Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With Allie Bice and Nick Niedzwiadek Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Tina In what was otherwise a shit sandwich of an August for President JOE BIDEN, one silver lining managed to emerge. His ambitious plan for reshaping the social safety net — otherwise known as the Build Back Better bill and formally described in congressional parlance as the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package — went largely unscathed. Democratic operatives who track political activity during the August recess said party members encountered little pushback over the proposal in their home districts and states. Ad spending trackers said they believe liberal group television advertising on the bill outpaced that from conservative counterparts. (Two progressive environmental groups, Climate Power and League of Conservation Voters, alone spent nearly $14 million dollars in paid ads during August recess in 27 frontline districts and four states with Senate races.) The communications and marketing agency, BPI, which does political work primarily with Democrats, found that of the roughly $12.5 million in Facebook ad spending that Republican and Republican-allied groups placed during the month of August and first week of September, roughly $2 million went after Biden. Of that $2 million, just $112,000 targeted him on economic issues. Only one group — the Conservative Institute — mentioned the Build Back Better plan in its ads. They spent less than $200 on those spots. “We’re seeing no concerted Republican messaging effort against it,” said MAX STEELE, a spokesperson for American Bridge 21st Century, the largest opposition research, tracking, and rapid response operation allied with the Democratic Party. The absence of a concerted attack against a legislative initiative certainly doesn’t mean that said initiative is on a glide path towards passage. Indeed, there’s plenty for Biden to worry about when it comes to passing the reconciliation bill. He can’t afford to lose many votes in the House or a single vote in the Senate. And Sen. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.) has been saying for weeks that he’s uncomfortable with the size of the package and the speed at which it is being considered. But for those who lived through the legislative Bataan Death March that was the passage of Obamacare, the fact that August went the way it did for Build Back Better was a godsend. Twelve years ago, Democratic lawmakers went back home only to encounter absolute bedlam over their efforts to put together the Affordable Care Act. Town hall confrontations went viral. Democratic members were inundated with protests. By the time they came back to Washington, the party was in a panic. That just didn’t happen this time around. One top party operative recalled anxiously looking for signs of how the August recess would go while watching Rep. Cindy Axne (D-Iowa), a moderate Democrat in a frontline district, as she conducted the very first town hall during recess. “Not a single person there who was pushing back on her,” the operative recounted. Republicans don’t concede that they’re letting Biden’s major legislative initiative skate by. They note that inflation has been at the center of their economic attacks against the president and that, inherently, people will start opposing a $3.5 trillion bill the more they begin to worry about the rising costs of living. But they also concede that there are — to put it bluntly — more inviting targets right now, from Afghanistan, to hot button culture war issues, to efforts to fight the pandemic. “I think the lack of attacks on that specific piece of legislation speaks to how target-rich the environment is right now,” said one top GOP operative working on the 2022 campaigns. “There are probably five other more divisive issues right now.” The fear for those Democrats working on the Build Back Better initiative is that all this could abruptly change; not just that Republican groups may soon turn their ire on the bill (indeed, there is some indication that the pace of ad spending on the right is picking up), but that major industry players will swoop in and try to tank it, too. Pharmaceutical companies and major corporate interests have been open in their opposition to the prescription drug reforms and corporate tax hikes that are set to be included in the package. “We will be planning a significant ad buy but also doing in-district events too,” MARC SHORT, the founder of the conservative Coalition to Protect American Workers and MIKE PENCE’s former chief of staff, told West Wing Playbook. All of which is why the Biden White House and congressional Democrats want to move quickly to pass the legislation, lest the already shaky path for passage gets closed off for good. As the aforementioned GOP operative noted: “History has shown that it's impossible for large scale bills to remain popular for a couple months.” Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you LAURA FLORES? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous: westwingtips@politico.com. 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