Stimulus research: Many Republicans think the Republican Party supports the American Rescue Plan

Earlier this month, Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) posted a shocking tweet: After being one of the 49 Republican senators who voted against the American Rescue Plan (ARP), he proudly boasted that the pandemic relief that he provided would come soon.

“Independent restaurant operators earned $ 28.6 billion in targeted relief,” wrote Wicker in his post. “This funding will ensure that small businesses can survive the pandemic, helping to adapt their operations and keep their employees on the payroll.”

As Aaron Rupar of Vox explained, Wicker advocated aid to restaurants and introduced a bipartisan amendment along with Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) who secured this funding. However, he still voted against the approval of the final bill, which led to an immediate reaction to this tweet. Many called on him for trying to take credit for something that he not only did not support, but against which his party actively lobbied. In the final vote, 50 Senate Democrats supported the bill, while 49 Republicans opposed it, as a member of the Republican Party was absent.

Messages like Wicker’s, however, can only work to confuse the way some people perceive their support for the legislation.

According to a new poll by Vox and Data for Progress, some likely voters think the aid package has had bipartisan support – although no Republicans in Congress have voted for it. In a poll conducted March 5-7, at the time the stimulus bill passed the Senate (and before Wicker’s tweet), 21% of likely voters said they believed Republicans supported the ARP, including 31 % of Republicans. Sixty percent of likely voters said they thought Republicans were opposed to the ARP and 18 percent did not know.

Likewise, there are previous votes – like the one about the 2017 tax cuts – that some likely voters perceive as bipartisan according to the DFP poll, although they have occurred only on party lines. This dynamic indicates that bipartisanship in legislation or nominees is a perception that, in some cases, does not necessarily align with the way legislators actually vote.

And when it comes to recent legislation, Republicans, in particular, seem to think that Republican lawmakers are more supportive of the stimulus than they really are, a trend that echoes in previous DFP polls. A previous poll also found that some Republican Party voters think the party is much more generous in economic policies than it really is.

Issues of bipartisanship have often been raised in the ARP and how the White House intends to address other legislation: Democrats have faced criticism from Republicans for approving stimulus via budgetary reconciliation on a party basis, and considering the same for infrastructure legislation. Because of Republican opposition to a comprehensive aid package, Democrats chose to promote the stimulus on their own. Despite GOP manipulating this approach, the American Rescue Plan is widely popular and has 61 percent support, according to a recent CNN survey. Other research has shown even greater support.

Now that politics has proved so popular, Republicans – it seems – can try to convince some voters that they supported a proposal they did not vote for.

The Data for Progress / Vox poll included 1,429 likely voters, with a sampling margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Some Republicans think the GOP supported more relief from the coronavirus than it did

There is a segment of Republicans who believe that their party was more supportive of relief policies than it really was: according to this survey, 17 percent of Republicans felt that Republican Party members supported raising the minimum wage as part of aid to pandemic, and 48 percent of Republicans felt that the Republican Party members supported state and local aid in the package. (Both measures were those that most Republican lawmakers did not want to be part of for coronavirus relief.)

Ethan Winter / Data for Progress

This view may be driven by a desire to see party policies as more supportive of constituencies and more focused on aid, DFP analyst Ethan Winter explained earlier.

A proportion of Republicans – 31 percent – prefer to see their party provide relief to people rather than fighting for small government and national debt reductions, a potential sign that some Republican Party voters may want their party to be more generous than that was when it comes to stimulus.

Ethan Winter / Data for Progress

When told that Republican voters and governors supported the ARP, although members of Congress were opposed to it, 42% of Republicans interviewed said they considered it a bipartisan project, while 45% said they did not, and 12% did not know.

These findings are consistent with an earlier DFP study, which found that some Republican voters said their party supported policies such as expanding Medicaid, which it opposed. Winter notes that this dynamic has been around for some time:

This is a long-standing trend, of voters, mainly Republicans, denying the extremism of the party’s positions on issues of political economy. Matthew Yglesias, former Vox, calls this phenomenon “politics of unbelief”. For him, these voters are one of the main reasons for the persistence of these conditions. He argues that “voters find [the Republican Party’s position on economic issues] so strangely bad that they will only believe that someone has married them if you can convince them that the person in question is a heartless monster. “

For Republican voters in particular, Yglesias adds: “Consequently, people who align themselves with Republicans on broad-ranging issues – whether it is opposition to the right to abortion, love of arms, patriotism or panic over the idea of ​​a diverse country – find that it simply is not credible that its champions are, in fact, following a politically toxic agenda that would clearly lose the elections ”.

Previous party votes are not necessarily perceived in this way

This poll also examined previous votes in legislations and nominees who were strongly partisan and found that their perceptions are also not so clear: for example, 19 percent of likely voters, including 25 percent of Democrats, believe Democratic lawmakers supported the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, although they voted overwhelmingly against it in 2017.

The perception of other party votes, including confirmation by Supreme Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett and approval of the 2017 tax cuts, both of which no Democrats voted for, has also been distorted for some people: 20 percent of the probable Voters, including 18 percent of Democrats, felt that the majority of Democrats supported tax cuts, although none did. In the same vein, 16% of likely voters, including 22% of Republicans, felt that Republicans were opposed to tax cuts, although the majority of the party defended them.

While many voters’ understanding of bipartisanship corresponds to the reality of how legislators voted, a segment of voter perceptions does not. This discrepancy allowed lawmakers – Republicans in particular – to try to fit in as advocates of popular policies, even though their electoral records do not reflect that support in any way.

That’s how Republicans managed to claim their support for people with pre-existing conditions during the 2018 parliamentary campaigns, even after many voted against such protections. And that is how lawmakers like Wicker manage to proclaim stimulus provisions after voting against passing the bill itself.