Navigating Infrastructure in the Midterms

What voters think about infrastructure

Voters support investing in our infrastructure. Nearly four in five Americans think rebuilding our infrastructure is extremely important or very important. However, while voters think infrastructure is important in terms of how they plan to vote, it pales in comparison to other topics like health care, national security, gun policy, education, and the economy. (Source)

President Biden’s American Jobs Plan has enjoyed broad support among Democrats and Independents (87% and 68% respectively), though only 21% of Republicans support it. The bipartisan infrastructure plan endorsed by the President has more support among Republicans (60%), but less among Democrats (48%) and Independents (54%).

How to pay for the plan is more controversial: far more voters support raising taxes on people earning $400k+ or taxing the earnings US corporations make in other countries than any other proposed pay-for (such as tolling, raising the gas tax, or taking on debt).

What’s in the bipartisan proposal?

The bipartisan infrastructure proposal supported by President Biden represents a historic investment in our nation’s transportation, water, energy, and broadband infrastructure. Some highlights from the proposal include:

• Significant investment in roads and bridges, including the single largest investment in bridge repair in our history;
• The largest investments ever in transit and passenger rail, which will help improve transportation options while reducing emissions;
• A down payment on electrifying the transportation sector—which is critical to growing and keeping US auto jobs—including funding to deploy EV charging infrastructure and to help school districts and transit agencies purchase electric buses;
• Investments in water infrastructure that will help eliminate the nation’s lead service lines and pipes, delivering clean drinking water to up to 10 million American families and over 400,000 schools and child care facilities that don’t currently have it; and
• Investments to connect every American to reliable high-speed internet by building out broadband in rural and other underserved communities.

How to talk about the infrastructure package

The bipartisan infrastructure package has a lot for clean energy and climate, and you should feel free to point that out to voters and interest groups that you know value those priorities. However, for the general public the upcoming infrastructure package needs to be defined as a jobs and opportunity plan that will help solve the climate problem, rather than a climate bill that has some jobs and economic opportunity thrown in.

If talking about EV charging infrastructure, for example, be sure to mention that a robust investment in EV charging infrastructure will create tens of thousands of jobs and help the U.S. auto industry remain competitive, rather than just focusing on the climate benefits of EVs.

You can have an expansive definition of infrastructure—to a point. Voters will believe that broadband and water pipes are infrastructure, but they won’t see health care as infrastructure. Voters think of that as something else, and you shouldn’t waste time trying to convince people that everything we want to include in this package counts as “infrastructure.”

Most importantly, always bring the conversation back to local issues and how an expansive investment in infrastructure will help back home. 62% of Americans think the federal government isn’t spending enough on infrastructure projects in their local area. What are the most pressing infrastructure needs in your district? A robust infrastructure package will help fix structurally deficient bridges, fill in potholes, help communities underserved by broadband, replace lead water pipes, and more—all while creating and saving millions of jobs and reducing our climate impacts.

If asked about pay-fors

It is much more important to talk about what people are getting out of the infrastructure package rather than how we’re going to pay for it. However, you may be asked about pay-fors, which you should answer briefly before pivoting back to the benefits of these investments.

Raising the gas tax is a perennial option for funding our highway infrastructure. While this is the simplest and most straight forward option, many see it as a political hazard that could face backlash from voters. This is possibly why President Biden has taken raising or indexing the gas tax off the table, along with any tax increase for people earning less than $400,000 a year. (The President has instead proposed lifting the corporate tax rate, which was 35% before the 2017 Republican tax law, from its current 21% to 28% to help pay for infrastructure investment.)

Similarly, Republicans and Democrats have both floated a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) fee as a replacement to the gas tax to pay for infrastructure. Just like it sounds, this system would have motorists pay a fee based on the distances they travel over a certain time period. But that comes with its own challenges. A VMT fee has never been implemented at the federal level and will be much harder to administer than the gas tax. We also don’t know how it would affect rural drivers, and there will likely be privacy concerns with tracking how much and where people are driving. In short, a VMT is not ready for primetime, but worth investigating further.

Some Republicans are being disingenuous by saying we can pay for a massive infrastructure bill by levying a fee on electric vehicles—but there are currently very few EVs on the road, and so a user fee on EV drivers will barely put a dent in our highway funding shortfalls. Republicans have also suggested using unspent funds from the American Rescue Plan, which President Biden has said will hamper our ongoing recovery efforts.

Several additional options have been put forward to help pay for the bipartisan infrastructure proposal. These pay-fors include stronger IRS enforcement, redirecting unused unemployment insurance relief funds, extending customs user fees, proceeds from 5G spectrum auctions and strategic petroleum reserve sales, and others.