

That should make Democrats’ job easier when it comes to publicising the legislation to defend their congressional majorities in the 2022 midterms.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney has already suggested the Covid relief bill will be “a big piece of the puzzle” in his party’s plans to keep control of the House.

“Anytime you're delivering for the American people, you're strengthening your position politically. So this is going to strengthen us because it's good policy,” he told NBC News in an interview on Tuesday.

“We should shout it from the rooftops that we are passing historic legislation that will reboot the economy and end the pandemic.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has characterised the bill as an “excellent” compromise between the Democratic party’s progressive and centrist elements.

The president is on board with shamelessly promoting the new legislation as well, telling House Democrats on a conference call last week that the Obama administration paid a political price for being too humble after signing into law the nearly $1trn stimulus package in 2009 to try to climb out of the Great Recession.

“We didn’t adequately explain what we had done. Barack was so modest,” Mr Biden lamented on the call. “I kept saying, ‘Tell people what we did.’ He said, ‘We don’t have time. I’m not going to take a victory lap.’ And we paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility.”

While Republicans have hammered Democrats for cutting them out of Covid relief negotiations by using the budget reconciliation process to side-step the Senate’s traditional 60-vote threshold for legislation, Mr Schumer has expressed no remorse for following that route.

“What happened in 2009 and ’10 is we tried to work with the Republicans, the package ended up being much too small, and the recession lasted for five years,” the Democratic leader told the Washington Post recently.

“People got sour; we lost the election,” he said.