Clyburn: Democrats are ‘going to run’ in 2022 on COVID-19 relief bill

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) said that Democrats are going to run on the passage of the American Rescue Plan in the 2022 midterm elections. 

Clyburn told The Associated Press in an interview published Tuesday that his party was not eager to make the same mistakes of the 2010 election cycle. He claimed that Democrats let Republicans define their efforts on relief aid in the face of economic disaster.

“What we’re going to do this time is let people know exactly what they’ve got,” Clyburn said, according to the AP. “We’re going to go out there and tell ’em what they’ve got, and, two years from now, we’re going to run on it.”

In 2010 he said Democrats “never told people exactly what we had done, and so the people opposed to what we were doing got a chance to fill in the blanks.”

Democrats underperformed in both the House and the Senate in 2020, when they expected to make gains in the Democratic-held house and win back the Senate by a clear margin. 

Instead, Democrats lost a number of seats in the House and won the Senate by a razor-thin margin following two Georgia elections in January of this year. Georgia broke for Sens. Raphael Warnock (D) and Jon Ossoff, defeating Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R) and David Perdue (R) respectively. 

Vice President Harris has served as a tie breaking vote in the 50-50 Senate, giving Democrats the slim majority. 

A larger majority in Congress would allow Democrats to push through their legislative priorities with more ease as moderates with their own party, such as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), have expressed to some proposed legislation. 

Former President Trump alleged that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), among others were to blame for the losses in Georgia, adding that they did not support a larger stimulus package while he was in office. In particular, Trump pointed to his call for larger direct payments to Americans in December.

“Senator Mitch McConnell’s refusal to go above $600 per person on the stimulus check payments when the two Democrat opponents were touting $2,000 per person in ad after ad. This latter point was used against our Senators and the $2,000 will be approved anyway by the Democrats who bought the Georgia election — and McConnell let them do it!” Trump said in a statement earlier this year.