Alexandra Buxbaum/Sipa USA via AP Images
Starbucks Workers United partners celebrate a victory after watching the union vote count in Mesa, Arizona, February 25, 2022.
President Biden’s State of the Union address didn’t do much, I’m afraid, to boost his standings in the polls, to which, I’m also afraid, Democrats’ prospects in November’s midterm elections are inevitably linked. With Joe Manchin still consigning most of the Democrats’ domestic agenda to his own fetid dustbin, the party’s ability to meet the needs of its core constituents, much less the broader nation, has been eviscerated.
And it’s those core constituents, not just those feckless middle-of-the-roaders, who’ve been driving the drop in Biden’s support. In his Washington Post column today, E.J. Dionne has provided a deeper dive into the Post’s recent poll, which showed Biden’s overall approval rating to be an anemic 37 percent. Among the non-Republicans in the survey, support for Biden has fallen from 65 percent in April 2021 to 47 percent late last month. Among those non-Republicans, Biden’s support fell by 25 points in two crucial groups: non-whites and respondents under 40. It fell by 24 percent among those with household incomes under $50,000.
In other words, Biden needs to do something truly substantial to address the needs of those groups, and it likely can’t be something that requires congressional approval, other than reducing drug prices. Herewith, two suggestions, aimed primarily at boosting his support among the young:
First, retire a chunk of student debt. It’s clear he can’t get another round of the expanded Child Tax Credits or a higher minimum wage through the Manchinized Senate, but he can at least put more money in young people’s pockets, or more precisely, let them keep more money there, by reducing their student debt. As the pandemic moratorium on the monthly payments of student debt is set to expire at the start of May, this would be best done quickly.
Second, go to Buffalo and make a speech backing the Starbucks baristas’ campaign to unionize, which has now spread to roughly 100 Starbucks outlets across the land. Moreover, the speech should really be directed at the entire millennial generation, which, when Gallup polled them last year, approved of unions at a stratospheric 77 percent rate. In his speech, Biden should acknowledge their frustrations—that many of them are compelled by employers to work short and irregular hours, that they’re underpaid at a time of record profits, that they have no voice at work and had no power to negotiate safety provisions when COVID struck—and spell out why unionizing is the one option available to them that can address these problems. He can pledge that his administration will have their backs as they go forward. Biden already delivered a milder version of this pitch to the workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse during the unionization campaign there last year; now—with the overall union approval rating at 68 percent, its highest in half a century—it’s time for him to go bigger and bolder.
Sens. Manchin and Sinema having slammed shut the box of badly needed legislative initiatives, Biden has no place to go except outside the box. That necessity both compels and frees him to walk some untrod paths.
