The Trailer: Less talking, more spending: How Biden’s avoided a 100-day slump

“Presidents may be wasting their time and resources and adopting governing styles that are prone to failure,” Edwards wrote in “Overreach,” a 2012 study of President Barack Obama’s first term. “Presidents cannot reshape the contours of the political landscape to pave the way for change.”

What happens when a president doesn’t really try? Biden is finding out, and so is Edwards. The president has been less visible, and spoken less in public, than any of his immediate predecessors. The light touch has led to unsubstantiated conservative accusations of presidential dementia and questions about who’s “really in charge” of the country; it has fueled some anger on the left while leaving Biden with higher approval ratings among Democrats than Trump tended to hold with Republicans. The president has seen no real drop in his approval rating, no grass-roots organizing against his agenda, and nearly zero appearances in Republican advertising.

“There’s no evidence that presidents can expand their base by going public,” Edwards said in an interview this week, noting the stability of Biden’s poll numbers and the passage, so far, of his agenda. “Donald Trump is a perfect case. Here’s a guy who spent his life in self-promotion. He did a great job in dominating the media agenda. He did a not-great job promoting his policies.”

Other presidents have been more popular in their first 100 days, Trump excepted. Biden’s recent predecessors generated massive resistance, with visible swings in public opinion. At this point in Trump’s presidency, the largest one-day protest in American history had come and gone, followed by spontaneous rallies against Trump’s “Muslim ban” and a march to demand the president’s hidden tax returns. At this point in Obama’s, the first wave of tea-party protests was over, and the second was underway — hundreds across the country, advertised on Fox News, organizing with a speed and an ethos that confounded liberals.

Nothing like that has unfolded under Biden. Although shutdowns have ended in red states where the president is least popular, and although traditional campaigning has returned, there’s none of the mass organizing that confronted the Trump or Obama. That has been a shock to liberals. Groups that grew out of the 2017 Trump resistance just wrapped up two weeks of “Recovery Recess” events, promoting what’s in Biden’s recovery plans. If there was a grass-roots conservative resistance, they couldn’t find it.

“We were prepared for it,” said Mary Small, the policy director of Indivisible, a member of the Recovery Recess coalition. “We were ready for the backlash dynamic we saw in the Obama administration.”

The opponents never showed up. There was no visible grass-roots organizing against Biden’s legislative priority, the infrastructure bill. One tea party group focused on organizing against H.R. 1, the Democrats’ omnibus election bill; most House and Senate Republicans focused on immigration, with junkets to the U.S.-Mexico border, an issue Biden has not discussed at length unless pressed, as he was in his sole news conference last month.

There’s a mismatch between what the White House focuses on and what Republicans focus on, and it’s visible in recent tracking polls. Two, from Ipsos and YouGov, found Biden’s approval ticking up over the recess; Ipsos found the proportion of voters who called immigration the biggest problem facing the country dropping from late March to mid-April. Biden’s approval rating on immigration has run 10 to 15 points below his overall job rating, but only Republican voters have prioritized it, letting the president skate with the rest of the electorate.

Republicans have theories about how Biden does this, developing them during the presidential campaign, where he never relinquished a polling lead despite doing far less in public than Trump. One is that the media, defined broadly, is not covering him as skeptically as it covers Republicans. The other is that polling simply isn’t right, a theory that carried some weight after Trump did better in 2020 than pollsters expected. (Democratic pollsters don’t disagree with all of that.) And although more popular than Trump ever was, Biden is lagging behind the initial approval ratings enjoyed by Obama, whose support didn’t begin to dip from the mid-60s until the beginning of the debate over the Affordable Care Act.

But the president is simply not at the center of most political debates for numerous reasons, and for the past three months that has helped him. Special elections so far this year have not attracted the investment or interest that the first races of the Trump and Obama years did, with no seats switching between parties yet. The highest-profile Democratic defector of the Biden era, North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee, did not mention Biden at all as a reason he joined the GOP, crediting the socialists who he said had taken over the state Democratic Party for his exodus. Republican advertising in even expensive House and Senate primaries has generally ignored Biden in favor of “cancel culture” and “election integrity.” Biden is a character in those story lines, but not the star.

“There’s something to learn from the campaign,” said John Anzalone, a Biden-Harris pollster who advises the White House. “We got hit from June until Election Day. Ninety percent of Trump’s ads were negative, and our popularity increased. I mean, has that ever happened? They tried to call him a radical for six months and people just didn’t buy it.”

That’s a rosy memory of the campaign, but it isn’t wrong. Biden’s favorable rating, which dipped after he entered the Democratic primary, rose throughout the general election, and the national exit poll found him with a 12-point positive image advantage over Trump. The Republican nominee had complete control of his party, and was the central figure in all of its fundraising, a role he returned to shortly after his second impeachment trial ended this year. 

Trump’s endorsement is a precious Republican commodity, with party primaries still frequently fought over which candidate has been loyal to the former president. Three months into his ex-presidency, Trump has headlined an RNC fundraiser (more about that below) and endorsed nine candidates; Biden has attended no DNC fundraisers and endorsed no candidates. Biden recedes from headlines, while Trump still craves them. 

For an example, look at the FDA’s announcement that the Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine should be paused. The president briefly commented that there was “enough vaccine that is basically 100 percent unquestionable,” while the ex-president released a confusing statement suggesting that the pause may have been a conspiracy to help Pfizer, a company he continues to blame for not releasing news of the first vaccine in time to boost his reelection. At the cost of the occasional Republican attack on his age, or question about his whereabouts, Biden avoids the fights that Trump constantly started.

“Trump was frequently tweeting about all sorts of matters, often in an incendiary fashion,” Edwards said. “He loved to get the attention of the media, which he succeeded in doing. Did it help with his base? It did help. And as far expanding beyond that base, he was a massive failure.”

One normal night in Florida.

Michael Wood’s unusual primary campaign.

A survey of the voting wars and the private sector’s new front in them.

How a high-profile election with a few thousand voters was won.

Why the former president is not getting pushed aside.

Former president Donald Trump’s Saturday night speech to Republican donors in Florida was infamous before it was over, with some wealthy and anonymous people sharing the details with reporters. Trump’s political operation had previewed one speech before the evening started; Trump theatrically threw it out, riffing for the better part of an hour on the 2020 election and his baseless insistence that it was stolen from him.

If anything was shocking about the night, it was that donors had the capacity for surprise. Trump, who has spoken mostly through news releases since leaving the White House, has been winding in and out of the same monologue since the election was called for Biden. Weeks ago, at a Mar-a-Lago wedding reception, a tuxedoed Trump remembered how at “10:30 in the evening,” on election night, things were “closing up in certain places.” He didn’t finish that thought, but the memory of watching early returns break his way, and the specific time, returned at the Republican National Committee fundraiser.

“At 10:30 in the evening, I got a call from a real stiff named Karl Rove,” Trump said. “Karl Rove said, sir, congratulations on your victory. But, many people called me.”

As The Post’s Josh Dawsey first reported, Trump called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) an S.O.B., and insisted that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) would “never have allowed it to happen,” it being the certification of an election that his party’s candidate would not concede. Trump also reiterated what some participants in the “Save America” rally on Jan. 6 had stopped saying: Had Republicans found their willpower, they could have canceled Biden’s victory and given Trump another term. 

“I wish that Mike Pence had the courage to send it back to the legislatures,” Trump said, adding another falsehood: “I believe that if he would have sent it back to the legislatures, where it would show in Michigan and Pennsylvania, that you had more votes than you had voters.”

It was the most specific election story Trump told onstage, and it wasn’t true. Turnout in both states was above 70 percent, the highest in a century, but not larger than the electorate. The claim that some Michigan precincts had more “votes than voters” was based on false data about Minnesota precincts, mistakenly (or just falsely) endorsed as data from Michigan by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. The same claim about Pennsylvania, originally made by a Republican state legislator, was based on a set of Pennsylvania registration numbers that left out the commonwealth’s biggest counties.

“You can say almost anything,” Trump told the donors. “The one thing you can’t talk about is the fraudulent election, presidential, of 2020. You can’t talk about it. You know why? They’re too close to home.”

Trump’s attack on McConnell made the most news outside the room. Inside, it didn’t get a warm reaction. What did: every Trump claim that the election was stolen from him. Each time he did so, there was loud applause. And before Trump spoke, the questions from donors to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) showed the same dynamic of the people who could pay $100,000 for tickets to meet top Republicans having the same concerns as Republican activists. Cotton was asked about China’s threat to Taiwan, how children could be protected from liberal teachers pushing dogma, and whether conservatives should boycott Coca-Cola after its intervention in Georgia’s election debate.

“Major League Baseball and massive corporations like Delta and Coca-Cola are boycotting an entire state for passing voter ID laws,” Cotton said. “To those corporations, I say this: if you’re silent about the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide while begging for their business, don’t start lecturing Americans about voter ID.”

Troy Carter, “Troy Carter Will Get Things Done.” The top vote-getter in last month’s primary in Louisiana’s 2nd Congressional District, Carter is closing out the runoff by reemphasizing his alliance with the White House through former Rep. Cedric Richmond’s role there. “Congressman Richmond endorsed me to fill his seat for a simple reason,” Carter says. “He knows I can get things done.”

Jake Ellzey, “Education, Not Indoctrination.” Ellzey is the only Republican in the crowded primary for Texas’s 6th Congressional District who has sought the office before, narrowly losing a 2018 primary to Ron Wright. Now a state legislator, Ellzey’s campaign ads for this cycle go beyond his military service, into monologues about the crises he sees bearing down on the country. “We must stop efforts to force teachers to comply with radical indoctrination,” he says here; another ad suggests that “we must stand for the free market and stand against socialism” (Neither mentions that he’s in the state legislature, where he has served just a few months.)

Mark Moores, “Seniors.” The special election for New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District pits a swing-seat Republican legislator (Moores) against a swing-seat Democratic legislator (Melanie Stansbury), and the race has so far lacked the acid partisanship of … well, of every other race in the country. That continues with Moores’s first negative ad, the first attack from either candidate, which goes after Stansbury for doing “little to lower taxes on seniors’ Social Security.” Moores has a bill on that policy; Stansbury doesn’t. 

Economy/unemployment/jobs: 21% (+2 since last week) 
Public health/disease/illness: 13% (+2) 
Immigration: 12% (-1) 
Health care system: 9% (-)
Inequality/discrimination: 9% (+1) 
Crime/corruption: 6% (-)
Environment/climate: 5% (+2) 
Morality: 5% (-1)

One of the only public, weekly tracking polls, Ipsos captured the rise of immigration as a top voter issue last month; this week, it captured either a blip or the start of a decline in that issue’s salience. Republicans still cite immigration as the country’s top problem, but independents, who did the same last month, have moved on, from 19 percent of them naming immigration first to just 9 percent. That coincided with an overall jump in Biden’s approval rating, from a net positive 13 points to a net positive 19 points. While Republicans spent the recess visiting the U.S.-Mexico border and decrying conditions there, they struggled to keep it in front of voters, one reason they had urged Biden to go personally.

Nobody knows what New York’s new electoral map will look like after redistricting, but Democrat Dana Balter won’t be on it. After a narrower-than-expected loss in 2018 and a bigger-than-expected loss in 2020, she swore off a third bid against Rep. John Katko (R), who now represents one of the bluest districts held by a Republican: It backed Joe Biden by 9 points, while rejecting Balter by 10 points.

Nobody knows when Florida’s special election for the 20th Congressional District will be held, either — except for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who has the sole power to schedule the vote to replace the late Alcee Hastings. Three Democrats have jumped in, with Broward County Commissioner Dale Holness joining state Sen. Perry Thurston and Broward County Commissioner Barbara Sharief. The district is safely Democratic.

The union election at Amazon’s Bessemer, Ala., fulfillment center was a rout for organizers, with just 738 workers voting “yes” and 1,798 voting “no.” The bad omens for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union were visible when The Trailer reported from the state, for reasons we laid out at the time — a late start, a larger electorate than organizers had wanted, and a lack of campaign resources. When the ballots were in, the RWDSU quickly filed an objection to the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the company interfered with the vote.

(Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

That challenge isn’t likely to succeed, and there weren’t enough ballots challenged in the long run-up to the count to make a difference. A total of 505 ballots were challenged, and 76 marked void; all of them, added to the “yes” total, would still leave it far short. It was the first union election in decades that a sitting president endorsed, and it was the worst defeat yet for a theory that majority-Black workforces in the South could be organized in a new civil rights struggle.

What happened? Union elections aren’t complicated: Organizers must get at least 30 percent of workers to sign cards agreeing to vote on organizing. The RWDSU, which has a fairly small presence in Alabama, wanted an election among a 1,500-worker unit; Amazon argued to the NLRB, successfully, that the election should be held among all of the nearly 6,000 workers at the facility. Organizers hit 30 percent of the larger threshold, but a winning union drive typically starts with enough support to overcome whatever tactics are used to peel off soft supporters. The RWDSU never had a majority of workers to lose, and it did not engage in door-to-door canvassing to win more of them.

“You want to get about 50 percent of the workplace signed up on those cards,” RWDSU organizer Joshua Brewer said in an interview with the Battleground podcast last week.

The rest of the facts were laid out, unsparingly, by Jane McAlevey in the Nation. With very stiff odds, the union sought, and got, attention from the media and from sympathetic politicians such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). The story was irresistible: The biggest company in the world, which recognizes many unions at facilities in Europe, was facing a union drive in America. 

The intervention of the president was a genuine boost to workers who favored the union, and it probably picked up votes. More Perfect Union, a media-start up run by former Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir, made Bessemer the first test of a new strategy for publicizing union drives; its videos and reports did that, but came in for criticism after the drive failed. 

Some activists hoped that even a failure in Alabama would draw attention to the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which has passed the Democratic House and could be part of a final infrastructure bill. Had the PRO Act been law when the union drive began, the effort to limit the vote to a smaller bargaining unit would have been accepted. But the size of the loss threw that theory into question.

“The coverage heaped a mountain of unwarranted attention that might serve the media narrative behind the PRO Act, but overhyped campaigns also leave people feeling defeated,” McAlevey wrote.

The White House’s only comment on the defeat was, in fact, to tout the PRO Act. There is immense pressure on Democrats from labor and left-wing organizers, including Democratic Socialists of America, to get that past any skepticism in the Senate caucus. And their campaigns have pointed to the union defeat as the sort of thing the PRO Act could prevent.

Dan Rodimer’s campaign in Texas’s 6th Congressional District is a real-time test of whether all publicity really is good publicity. Rodimer, a 6-foot-7 former wrestler who ran for Congress in Nevada last year, moved to Texas and filed for this race at the last possible hour. His debut video, in which he claimed to ride a bull, portrayed someone who was not Dan Rodimer riding a bull.

Last week, Rodimer was confronted about the ad at a GOP meeting in Ellis County, where each candidate got one question from local activists. Most of the questions were friendly. Rodimer’s was not. How, he was asked, could he start out his campaign pretending to ride a bull?

“One, actually, I did ride the bull,” Rodimer said, in a video recorded by the local party. “I stayed on for 11 seconds.” 

Rodimer had said this before, asking news outlets to correct their stories about the video by saying “we didn’t get the full filming of it” and “had other people jump in to be body doubles.” In the GOP meeting, he went further, explaining that the attention surrounding the video helped him score major media interviews.

“Here’s the deal: Chuck Norris? You think he did his own stunts?” Rodimer said, a confusing reference to an actor known for performing most of his stunts. “WWE, you think it’s all real? Some of it’s fake. Fact is, they wanted me to ride that bull six times. I rode it one time, and I was like: There’s no way in hell I’m riding it again. You know what’s so great about that? Now, what happened was… it’s so great, because CNN and Fox and all these news stations want me on. And you know what I do? I pivot and I talk about our issues.”

The all-party primary is on May 1, and the next edition of The Trailer will have more about the race and fundraising totals — from Rodimer’s race and from across the country.

Shortly before this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Axios scooped an irresistible detail about House Speaker John Boehner’s upcoming memoir. While recording the audible book of “On the House,” Boehner had been “going off script,” adding asides, such as a four-letter insult directed at Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). 

A feud that started when Boehner was Washington’s most powerful Republican, which worsened when Cruz ran for president, was back, and less family-friendly than ever — and while Cruz was reeling from the backlash to a Cancún vacation as a deep freeze hit his state. How would Cruz respond when he took that CPAC stage?

“Who’s John Boehner?” Cruz joked. It was the only reference to Boehner, the last Republican speaker who retired with his party in control of the House, across the three-day event.

The Boehner who jokes and sometimes rambles through “On the House” is memorable, though not for anything he did in Washington. The best insults made it into news stories, from pre-publication copies of the book; an appendix of “Boehnerisms” includes three jokes about golf, one of which appears again just a page before the appendix. 

As a memoir, it’s refreshing and unpretentious. Traditional D.C. ghostwriting has been banished in favor of dinner party anecdotes that skip across time and place. Like “Man of the House,” the Tip O’Neill memoir that became a surprise hit, it’s rich with the sort of anecdotes you only get to live if you’re second in line for the presidency, like Libya’s dictator offering him sunglasses for an indoor meeting. (“They’re in a junk drawer in my D.C. apartment,” Boehner writes.)

It’s much less effective at convincing the reader that Boehner did much with his power, or shaped the Republican Party that, in 2010, built a midterm campaign around his image. One chapter unpacks a clear, bipartisan victory, the passage of George W. Bush’s education reforms, in which Boehner credits himself for bringing a key Democrat into the process.

For the rest of the book, history seems to happen to Boehner, and he struggles to affect it. Much of it has been reported from other angles, and the answer to what Boehner was doing at moments of national crisis is, typically, “getting frustrated.” The story of John McCain arriving in Washington for a meeting on the 2008 financial crisis with no plan is well known; Boehner colors in his role, as the leader of House Republicans, panicking when McCain asks him what the plan is.

“There wasn’t anybody who was going to get us out of this mess,” said Boehner, who had led his party in the House, by this point, for more than two years. “No cavalry was coming.”

Boehner is generous with praise for his colleagues, praising the “killer instinct” of Nancy Pelosi and the intelligence of Mitch McConnell. The narrative is tougher on his own instincts. A 2014 effort to restructure immigration founders because Obama “kept poisoning the well” and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Bob Goodlatte, “a friend of mine going back to the days when we served together on the Agriculture Committee,” does not want to compromise. 

“I don’t know whether it was his committee, his staff, his district, or just him,” Boehner recalls, raising the question: Why didn’t he? 

The 2011 battle over the debt ceiling ends without a grand bargain in part, too. There’s a similar problem, with a longtime Boehner friend — then-Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia — advocating a deal that Obama prefers and Boehner can’t get through the House.

“The failure of our Grand Bargain on spending and entitlement reform is my biggest regret from my time in Congress,” Boehner writes. “Things fell apart at the very end when, I maintain, they didn’t really have to.” This is not a regret in O’Neill’s memoir; O’Neill pulled it off.  Twice, Boehner begins to describe the fight over the Affordable Care Act, then digresses, by saying the party basically fulfilled its promise. “Today, there’s not much left of Obamacare,” Boehner writes at one point. “There really isn’t much of Obamacare left,” he writes near the end, chastising Cruz for his unsuccessful gambit to repeal the ACA in a must-pass 2013 funding bill. 

If post-Trump Republicans are more interested in emulating the defeated president than restoring another version of their party, Boehner’s memoir lays out the reasons. 

… 11 days until the runoff in Louisiana’s 2nd Congressional District
… 18 days until the special primary in Texas’s 6th Congressional District
… 25 days until the GOP nominating convention in Virginia
… 49 days until the special election in New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District
… 56 days until primaries in New Jersey and Virginia
… 70 days until New York City’s primary
… 112 days until the special primary in Ohio’s 11th Congressional District