President Joe Biden has been on the road promoting the American Rescue Plan and is now pushing forward with an even larger infrastructure initiative. He’s not alone in selling his bold agenda. The Super PACs that helped him win the White House are helping him get the word out.
Earlier in March, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion stimulus package that included money for state and local governments, vaccine distribution, safe school reopening and $1,400 checks to anyone making under $75,000 annually. Since then, Biden has traveled to Pennsylvania and plans to visit Ohio and several other key swing states with Vice President Kamala Harris to promote the package. Today, he’s in Pittsburgh unveiling a $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan.
The liberal Super PACs Priorities USA Action, American Bridge 21st Century and Unite the Country have Biden’s back. They have been pouring millions into ads to promote the American Rescue Plan, hoping to get an early foothold on positive messaging for the 2022 midterms. Key to the messaging is hammering the fact that zero Republicans voted for the bill, giving Democrats the opportunity to own the recovery and draw contrasts to how President Donald Trump handled the pandemic.
Looking to the midterms
American Bridge reportedly plans to spend $100 million helping Democrats in the midterms and made a six-figure ad buy in mid-March for ads hitting the airwaves this spring. Priorities’ new “help is on the way” ads will reportedly play in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin over the next two years. Unite the Country, a Biden-focused Super PAC formed for the 2020 election cycle, is launching a digital ad campaign in those same states—we’re unlikely to know the exact total spent since the ads aren’t advocating that people vote for one candidate or the other, meaning Super PACs wouldn’t be required to report it with the FEC.
The strategy will be somewhat new territory for American Bridge in particular; the group specializes in opposition research and typically spends most of its outside money bashing conservative opponents—in the 2020 cycle, the Super PAC spent just under $60 million, nearly all of it opposing Trump and the Georgia Senate runoff candidates. Democrats are hoping to avoid a repeat of the strategy used with President Barack Obama’s recovery in 2009, which many felt was too passive both in the negotiations and the public rhetoric.
Learning from past mistakes
“Barack was so modest, he didn’t want to take, as he said, a ‘victory lap,’” Biden reportedly said in a recent address to House Democrats. “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.”
Democrats are not so shy this time around. Although Biden declined to put his name on the stimulus checks as some had suggested, his promotional tour pairs with confident messaging from other top Democrats—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “this is the most consequential legislation that many of us will ever be a party to.”
Bolstered by a more progressive political landscape with fewer vocal deficit hawks than Obama’s first term, Democrats are poised to be more ambitious in the next couple of years. Biden has already announced his intention to run for re-election in 2024 and the party now has its eyes on eliminating the filibuster and getting into infrastructure and gun legislation—potentially giving Super PACs more ammunition for positive ads in the coming months.
