Why ‘Deliverism’ Didn’t Deliver for the Democrats
The Biden team bet on big legislation. Voters didn’t care.
AS DEMOCRATS GRAPPLE with their election drubbing, one question in particular haunts them: Why didn’t Biden’s policy achievements win over more voters?
Theories run the gamut, from disinformation, to the culture dominating politics, to the pain of inflation blocking out everything else. But in recent days, another argument is gaining credence: The problem wasn’t that the party failed to sell the public on what it delivered, it was that it provided them with the wrong things, politically speaking.
“We didn’t deliver what people wanted—help with child care, help with elder care, more security in their lives. Instead we delivered more remote things—bridges and roads, clean energy, future jobs in future chip fabs,” Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, told me. Noting that Biden’s Build Back Better agenda was pared back significantly in order to secure Sen. Joe Manchin’s vote, he added, “Losing the caring stuff hurt us badly.”
Klain’s comments are among the more notable offered up by Biden world in defense of their approach to the 2024 election. But they’ve also been echoed in various forms by others in the party. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, for one, has credited proposals to help people with their costs of living (such as expanding pre-K) as a key factor in why his state didn’t lurch as dramatically rightward as other Democratic strongholds.
From the beginning of the administration, Biden operatives believed that the key to retaining power for Democrats was “deliverism”—the idea that the voters would reward the party for producing tangible legislative results for them.
The COVID relief checks that went out early in Biden’s term would lock in support from a pandemic battered electorate, or so the thinking went. Domestic legislation would not just be passed but, in contrast with the Obama administration, effectively sold. Infrastructure spending, the CHIPS Act, and the clean energy investments under the Inflation Reduction Act would allow the party to make inroads in communities that had been drifting away from them.
The theory proved wrong. Biden’s domestic achievements didn’t resonate with voters. And it’s left the party questioning whether deliverism is smart politics at all.
The debate over why deliverism failed could define how the party tries to claw its way back to political relevance on the federal level and what type of policies Democrats pursue in the future.
Some defend the strategy on grounds that the outcome of the election was preordained: No matter what popular legislation Democrats passed or how they tried to spin it, it would have been overshadowed by the pain of inflation and the scarcity of resources. Voters might have felt better about COVID relief and the construction jobs coming to their communities if the cost of groceries hadn’t skyrocketed or if there weren’t housing shortages around them.
Others blame not the strategy but the tactics, specifically the failure to explain how much good Biden and the Democrats had done to swing voters. The party was too unwilling to engage unorthodox or adversarial media spaces, effectively ensuring that a wide swath of the country wasn’t aware of the progress they’d made. To that end, surveys showed that voters simply didn’t know about Biden’s work on eliminating junk fees, or, for that matter, any of the major laws that the president passed. On infrastructure spending, voters gave Biden about as much credit as they gave Trump—despite false-start “infrastructure weeks” being a running gag during the latter’s presidency.
“There is an obvious logic to it,” Adam Jentleson, John Fetterman's former chief of staff, told The Bulwark. “But I think basically people should think of ways to both be popular and to pursue good policies for people separately. They should think of them as two different things. The ways you stay popular as president aren’t necessarily passing legislation, even if it polls well.”
“You should never do a press conference on anything you’re trying to pass,” he added. “Just do press conferences on things that are cool. It’s like [New York City Mayor] Eric Adams’s administration. But just don’t do crimes.”
Yet others note that the lack of familiarity with accomplishments can only explain so much. They point to the Teamsters. For years, the union’s top legislative priority was to get their member’s pensions secured. Biden’s COVID-relief bill did just that, appropriating $36 billion to avert a 60 percent cut in the pensions of some 350,000 union members. Two years later, the union’s president, Sean O’Brien, was speaking at the Republican National Convention and telling podcast hosts that Democrats “have fucked us over, for the last 40 years.”
O’Brien’s actions infuriated Democrats, not just because they believed he knew better but because they feared that if the union boss didn’t care for deliverism, then the union members wouldn’t either.
“People pretty much don’t believe politicians when they tell you they’ve done something for you,” said Mike Podhorzer, the former political director at the AFL-CIO. “So in the absence of someone you trust telling them that Biden or Harris has done something for you, you pretty much just think you deserved it.”
Ultimately, it didn’t take the election results for Democrats to recognize that deliverism would not save them. There was plenty of contemporaneous reporting demonstrating as much. A September CNN report on Lordstown, Ohio noted that in 2017, Trump had told people to stay put because he pledged he would bring back their jobs, only for the GM factory there to go idle. Under Biden, a new Ultium EV plant had brought 2,200 jobs to the beleaguered northeast corner of the state. But voters in Lordstown told CNN they would still vote Republican anyways. Sure enough, Trump won the county with 57 percent of the vote.
Klain’s argument is, essentially, that those margins would have been more favorable to Biden if voters felt more tangible help from the government beyond the EV plant; that a new factory can be overshadowed by costs of child care, groceries, education, and so on.
Last week, Annie Lowrey made a similar case, noting that while Democrats had passed big legislative items, the COVID-era boosts they’d made to the social safety net (food stamps, child care assistance, expanded Medicaid) had been unwound. To that end, in 2022, the Census Bureau found that the poverty rate had spiked to 12.4 percent from 7.8 percent the year before, while personal finance data showed that low-income Americans were worse off than during the pandemic.
In that context, it’s hard to ask people to be thankful for the bridge being built down the road.
But underneath the data was an even harsher reality for Biden and the Democrats, one that truly underscored how ineffectual deliverism can be. Voters who had seen their lives demonstrably improved because of the enhanced child tax credit that the party had passed in the COVID relief bill were deeply disappointed when it lapsed. But instead of blaming Republicans, who were chiefly responsible for the expiration, they blamed Democrats. After all, they were the party in power.