J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
The fact that the poorest families were getting money from the expanded Child Tax Credit in the American Rescue Plan seemed to particularly irk Sen. Joe Manchin.
For the past couple of years, a cohort of center-left writers and analysts have been arguing in favor of something called “popularism.” David Shor, the data guru who has become the face of this school of thought, defines it like this: Candidates for political office “should talk about popular issues, and not talk about unpopular issues.”
While that sounds intuitive—though it assumes that public opinion is static, with “popular” and “unpopular” issues etched in stone and not influenced by who advocates for them and how—there has been considerable debate in the political science literature over whether or not politicians get credit for saying or doing popular things. But there are stronger reasons to think that politicians will get blamed for doing things that directly and obviously harm voters. And thanks to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), that’s what Democrats have done to themselves in this election cycle with their child benefit.
In the American Rescue Plan, Democrats expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC) so as to turn it into a de facto child allowance. Not only would it rise to $3,000 per year for children ages six and up, and $3,600 for children under six, it would come in the form of a check every month, rather than in a lump sum at tax time. In theory at least, all families with children would qualify below quite a high income cap, even if they have no labor income.
This was a massive departure from the traditional neoliberal policy design, which worships at the shrine of the work requirement. Despite serious administrative problems, the 2021 Biden CTC was on balance a huge overall success, cutting child poverty from about 18–20 percent to about 12 percent.
But the ARP only provided funding for one year. One of the biggest parts of Biden’s Build Back Better package was an extension of the expanded CTC, and a permanent change to its “refundability,” which would have extended the benefit to many lower-income families. But Manchin made sure that didn’t happen. The fact that the poorest families were getting money seemed to particularly irk him. He reportedly told colleagues that he thought recipients would spend the money on drugs—a complaint he never made about the traditional CTC, which cuts out most of the poor.
So in January, the checks stopped coming. Child poverty spiked by about two-fifths, back up to the typical 17 percent, and a much larger population of families stopped getting any monthly benefit.
The fallout was as predictable as it is debilitating to Democratic electoral hopes. According to a recent Morning Consult poll, support for Democrats among CTC recipients has fallen from 49 percent to 43 percent, while support for Republicans has risen from 37 percent to 46 percent—a net swing of 15 percentage points. Meanwhile, party support among all voters barely budged, going from each party at 41 percent support to each at 43 percent. Other polls have shown a similar shift among CTC recipients.
It makes for an interesting concrete test case of polling on theoretical issues versus actual concrete policies. Back in September, before Manchin had killed the Biden agenda, Shor and Simon Bazelon argued in Matt Yglesias’s newsletter that Democrats should drastically tighten the means test on the expanded CTC—cutting off most middle-class families—because while this would irritate current recipients, it would make the overall program somewhat more popular.
Now we see what happened when we followed that suggestion to an extreme: People who lost their money are spitting mad, and voters as a whole don’t care at all. Imagine that.
At a guess, this is down to two factors. The first is loss aversion: It’s long been demonstrated in behavioral economics literature that people dislike losses much, much more than they enjoy equivalent gains. Getting a check for a few hundred bucks is nice, but it hurts much more when that same amount of money is taken away.
The second is that people who aren’t getting the CTC have no idea what is happening with it. Most voters are frankly not very familiar with the complex details of government tax policy, much less how they are changing from month to month, and there is so much news in any case that even the well-informed are likely to miss it. No normal person is eagerly reading every page of Tax Credit Monthly when Russia is invading Ukraine, gas prices are spiking, and right-wing lunatics are calling every liberal a Satan-worshiping pedophile.
The only people who are keeping up are either policy obsessives or families who just noticed their wallets are several hundred dollars a month lighter.
So because of Manchin, Democrats have done the worst possible thing—sacrificed an excellent program, drastically increasing child poverty in the process, for no political benefit whatsoever. That in turn speaks to who really needs to hear the lessons of the so-called popularists. It isn’t the leftist police reform activists, who wouldn’t listen to them anyway. It’s centrist Democrats like Manchin and Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL), who stop the party from doing anything good, and then blame everyone but themselves for ruining their party’s political prospects.
