There’s really not much drama going on in Congress lately, but a manufactured crisis could shut down the federal government right in the middle of the general election season, as I explained at New York:
Kicking cans down the road is an essential skill in Congress, particularly when partisan control of the government is divided, as it is now. Routine decisions like keeping the federal government operating must await posturing over essential laws each party wants to enact but does not have the power to impose. And that’s why there seems to be a perpetual threat of a government shutdown — which is what happens if either house of Congress or the president refuses to sign off on spending authority — and why Washington typically lurches along from stopgap spending deal to stopgap spending deal.
The most recent stopgap spending deal expires on September 30, the last day of Fiscal Year 2024. There’s been some back-and-forth about the length of the next stopgap based on changing calculations of which party is likely to be in the ascendancy after the November election. But this normal bit of maneuvering suddenly turned fraught as Donald Trump bigfooted his way into the discussion on Truth Social not long before he debated Kamala Harris:
“If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET. THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO “STUFF” VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN — CLOSE IT DOWN!!!”
The backstory is that in April, when Speaker Mike Johnson was feeling some heat from the House Freedom Caucus over allegedly “caving” to Democrats in the last stopgap spending fight, the Louisianan scurried down to Mar-a-Lago to huddle with the Boss. Johnson announced he would do Trump’s bidding by introducing a bill to outlaw noncitizen voting, the phantom menace that is one of Trump’s favorite stolen-election fables. Those of us who understood that noncitizen voting (of which there is no actual evidence beyond a handful of votes among hundreds of millions) is already illegal shrugged it off as a MAGA red-meat treat.
But Johnson forged ahead with a House vote to approve the so-called SAVE Act. After the Senate ignored it, he included it in the first draft of his new stopgap bill. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, figured it would be dropped when negotiations got serious. But then Trump made his latest intervention and then, worse yet, Johnson couldn’t get the votes to pass his stopgap and get the ping-pong game with Democrats going (many right-wing House members won’t vote for any stopgap spending bill, and others are demanding big domestic spending cuts that don’t pass the smell test). So Johnson is back to square one, as the New York Times reports:
“Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday abruptly canceled a vote on his initial plan to avert a government shutdown, as opposition to the six-month stopgap funding measure piled up in both parties.
“It was a bruising setback for Mr. Johnson coming only a few weeks before a Sept. 30 deadline Congress faces to fund the government or face a shutdown.”
So now what? In the intense heat of an election year in which both the House and the White House are poised between the two parties, the leader of the GOP ticket has ordered Johnson to hold his breath until he turns blue — or more to the point, until the government is shut down — unless something happens that is as likely as Johnson suddenly coming out for abortion rights. Indeed, far from ramming the deeply offensive and impractical SAVE Act down the throats of Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden, he can’t even get the stopgap spending measure that includes it out of his own chamber. In the past, Democrats have loaned him a few votes to help him out of a jam, but they won’t do it unless he drops the SAVE Act. And if he drops the SAVE Act, Trump’s friends in the House will happily drop him the first chance they get (maybe right away, or maybe after the election). On the other hand, if he obeys Trump and refuses to move any spending bill, there’s a good chance a few Republicans will defect and back a Democratic measure to avoid an unusually pointless and politically damaging government shutdown. That, too, would expose Johnson as feckless and disposable.
Ever since Johnson succeeded Kevin McCarthy, Washington observers have alternated between treating him as some sort of backwoods parliamentary genius who fools people with his apparent befuddlement and as a Mr. Magoo who stumbles forward blindly and survives by luck and the fact that House Republicans have no better prospects for wielding the gavel. We’ll soon see which Mike Johnson emerges from the current morass. Another major incident of GOP fecklessness and disarray could help Democrats flip the House, but it’s a shame people may not be able to do their jobs in the interim.
Most of the political science research on voting indicates that the likelihood of voting rises with education. Voters with a high school diploma or less tend to break Republican; voters with a college degree or some college education tend to break Democratic; voters with post-graduate education break evenly (those in social sciences breaking heavily Democratic, those in physical sciences breaking heavily Republican).
That has been the general trend since “The American Voter” came out decades ago, although the trend does appear to be weakening some among voters with post-graduate education and college education.
Jason – EMD posts RV’s when they are available, LV’s when RV’s are not available. RV’s are better because they are more accurate for predicting outcomes. LV’s do gain some value for predicting outcomes as the election gets very close, which will be soon.
i read in salon (i beleive) that bush has not visitied ohio at all or very much in last three weeks.
can anyone confirm that?
A small complaint/request for clarification.
You seem to oscillate between citing LV results and RV results. You have a lot of excellent analysis, but the practice gives the impression of only citing the most favorable side of a poll for Kerry.
Is it merely a matter of polling firms just looking at LVs, or RVs, but not both? If not, perhaps you could cite both results, or, if it’s not too simplistic, say why you favor one over the other?
The trends reported in this poll for education and income are quite extraordinary:
“Kerry’s support gradually grows from those who do not have a high school diploma (60-40 Bush) to those with a graduate or professional degree (67-32 Kerry). Kerry leads in income categories under $35,000 a year and in the $51,000-$75,000 a year range; Bush leads narrowly in the $36,000-$50,000 category and has wider leads in the higher categories.”
I have seen few polls that gave breakdowns by both income and education, but the trends are generally in the same direction although usually weaker. Since education and income are highly correlated, it is very striking to have such opposite trends and when you look at subgroups with the same level of education, the change in Bush/Kerry vote as a function of income must be staggering. And similarly for change in vote as a function of education among people with the same income.
In this circumstance, weighting your sample to give an accurate demographic breakdown by education, but not by income (the latter is nearly impossible for a myriad of practical reasons) will actually INCREASE the Republican bias of the sample created by the oversampling of high-income voters.This bias affects RV samples just as much as LV samples.
I have not studied past poll data on this subject, but my impression was that in past years the overall trend was that Republican vote went up with education level, so that weighting for education allowed you to partly correct for undersampling of low-income voters. But if my recollection is right, this year is different — meaning that the polls are underpredicting Kerry’s vote. (Don’t get too excited — my guess is that the effect is probably not more than one point or so — but in this election one point is a big deal.)
One conclusion is clear. Polls absolutely should not weight their samples for education this year.