Voters pay attention to the ideological direction of policy and will punish Biden for moving too far left.

Politicians seek to move policy in their preferred ideological direction and believe that elections give them a mandate to govern (Azari 2014). But that hardly means voters will reward them. Consider research showing that public support for policy change moves “thermostatically” against the direction of policymaking, shifting leftward under Republican presidents making conservative policy moves and rightward under Democratic presidents making liberal policy moves (Wlezien 1995; 2004; Erikson, et al 2002). These shifts lead voters to turn against the party of ambitious presidents that overshoot public demand for policy change (Erikson, et al 2002; Wlezien 2017). In presidential elections, the further policy moves rightward or leftward, the more relative preferences move in the opposite direction and the worse the candidate of the incumbent party does (also see Bolstad 2012), explaining about half of the cost of ruling effect (Wlezien 2017).

Policymaking may have similar consequences for Congressional elections. Public judgments of Congress respond to congressional lawmaking, as voters use policy output to judge the ideological distance between themselves and Congress (Algara 2021). Voters tend to move against major laws passed by Congress as they learn about details (and infighting) from media coverage (Atkinson 2017). Major electoral losses for the majority party in Congress, such as in the 2010 election, are the product of voters punishing legislators for supporting policies that demonstrate they are ideologically distant from voters (Nyhan et al. 2012). All of these findings suggest that parties may suffer from moving policy too far in their preferred direction. State-level evidence also finds that voters counterbalance parties that succeed in legislating major policy victories (Pacheco 2013).