In Messaging, Bigger is Worse
The bad politics of reconciliation bills
Everyone knows Biden’s “Build Back Better” reconciliation bill has a $3.5 trillion price tag. But no one knows what’s in it.
This is not an original observation. We’ve reached the point in the circle of legislative life where everyone either blames Democrats’ messaging or blames the media for ignoring the Democrats’ message.
If I had to pick a side, I think the fault lies with the media. When most of the stuff in a Democratic bill is popular, Republicans manufacture controversy around the cost. And most political reporters don’t just fall into this trap, they gleefully cannonball into it. They’d rather cover controversy than policy.
But this is one case where simply blaming the media isn’t enough. Democrats really do have a messaging problem - not because their strategists don’t have the clearest narratives or the right catchphrases, but because big, sweeping bills are nearly impossible to message.
Passing a few huge reconciliation bills per Congress can make an enormous difference in people’s lives. But it’s a comms nightmare. And that means the gap between good policy and good politics is getting wider and wider.
If Democrats want more credit for all the popular stuff they want to do, they need to change the way Congress works.
One of the simplest secrets of political comms (or really most writing) is this: People love small examples, and tune out big numbers. In their classic Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath use JFK’s moonshot to illustrate this point. “Putting a man on the moon,” is easy to visualize. One person.
Imagine if instead, JFK had vowed to “Ramp up the space program,” or “Create the conditions for a new generation of lunar exploration.” These things might have arguably been bigger ambitions than the moonshot. But most of us would tune them out.
For similar reasons, when it comes to political comms, voters often care more about little things they can picture than big things they cannot. Last week, the Biden Administration reversed a bunch of Trump-era attacks on the Bears Ears national monument, as well as two others.
This was great news. But in the scope of things the Federal Government can do, it’s not really big news. Saving a few national monuments is far less consequential than, say, whether the vaccination rate goes up by 5% or 7% per month, or whether the climate-change portion of the reconciliation bill is scaled back by $100 billion or $150 billion. But this was good policy and good politics - it got a ton of press, relative to its impact.
Democrats’ ought to have tons of stuff like Bears Ears to message. We’re on the right side of nearly every issue: gun safety, climate, immigration, healthcare, public education, family leave, etc. etc. etc. But because of the way Congress works, most of these bills can’t be passed one at a time, because they’d be filibustered.
Instead, the policies either go nowhere, or they’re wrapped up in massive reconciliation bills that, for completely silly reasons, are allowed to pass with just 50 votes.
Of course “Build Back Better” is a hard bill to message, even though it’s full of popular stuff - it’s the legislative equivalent of mushing all the crayons together. The whole is far less attractive than the sum of its parts.
And Build Back Better won’t necessarily get easier to message if and when it passes. I remember the 2009 Stimulus - another bill that was full of helpful stuff, but that was defined by its size rather rather than by what it accomplished.
I’ve written extensively, some might say ad nauseam, about the policy benefits of getting rid of the filibuster. But let’s not forget the political messaging benefits, too. In a world where small bills could pass, Democrats would be forcing vote after vote on the most popular items in their agenda. Republicans would have to explain their opposition to these popular ideas without having a giant (and misleading) $3.5 trillion number to use as an excuse.
Democrats could finally start to resolve the most vexing paradox in American politics: Why is it that the party whose ideas most people agree with is the one that consistently struggles to get its agenda passed?
In the meantime, Democrats are left without a ton of great options. The best of them is, I think, to do retroactively what you couldn’t do in the moment - pass the big bill, but then take credit for each of its constituent parts rather than claiming the whole giant thing as one large achievement.
None of this excuses the GOP’s hypocrisy or the media’s politics-as-sports approach. But it does suggest there are ways to work around them. And even more than that, it suggests that the easiest way to “change the narrative” is to change the way a bill becomes a law.