POLL: COVID bill a liability
New polling from American Action Network is out today, and the results are clear: the left’s $1.9 trillion COVID bill is a major flop in swing districts.
In the numbers released today, 65 percent preferred targeted relief measures focusing, “on only the highest priorities of COVID relief like vaccine distribution and opening schools” and just 27 percent said they thought Congress should, “go big.”
The numbers are similarly damning for other early Biden Administration priorities, like keeping schools closed (55% say open now, and just 31% wait longer) and their signature campaign finance reform legislation.
Read the write up in Roll Call below and for the full polling memo, click here.
GOP testing ways to make relief package a burden for battleground Democrats
Roll Call
Stephanie Akin
February 24, 2021
https://www.rollcall.com/2021/02/24/gop-testing-ways-to-make-relief-package-a-burden-for-battleground-democrats/
Republicans tasked with winning back the House majority in 2022 see an opportunity in the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that Democrats plan to push through Congress in the coming weeks, most likely without GOP support.
In an early indication of the attacks to come, the GOP is road-testing messages in battleground districts. A poll obtained by CQ Roll Call and conducted for The American Action Network, a nonprofit group that supports Republicans but does not disclose its donors, focused on whether Congress should pass legislation encouraging schools to safely reopen and the possibility that aid payments could go to undocumented immigrants.
The poll, by the right-leaning Remington Research Group in Virginia’s swingy 7th District, found pandemic-weary respondents were receptive to Republican messaging surrounding the relief package and other measures that the Biden administration and the Democratic-led Congress have made priorities in its early weeks. For weeks, for example, Republicans have been working to tie Democrats to virus-related school closings. …
But Republicans say that Democrats’ early confidence will backfire if voters in 2022 come to see the party in power as beholden to special interests and progressive factions on the left.
The AAN poll found that 65 percent of respondents preferred targeted relief measures focusing, “on only the highest priorities of COVID relief like vaccine distribution and opening schools,” versus 27 percent who said they thought Congress should, “go big and address many priority items for the Biden Administration, like bailing out state governments and extending benefits to illegal immigrants.” The poll surveyed 804 likely 2022 voters and had a margin of error of +/- 3.3 percent.
Democrats on House committees voted down GOP attempts to bar relief payments from going to undocumented immigrants earlier this month. In two previous rounds of relief payments approved by Congress last year, the first round barred payments to immigrants while the second allowed funds to go to households if one person in it had legal status.
“Just weeks in and already the left has proven that if they can overreach on a major issue to push a liberal political agenda — they will,” said AAN President Dan Conston. “First impressions are really hard to shake and voters already see it for what it is, a liberal partisan political payoff to allies that’s totally out of step with what the country needs, and what Americans want. ”
The poll also surveyed voters’ opinions on COVID-19-related school closures, which Republicans have attempted to tie to Democrats in Congress, and HR 1, a sweeping measure that would overhaul campaign finance, voting and ethics laws.