Having closely watched congressional developments over the last few weeks, I’ve concluded that one much-discussed Democratic tactic for dealing with Trump 2.0 is probably mistaken, as I explained at New York:
No one is going to rank Mike Johnson among the great arm-twisting Speakers of the House, like Henry Clay, Tom Reed, Sam Rayburn, or even Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, he still resembles Winston Churchill’s description of Clement Atlee as “a modest man with much to be modest about.”
But nonetheless, in the space of two weeks, Johnson has managed to get two huge and highly controversial measures through the closely divided House: a budget resolution that sets the stage for enactment of Donald Trump’s entire legislative agenda in one bill, then an appropriations bill keeping the federal government operating until the end of September while preserving the highly contested power of Trump and his agents to cut and spend wherever they like.
Despite all the talk of divisions between the hard-core fiscal extremists of the House Freedom Caucus and swing-district “moderate” Republicans, Johnson lost just one member — the anti-spending fanatic and lone wolf Thomas Massie of Kentucky — from the ranks of House Republicans on both votes. As a result, he needed not even a whiff of compromise with House Democrats (only one of them, the very Trump-friendly Jared Golden of Maine, voted for one of the measures, the appropriations bill).
Now there are a host of factors that made this impressive achievement possible. The budget-resolution vote was, as Johnson kept pointing out to recalcitrant House Republicans, a blueprint for massive domestic-spending cuts, not the cuts themselves. Its language was general and vague enough to give Republicans plausible deniability. And even more deviously, the appropriations measure was made brief and unspecific in order to give Elon Musk and Russ Vought the maximum leeway to whack spending and personnel to levels far below what the bill provided (J.D. Vance told House Republicans right before the vote that the administration reserved the right to ignore the spending the bill mandated entirely, which pleased the government-hating HFC folk immensely). And most important, on both bills Johnson was able to rely on personal lobbying from key members of the administration, most notably the president himself, who had made it clear any congressional Republican who rebelled might soon be looking down the barrel of a Musk-financed MAGA primary opponent. Without question, much of the credit Johnson is due for pulling off these votes should go to his White House boss, whose wish is his command.
But the lesson Democrats should take from these events is that they cannot just lie in the weeds and expect the congressional GOP to self-destruct owing to its many divisions and rivalries. In a controversial New York Times op-ed last month, Democratic strategist James Carville argued Democrats should “play dead” in order to keep a spotlight on Republican responsibility for the chaos in Washington, D.C., which might soon extend to Congress:
“Let the Republicans push for their tax cuts, their Medicaid cuts, their food stamp cuts. Give them all the rope they need. Then let dysfunction paralyze their House caucus and rupture their tiny majority. Let them reveal themselves as incapable of governing and, at the right moment, start making a coordinated, consistent argument about the need to protect Medicare, Medicaid, worker benefits and middle-class pocketbooks. Let the Republicans crumble, let the American people see it, and wait until they need us to offer our support.”
Now to be clear, Congressional GOP dysfunction could yet break out; House and Senate Republicans have struggled constantly to stay on the same page on budget strategy, the depth of domestic-spending cuts, and the extent of tax cuts. But as the two big votes in the House show, their three superpowers are (1) Trump’s death grip on them all, (2) the willingness of Musk and Vought and Trump himself to take the heat for unpopular policies, and (3) a capacity for lying shamelessly about what they are doing and what it will cost. Yes, ultimately, congressional Republicans will face voters in November 2026. But any fear of these elections is mitigated by the realization that thanks to the landscape of midterm races, probably nothing they can do will save control of the House or forfeit control of the Senate. So Republicans have a lot of incentives to follow Trump in a high-speed smash-and-grab operation that devastates the public sector, awards their billionaire friends with tax cuts, and wherever possible salts the earth to make a revival of good government as difficult as possible. Democrats have few ways to stop this nihilistic locomotive. But they may be fooling themselves if they assume it’s going off the rails without their active involvement.
It’s not going to be close, coldeye. It’s going to be Kerry in a big win, and the undervaluing of Dems in the polls will be identified as one of their compelling failures. Their inherent design defect will be another.
Kerry by 4-5 million, and by at least 40 points in the EC.
My worry is that the early voters are (likely to be, and this is just a guess) disproportionally students and the elderly, in which case wouldn’t we expect a bigger Kerry lead?
Ted
Very interesting. My only observation is that there are now more self identifingrepublicans then in the examples cited(especially in the midwest swing states). 9/11 had an impact that will be measured on tuesday.
This will be my final post before the election. Thank you Ruy and Alan and the rest for all the great information and insight into this crazy polling business.
Regarding the Pew poll, in the final analysis, I’m forced by hard reality to become a skeptic of weighting polls by party id (sorry Alan, I know you feel strongly on this one). MysteryPollster has an excellent and convincing refutal of the contention that polls should be weighted by party ID. I urge you all to read it.
However, there are real factors working in Kerry’s favor that aren’t fully reflecting in the polls; party-ID misweighting is simply not one of them (my humble opinion).
So what are the real polling unknowns in these final days?
The first is voter turnout. It would seem to favor the Democrats that turnout is expected to match or exceed 1992 (based on days of trolling the blogs and news cites, I predict it will exceed 1992). (Hence the sudden spike in Republican voter supression tactics in key battleground states – these are very real, very ugly, and very disgusting). The pollsters admit their models can’t effectively factor in the results of heavy turnout.
The second is possible underrepresentation of Kerry supporters in the poll samples and LV models. It’s probably a very small cumulative effect (1-2%) but in an election this close it could have an impact (well, obviously it will have an impact). I hate to be a wet blanket, but I tend to agree with the pros that the “unreachable cell phone” voter is given greatly more significance on this site than he/she deserves, at least for this election. The wingnut blogs entertain a fantasy that there are also millions of invisible Bush voters out there, but there’s really no good evidence to back this up. Invisible voters tend to be minority, young, mobile, phone-screeners, busy, politically unmotivated (in most election cycles), etc. They are probably more Democrat than Republican. Probably.
The last factor that may be skewing the national polls is Red states that are top-heavy with Bush supporters. Bush’s entire campaign has been aimed at energizing his base, which is very energized indeed and it concentrated in the (election 2000) Red states. When Fox stopped oversampling from Red states in their tracking polls, Bush’s support dropped seven points in four days, to +2 Kerry today. Kerry’s support in the battleground states is 2% or more higher than it is nationally.
When these three factors are combined, Kerry has a decent chance of winning the election even when the average of the final polls show Bush ahead by 2 or 3 points, which seems to be how it’s shaping up.
I don’t believe the predictions of a Kerry blowout (or a Bush blowout, either). It’s going to be very, very close, folks.
It’s been great blogging with all of you. I’ll now recede and await the outcome on Wednesday morning. God bless you all and God save the Republic (this coming from an atheist – that’s how nervous I am).
Among thost who have already voted, Pew has Kerry ahead by just 1 pt. But beneath the surface this number looks a lot more encouraging for Kerry. Most of the states that have early polling are red states and a few are battleground states. Assuming Bush is doing well in red states, Kerry must be doing really well in the battleground states.