President Joe Biden signed the $1.2 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act into law on November 15, 2021, providing $550 billion for a range of new investments and giving the president and his party hope that they’ll have a landmark achievement to tout come election time. But eight months later, just 24% of likely voters know the bill was enacted, according to a new poll by center-left think tank Third Way and Impact Research. Nearly four in 10 likely voters say they “don’t know” the status of the bill while another 30% say lawmakers are still working on the legislation.
“Given that a large share believes the deal is still being worked on in Congress, it is clear that voters are confusing the BIF with BBB, which, of course, has not passed,” Third Way’s Aliza Astrow and Jim Kessler write, using the acronyms for the bipartisan infrastructure framework and Democrats’ Build Back Better bill. (Those abbreviations, useful as they may be for policy wonks, certainly could be contributing to the confusion among voters who don’t follow every legislative development.)
“We were so focused on passing the next thing, we forgot to tell people about it. And that’s a huge mistake,” Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA) told Politico, which first reported on the poll.
The online poll of 2,000 likely 2022 voters was conducted June 2 – 9 and has an overall margin of error of 2.2 percentage points.
