Securing Biden’s Legacy and What’s Next for the Democrats
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Hey, What's News listeners. It's Sunday, November 24th. I'm Charlotte Gartenberg for The Wall Street Journal. This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world.

This week, as they prepare to leave the White House, President Biden and his administration are rushing to cement his legacy. What can they do before Republicans take power? And looking further to the horizon, how might the Democrats find their way back to power? Let's get to it. On January 3rd, the Democrats' majority in the Senate will end. And on January 20th, President Biden will leave the White House. But they're not out yet.

Before they go, they're looking to secure his legacy on issues like the environment, infrastructure, diplomacy, and government regulation. So what could be on the chopping block? How might Democrats fight it? And what is the Biden administration doing to shore up the president's legacy in these final weeks? Here to fill us in on all this is White House reporter Annie Linsky. All right, Annie, the administration can't protect everything. So what are they looking to protect?

From the Biden administration's perspective, they are hoping to protect some of the key legacy agenda items that they feel that they have oriented the country in what they think is more solid ground. And they point to bringing manufacturing back to the United States.

to shoring up supply chains so that component pieces, whether it's in medicine or semiconductors, are being manufactured by allies rather than adversaries. And they're hoping to have the country focused in a greener, sustainable economy, which they believe is the wave of the future. All right. So sort of a rush to protect that, although it's not only in the last couple of weeks. How are they doing that?

The Biden administration officials have known for quite some time that it's possible and in fact likely that at least with Joe Biden on the top of the ticket, his election would be very difficult. And so they started the work of shoring up various regulations back in 2019.

February, March, April of this year, there was an effort there within agencies to move regulations along so that they would be finalized well before the end of the term when they would become vulnerable to the Congressional Review Act, which Donald Trump used in 2017 to undo some regulations. And he's very much expected to use again, if he can, to undo chunks of the Biden agenda.

All right. So there's this rush of regulations, which sort of already took place. What about some of the signature legislation? What are Biden and the Democrats looking to shore up now there and how?

One of the things that Biden administration is most proud of is their Chips and Science Act, which put a little under $40 billion towards bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States. They've given away a lot of that money, a lot of that $39 billion in grants. They've allocated them.

However, because it's very hard to give away that much money in a short period of time, roughly $30 billion is still in limbo in terms of the money that has been allocated. There's still negotiations going on with companies about exactly how they can use it, where they can put it. And that's where the administration could very much run out of time. So we are coming into a new House and a new Senate. The Democrats are going to be in the minority.

But not a big minority. What kind of power could they still hang on to? The House and Senate are both in Republican hands. The House is by a very slim majority. It will be difficult for Republicans to pass some legislation. It just is hard to get elections.

all of the Republicans on board in the House on big, complicated pieces of legislation. There's a little more breathing room in the Senate with the Republicans having what's in effect a wider majority there. So that means if President Trump wants to repeal a piece of the Biden legislation, he doesn't have a lot of breathing room to do it. Congress isn't necessarily going to act as a brake on the

the new Trump agenda, but the narrowness of the majority does make passing his agenda a little bit harder. But it also makes undoing things quite difficult because a lot of the laws that Biden passed, even though Biden himself was not popular, the laws were popular. So Biden and the Democratic-controlled Senate have confirmed over 200 judges, many of those former public defenders and civil rights lawyers.

And now there is already a race to approve more underway. What does that look like? It looks like the Senate Democrats are going to have not a very Merry Christmas necessarily. I mean, there's a lot of pressure to keep the Senate in session. This is typically a time when senators like to take some time off. They've been campaigning really hard. They would like

But there is a race on to confirm some of the judges that have really been lingering in the Senate. And Kamala Harris, who just really campaigned her heart out for several months, she's now on vacation in Hawaii. But she may be needed back in the Senate to cast her tie-breaking vote. Right. She might have to come back to push through some of those judges over the line. Yeah.

So before we go, I want to ask you, you were just in Brazil with Biden for the G20. What was the vibe? I just spent six days with the president and a tourist through South America. And he didn't talk publicly at least to the press at all in those six days. So I

I don't know if he's still mulling exactly how he's going to protect his legacy, but the images of him in the Amazon didn't really convey a strong environmentalist. They conveyed a defeated leader. It's a mixed legacy. He passed a lot of legislation and he's very proud of it. But a lot of that legislation can either be undone or slow walked and destroyed.

His main accomplishment initially from Democrats was stopping Trump, and that is not something that he did for very long. Trump is back in power. I've been speaking with White House reporter Annie Linsky. Annie, thanks so much for your time. Thank you. Coming up, as they look to the future, what can Democrats do to fix the disconnect with voters that cost them the election? And how do they get back into power? Perhaps history has an answer. That's after the break.

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Learn more at IBM.com slash WatsonX. IBM, let's create. The Democrats lost the Senate, failed to regain the House, and lost the presidency, not only in the Electoral College, but by a slim percentage of the popular vote.

So what can the Democrats do longer term to fix their issues? Here to tell us what went wrong and how it could go right is WSJ's former executive Washington editor, Jerry Seib. All right, Jerry, there's been a demographic realignment here. The Democrats lost a lot of their traditional voters, particularly black and Latino men and blue-collar workers. What happened? What the Democratic Party has become over the last decade

decade or two as a party that kind of has a hole in the middle of it. It's a lot of poor voters, minorities, city dwellers,

and upper-scale, college-educated suburbanites. And there is, in the middle of that picture, a big hole where a lot of working-class Americans reside. And so this was illustrated, I think, most by the AP VoteCast poll of the electorate, which showed that Kamala Harris won households with $25,000 or less in income and households with $100,000 or

or more in annual income and lost every income bracket in between. So Democrats' challenge is to regain a hold on that part of the electorate. And the question they confront, and I don't know the answer to this one, is have they lost their grip on those people for economic reasons or for cultural reasons? Is this more a question of what the Democrats did wrong or what Trump did right?

This is a mealy-mouthed answer, but I think you have to say it's a little bit of both. The Democrats' basic problem was they faced an inflationary environment. And inflation is simply an incumbent killer. We've seen it in the past in this country with Jimmy Carter and Jerry Ford in the 70s and 80s. And then we've seen it this year in other countries around the world. People are unhappy when they see inflation. It affects everybody and they take it out on the party in power. So

I say that because there was an unavoidable problem for Kamala Harris and there wasn't much she could do about it. She probably should have come up with a better answer to the question, what are you going to do about inflation? The progressive populist economic message is what they needed and they didn't really have one. The other thing they need to do is acknowledge that they went through a period in the last few years in which kind of a woke culture debate hurt them. You know, the transgender rights and defund the police.

Whether you think those are serious problems or not, the Republicans certainly thought they were great wedge issues and they pounded them home, particularly the transgender rights issue with advertising and the millions and millions of dollars. And that hurt Democrats and they have to figure out some way to respond to those attacks. So what do the Democrats need to get these voters back?

Well, I think they need two things. First of all, they're going to need a leader, a spokesman, a face and a name and a voice that can help pull these things together. And that's what Bill Clinton was for the Democrats by the late 80s and early 90s and then all through the 90s. And that person isn't really obvious right now in the Democratic Party. It may be that that person exists in the governor's seats in various places around the country. Maybe it's Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. Maybe it's Roy Cooper in North Carolina.

Second thing that they need is to find a way to move toward the ideological center on both economics and cultural issues without alienating their progressive base. And that's a lot easier for me to say than it is for them to do. Right. That's exactly what I was going to ask you. And how does that play out with the vocal left wing of the party? Well, I think there are two possibilities. One is that the Democrats develop what I referred to earlier as a progressive populist economic message, one that kind of combines the

anti-business or pro-consumer sentiments with some more responsible actions on things like the deficit and on tax policies that seem as if they're going to help the middle class, not the lower class or the upper class. And then secondly, somebody probably has to have a heart-to-heart talk with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party about what their emphasis on cultural issues has done to the base of the party and to the working class vote and whether the party needs to modulate that a little bit.

When Bill Clinton thought he had to speak directly to his party's liberal wing on cultural issues, he had what was known as the Sister Soulja moment when he went before Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition in 1992 and said, you shouldn't be talking to people like Sister Soulja, who was a hip hop star at the time and who had made some anti-white comments and said, this is not acceptable in our party. So he made a point of saying directly to the liberal wing of the party that

You have to fall behind me on some of these cultural issues. And let's find a message that wins, not just one that makes you feel good. Yeah, sort of a standard bearer. Well, as the Dems look for a new standard bearer, paint me that picture. What should that leader be like? It may very well be that that person has to come from outside of Washington. One of the problems is that

Donald Trump has both capitalized on and then exacerbated a sense in the country that, well, everybody in Washington is out of touch. Everybody is corrupt. It's a broken system. So finding your new voice from within that system that Americans have been told is

is broken and corrupt is going to be a stretch. Maybe if Democrats spend the next couple of years out in the wilderness looking for these voices, they can come together and hear some of those voices and somehow find a person and a personality who can push them forward. I will just add the other thing Democrats have going for them is, in a weird way, the fact that all the politically elected institutions in Washington will now be run by Republicans. The White House, the Senate, and the House.

It means Republicans are responsible for everything that happens or doesn't happen. It also is likely in this environment, and this is a lesson of history, that the party that's in power that has control of everything tends to overreach. They tend to go too far. They tend to believe that they are invincible and they overread their mandate. And that may be the silver lining in this situation for Democrats. That was WSJ's former executive Washington editor, Jerry Seib. Jerry, thanks so much for your time. Happy to be with you.

And that's it for What's News Sunday for November 24th. Today's show was produced by me, Charlotte Gartenberg, with supervising producer Michael Kosmides. We got help from deputy editors Scott Salloway and Chris Zinsley. I'm Charlotte Gartenberg. We'll be back on Monday morning with a new show. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching?

Washington Wise is an original podcast for investors from Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington and how they may affect your finances and portfolio. Listen at schwab.com slash washingtonwise.com.