Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on bipartisan infrastructure bill, lessons from Virginia

Judy Woodruff:

Last week was a pivotal one for President Biden, with highs and lows, the passing of his infrastructure agenda following the Democratic defeat in Virginia.

Here to take stock of it all are Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

Hello to both of you.

Yes, it was a week of both up and down. It was long in coming, Amy, the infrastructure bill, but it did pass late Friday night. In the end, how much of a — or, at this moment, how much of a political win is it for the president?

Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:

Well, it's certainly a win. You take them where you can get them. And it is also a bipartisan win, both in the Senate and the House.

So now the president can go out and members of the Democratic Party can go out in 2022 and say, we worked in a bipartisan manner, as we had promised you, to pass things that matter.

The challenge, though, is while the president and while the energy secretary come on and say we're going to sell this to the public, the sausage-making is not quite done yet. They're still trying to do the Build Back Better bill. That's going to have a back-and-forth between the Senate and the House. That's probably going to go on. Tam and I have talked about this for a while, probably December.

Most Capitol Hill reporters are talking about, like, spending Christmas and new years covering this. So there's still a ways for it to go.

The other big piece — and you raised this with the secretary — is, OK, how much immediate help is this going to provide to Americans who right now — and this is just a CNN poll — 40 percent of them saying, I don't think the administration is addressing the most pressing problems — or they do think they're addressing the most pressing problems; 60 percent say, I don't think they're addressing the most pressing problems in the country right now.

For the White House and for congressional Democrats in 2022, those numbers have to be reversed. Voters have to see that this administration is focused on the things that they see as the biggest problems.

Judy Woodruff:

So, it's what — Tam, it's what the administration is dealing with. And then there's this residue — or bigger than residue of mistrust among Democrats on the Hill.

And they're crucial to passing the rest of this.

Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:

Right.

And, as Amy said, this would not have passed in the House without Republicans helping out because there were some of the most progressive Democrats who just didn't sign on. That said, many members of the Progressive Caucus ultimately did vote for this bill, knowing that it would decouple it from the Build Back Better, the social safety net bill.

Progressives had tried to have them tied together because they didn't trust the moderates to support the other legislation. Now, President Biden today said that he thinks that the other one is going to pass, but, yes, there are challenges ahead. He's confident, he said.

But that's the thing. This was a trust fall. And they will find out sometime before the new year whether the moderates are going to go along. But there is not agreement on exactly what should be in this thing. There's more agreement than there was in the past. And there's also not agreement on just how essential it is.

Biden sees it as essential for the 2022 campaign.

Judy Woodruff:

Right. Right.

Tamara Keith:

Many Democrats see it as essential. Others aren't so sure.

Judy Woodruff:

And the White House trying to link it to infrastructure. Has to have Build Back Better in order to reach its full…

Amy Walter:

To do its potential.

Judy Woodruff:

Potential.

And it did play a role, Amy, a lot of people believe, in what happened in Virginia. We haven't had a chance to talk to you since we learned Tuesday night that the Democrats did not do so well in Virginia. It was a Republican night.

Lessons for both sides here?

Amy Walter:

In the — yes, some of them, they can take with them moving forward. Some of them, well, they were unique to that specific moment in time.

I mean, the bottom line is, if you're a Democrat on the ballot in 2022, and the president is sitting at 43 percent job approval rating, even in a state that's normally blue, like Virginia, that's a problem. You are in big, big trouble.

For Republicans, though, the idea that a Republican could follow the path of Glenn Youngkin and be able to sort of keep Trump at a little bit of distance, thread the needle, I'm kind of with him, I'm not with him, that's going to be harder to do when you have to run in primaries.

Glenn Youngkin did not come out of a primary. He came out of this convention process. So, you didn't have that long, drawn-out process where everybody on the Republican side is vying to be the Trump acolyte, right?

So, that part — both of those are going to be really important, I think, watching as we go forward.

Judy Woodruff:

And we're all trying to make those connections.

Meantime, Amy — Tam, you were talking to Virginia voters this week to try to get a better understanding of what they were thinking.

Tamara Keith:

Well, and the thing that stands out is that both Virginia and New Jersey are states the Democrats did not perform as well as they had hoped on Tuesday.

They're also states where the schools stayed closed longer than other places, where the number of days where schools were open for in person education were fewer. And parents were upset. We focused a lot on so-called Critical Race Theory. But it was a lot more than that, based on the conversations that I have been having with people.

And, in fact, Ballotpedia looked at these school board races all over the country where there were so-called anti-CRT candidates or anti-mask candidates.

Judy Woodruff:

And they were all over the country.

Tamara Keith:

And they were all over the country.

Judy Woodruff:

Right.

Tamara Keith:

And it wasn't a sweep. There is not a strong signal coming out of the races that they followed.

A lot of those candidates lost. Some of them won, but a lot of them lost. And so it wasn't sort of a uniform message, except that what one Northern Virginia parent and Republican political consultant told me is that Democrat Terry McAuliffe probably would have won if the schools had opened in the fall of 2020, instead of the fall of 2020 — or in the fall of 2020, instead of the fall of 2021.

Judy Woodruff:

That is something that was entirely out of his control.

Tamara Keith:

Completely out of his control.

Amy Walter:

Right. Right.

Tamara Keith:

But the parents were frustrated, and they were looking for an outlet.

Judy Woodruff:

Dealing with a lot, as parents all over the country.

But interesting, Amy, to point out that these two states, which happened to have governor's races this year, were ones that had the school issue.

Amy Walter:

That had the school issue, and that it goes — it speaks to the broader issue right now, when you have 70 percent of Americans saying, we think the country is off on the wrong track.

That means different things to different people. Some people are worried about the economy. Some people are still frustrated, not just that their schools weren't open, but just how hard it is for their child to catch up. They lost a lot of time.

We hear from the same parents. I was talking to one consultant is that I hear now in focus groups a lot, especially from moms, the challenge that their kids are having with their mental health.

Tamara Keith:

Yes.

Judy Woodruff:

Yes.

Amy Walter:

And so there is a lot of stuff going on for people. They're feeling that anxiety. And when you have that, and somebody is — somebody who's going to get the blame and somebody is going to offer the solution or at least a path forward, that's what happens.

Judy Woodruff:

Take this enormous disruption, and then you mix it into a political campaign.

Amy Walter:

That's right. Here you go.

Judy Woodruff:

And there you go.

Amy Walter:

Yes.

Judy Woodruff:

Amy Walter, Tamara Keith, thank you both. Politics Monday.

Tamara Keith:

You're welcome.

Amy Walter:

You're welcome.