A new Zogby America poll of nationwide LV’s conducted Sept. 8-9 has Bush at 47 percent and Kerry at 45 percent in a head to head match-up, within a 3.1 percent m.o.e.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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May 23: Trump’s BBB Far From Final, But Democratic Message Is Pretty Clear
Having followed the ups and downs and twists and turns of House passage of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, I offered some thoughts at New York of where things stand for Republicans and for Democrats:
Republicans are in a state of euphoric self-congratulation over House passage of what’s known as the Big Beautiful Bill.
Politico Playbook, the Beltway’s daily bread, referred to the GOP Speaker of the House as “Magic Johnson” for his last-minute deal-making and cat-herding in securing its passage by a single vote, which happened before a Memorial Day deadline that many had thought unrealistic. He’s sharing credit, of course, with The Boss, Donald Trump, who wheedled and threatened and thundered in the presence of BBB holdouts at several key moments. In the end, for all the interminable talk of “rebellious” GOP factions unwilling to support the gigantic bill as either too vicious or not vicious enough, the price of collective failure was just too high for nearly all of them.
But now, of course, we are about to be reminded that Congress is a bicameral institution, and despite Republican control of both chambers, there are enough issues in the Senate with the carefully balanced Jenga tower the House built to endanger the edifice anew. And when the Senate does produce its version of BBB (the informal but very real deadline is July 4), the two bills will have to be reconciled, and the final product passed by both Houses and sent to Trump for his signature. This needs to happen before the arrival of the so-called X Date — likely in August — when the Treasury finally breaches the statutory debt limit, which is increased in the BBB.
As a former Senate employee, I can assure you that members and staff of that body have enormous institutional self-regard, regardless of party, and will not accept take-it-or-leave-it demands from the petty little pissants of the House. Beyond that, it’s important to understand that what makes “reconciliation” bills like BBB possible is the ability to avoid a Senate filibuster, and there are arcane but very real rules, policed by the non-partisan Senate parliamentarian, about what can and cannot be included in a budget reconciliation bill. So some changes may become absolutely necessary.
More importantly, the very divisions that came close to derailing the bill in the House exist in the Senate as well, with some special twists.
One of the most powerful House factions was the SALT caucus, a sizable group of Republicans from high-tax blue states determined to lift or abolish the cap on SALT (state and local tax) deductions imposed by the 2017 tax cut bill. They were able to secure an increase in the cap from $10,000 to $40,000 (with an inflation adjustment over the next ten years), a juicy treat for upper-middle-income tax itemizers with big property-tax bills, costing an estimated $320 billion. There are no Republican senators from the big SALT states, but there are a lot who deeply resent what they regard as a subsidy for free-spending Democrats in the states most affected. Maybe they’ll care enough about GOP control of the House to throw a lifeline to vulnerable members like Mike Lawler of New York or Young Kim of California, who have made SALT a big personal campaign-trail issue. But there are limits to empathy in Washington.
Another red-hot issue in the House was the size and nature of Medicaid cuts, with the BBB winding up with big cuts mostly accomplished via new “work requirements” that will cost millions of low-income people their health insurance. Senators are divided on Medicaid as well, notes Politico:
“GOP Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine have all warned they have red lines they will not cross on Medicaid and that they believe the House bill goes beyond ‘waste, fraud and abuse.’ The alignment between Hawley, a staunch conservative, with moderates like Murkowski and Collins, underscores how skittishness over changes to the health safety-net program is resonating across the ideological spectrum.”
There are similar problems with the SNAP (food stamp) cuts that shift many billions of dollars of costs to the states. And the way BBB structure the SNAP cuts the cost-shift will be particularly egregious for states with high “error rates” for SNAP paperwork and benefit determinations. Three states with two Republican senators each, Alaska, South Carolina and Tennessee, could really get hammered. They won’t be happy about it.
But at the same time, the HFC hard-liners, who were the very last faction to cave in to Trump’s pressure on the BBB, have counterparts in the Senate with their own complaints about the roughly $3 trillion the BBB adds to the national debt, notes Politico:
“Sen. Ron Johnson … is pushing for a return to pre-pandemic spending levels — a roughly $6 trillion cut. The Wisconsin Republican said in an interview he knows he won’t get that level of savings in the megabill but wants to tackle a chunk under the budget reconciliation process and then set up a bicameral commission to go ‘line by line’ to find the rest.
“Johnson also believes he has the votes to block a bill that doesn’t take deficit reduction seriously, pointing to Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Rick Scott of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky as senators sharing his concerns.”
If Mike Johnson is “magic,” Ron Johnson is “poison.”
On top of everything else, the budget resolution the Senate passed to set up its version of BBB includes an accounting trick that basically means the two chambers are operating from very different baseline numbers. The Senate’s insistence on “current policy scoring” means $3.8 trillion worth of expiring tax cuts that will be resurrected are deemed as “revenue neutral,” a fancy term for “free.” Perhaps the Senate parliamentarian will blow up that scam, but if not, it will cause problems in the House.
These are just the most obvious BBB problems; others will emerge as senators use their leverage to shape the bill to reflect their own political needs and the grubbier desires of the wealthy interests Republicans tend to represent. And for all the talk of the House being the body in which Republicans have no margin for error or division (two voted no and one voted “present”), the same number of GOP senators, four, could blow up the BBB. It’s going to be a long, wild ride, and the only people in Washington who know exactly what to say about the BBB are Democrats. No matter what tweaks Republicans make, the final product is still going to “cut safety net programs to give the wealthy tax cuts” while borrowing money to do so. That’s just baked into the cake.
I think Kerry is in a great position to surge ahead based on such things as:
A strong debate performance
An uprising in Iraq going beyond the present upsurge
A North Korean bomb test if he can convincingly make the case that it is due to Bush fumbles.
My dream result is:
*Kerry wins big, bigger than any thought
*The pro Bush polls are exposed and ridiculed
*The good polls are vindicated by being closest
From Zogby’s notes for the survey: “Slight weights were added to region, party, age, race, religion and gender to more accurately reflect the voting population. Margins of error are higher in sub-groups.”
As noted by others in previous posts, Zogby and some others are weighting party ID a little bit in their polls, while Time, Newsweek, etc. aren’t. I didn’t see in the notes to this poll what the exact weighting for Dems/Reps/Inds was.
This whole debate over whether to weight party ID or not is starting to get a little play in some of the media – the local NPR station in NY had a segment on it yesterday. Here’s an off-the-cuff observation: one would think that there would be some sort of established standards for an industry that’s been around for many decades. If a pollster is going to weight other factors, why would he/she exclude party ID from (at least to some extent) the same treatment? The arguments that I’ve heard that party ID should be a “floating variable” don’t make much sense if every other major demographic attribute gets weighted. One can sum up these polls with this motto: buyer beware – read the fine print.
In any event, the numbers are starting to settle in the wake of the GOP hatefest. It looks like Bush has established a 2-4 point lead. Kerry still has the issues environment on his side, so I remain optimistic that we’re going to win. BTW, Jeff’s post from yesterday about the demographic changes in the electorate over the past four years was great…I was aware of nearly all of those things, but he put all the pertinent data in a summarized and understandable format.
This contributes little to the discussion of facts, but…let me say what a good pick-me-up your blog is, Ruy. For those of us who care deeply about this election and its repercussions (but haven’t the time to parse the details), I count myself fortunate to be able to visit your site and routinely catch “the rest of the story.” Believe me, I pass it on to all my Donkey friends.