Mitch McConnell Gave the Democrats the Senate: Why Not Sending $2,000 Checks Was Political Suicide
The Republicans could have held the Senate and set themselves up better for dealing with President Biden
In a close election, a thousand things can make the difference. A slight improvement with one demographic group, or one group turning out more, or your opponent’s base not turning out can flip things. And the Democrats are going to win the Senate in the closest fashion:
It’s those elections though that are especially devastating. When you lose by 20 points, there’s usually nothing you can do. Those blowout elections tell the loser that the fundamentals doomed them. The best Democratic Senate candidate isn’t winning a normal election in Wyoming. The best Republican Senate candidate isn’t winning a normal election in Hawaii.
The Republicans are going to lose both Georgia races, which shouldn’t have happened. Perdue won by two points in November. Warnock didn’t hit 40% in a multi-candidate field. The GOP had a solid base to win the runoff. They just needed to get a few suburban defections—not a crazy proposition when Donald Trump is going to lose the presidency and some of these folks would prefer divided government. And it appears that Perdue ran better than Trump in some suburban counties. But Perdue couldn’t get Trump’s voters out in key areas and lost.
McConnell had a chance to give voters $2,000 checks. He balked. While he offered poison pills—Section 230 repeal and an electoral investigations as part of a package—he never seriously offered the $2,000 checks. Instead, he hoped that the $600 stimulus would be enough.
It wasn’t. The $2,000 stimulus might have been. Trump lost, but he outran the polls in a bevy of states, especially in the Midwest. Turnout was up across the board in November, including in rural areas. Trump also ran much better in urban areas.
One key finding is that some economic fundamentals tracked with Trump and Republican vote share better than polling. As real disposable incomes stayed steady and the GDP increased in the 3rd quarter, Trump even ran a bit behind some of the fundamentals.
People seem to like free money. As Perry Bacon of FiveThirtyEight noted recently:
Public opinion does appear to be on Democrats’ side. Seventy-eight percent of Americans said they supported these $2,000 stimulus checks, compared to 17 percent who opposed them, according to a poll conducted Dec. 22-28 by the left-leaning Data for Progress. Similarly, a survey conducted by Business Insider and Survey Monkey on Dec. 21 found that 62 percent of Americans said that the $600 stimulus checks adopted in a recent bill is not enough; 76 percent said the payments should be more than $1,000.
Perdue is going to lose by a point or less. $2,000 checks a few weeks before the election could have turned things around for him. Maybe a few more rural voters decide to vote for him because they think Perdue delivers for them, and the post-Trump GOP won’t revert to being a more corporate party (yes, I get that many of Trump’s voters still think he’s going to win). Maybe a few minority voters feel less threatened by a Republican Senate if they think it is willing to give everyone more money. Either of those things doesn’t have to be super persuasive to that many people in either group. We’re talking about a narrow shift. That’s all Perdue needed. He didn’t get it.
Even if you believe that the $2,000 checks wouldn’t have helped the Republicans hold the Senate, it’s baffling for another reason: the Republicans could have shifted to deficit hawkery far easier, which makes opposing and weakening President Biden easier for them.
The optimal political GOP strategy in 2021 seems to be to run back the 2009 and 2010 GOP strategy: Claim that the deficit is a giant problem, and oppose the Democratic president’s agenda. Well, if the Republicans had voted for a giant stimulus package with $2,000 checks for everyone, they could have more persuasively argued, “We just passed a monumentally big relief package. We gave the people what they need for a recovery. Now we have to consider the deficit, and we can’t pay for the cost of a public option or anything else the liberals want. We’re not going to raise your taxes or saddle your children with an unsustainable debt.” In the low interest and low inflation environment, you might find these arguments unpersuasive, but the Republicans have won elections on “Democrats will spend too much money on undeserving groups, and that will require tax increases.” There are a million different reasons people vote for each party, but the margins decide elections; that argument has won Republicans plenty of elections. They could have made that argument more persuasively had they just added more to the deficit.
That presents a question: Why did McConnell not just vote for the $2,000 checks? The GOP clearly doesn’t care at all about the deficit. They voted for tax cuts that exploded the deficit, and their new voting base will not countenance entitlement reform.
I’m not sure why he didn’t support bigger checks. Maybe he just thought the $2,000 checks were a bad idea. Maybe he wanted to hold the line and have more checks as part of future negotiations for liability protections or something else. I don’t know why he didn’t. I just think it was a colossal mistake.
In the Shawshank Redemption, Red spoke of the warden’s suicide, “I'd like to think that the last thing that went through his head, other than that bullet, was how the hell Andy Dufresne ever got the best of him.”
I like to think the last thing that will go through Perdue and Loeffler’s head as they depart the Senate in a few weeks is, “How the hell did we let Mitch McConnell’s check decision get the best of us?”
Kendall Kaut is an assistant district attorney, sports editor and election analyst. If you like the newsletter, please forward it and tell others to subscribe (we’re moving way up on Substack and staying free while we grow). You can follow Kendall on Twitter @kendallkaut
McConnell ABSOLUTELY KNEW opposing the $2,000 stimulus would cost Republicans the Senate - he did it ON PURPOSE. The Republican Party is nothing more than the underground part of the Democrat Globalist Fascist Socialist Party. Us former Republican voters now understand exactly what's going on.
Great article Kendall. I agree that McConnell's actions, or inactions, likely did play a role in what looks like 2 upsets in GA, but why were these elections close enough for that to matter? Like you said Warnock only had about 33% of the vote in November, and the 2 Republican candidates added up to over 45% of the total vote. I know that there were many factors at play, but I am really shocked that these races, especially the Warnock - Loeffler contest were close enough for this to matter. Maybe McConnell thought the same thing? Keep up the great work! -Chad