I was very closely watching the saga of OMB’s disastrous effort to freeze funding for a vast number of federal programs, and wrote about why it was actually revoked at New York.
This week the Trump administration set off chaos nationwide when it temporarily “paused” all federal grants and loans pending a review of which programs comply with Donald Trump’s policy edicts. The order came down in an unexpected memo issued by the Office of Management and Budget on Monday.
Now OMB has rescinded the memo without comment just as suddenly, less than a day after its implementation was halted by a federal judge. Adding to the pervasive confusion, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately insisted on Wednesday that the funding freeze was still on because Trump’s executive orders on DEI and other prohibited policies remained in place. But there’s no way this actually gets implemented without someone, somewhere, identifying exactly what’s being frozen. So for the moment, it’s safe to say the funding freeze is off.
Why did Team Trump back off this particular initiative so quickly? It’s easy to say the administration was responding to D.C. district judge Loren AliKhan’s injunction halting the freeze. But then again, the administration (and particularly OMB director nominee Russell Vought) has been spoiling for a court fight over the constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act that the proposed freeze so obviously violated. Surely something else was wrong with the freeze, aside from the incredible degree of chaos associated with its rollout, requiring multiple clarifications of which agencies and programs it affected (which may have been a feature rather than a bug to the initiative’s government-hating designers). According to the New York Times, the original OMB memo, despite its unprecedented nature and sweeping scope, wasn’t even vetted by senior White House officials like alleged policy overlord Stephen Miller.
Democrats have been quick to claim that they helped generate a public backlash to the funding freeze that forced the administration to reverse direction, as Punchbowl News explained even before the OMB memo was rescinded:
“A Monday night memo from the Office of Management and Budget ordering a freeze in federal grant and loan programs sent congressional Republicans scrambling and helped Democrats rally behind a clear anti-Trump message. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted Trump as ‘lawless, destructive, cruel.’
“D.C. senator Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, warned that thousands of federal programs could be impacted, including veterans, law enforcement and firefighters, suicide hotlines, military aid to foreign allies, and more …
“During a Senate Democratic Caucus lunch on Tuesday, Schumer urged his colleagues to make the freeze “relatable” to their constituents back home, a clear play for the messaging upper hand. Schumer also plans on doing several local TV interviews today.”
In other words, the funding freeze looks like a clear misstep for an administration and a Republican Party that were walking very tall after the 47th president’s first week in office, giving Democrats a rare perceived “win.” More broadly, it suggests that once the real-life implications of Trump’s agenda (including his assaults on federal spending and the “deep state”) are understood, his public support is going to drop like Wile E. Coyote with an anvil in his paws. If that doesn’t bother Trump or his disruptive sidekick, Elon Musk, it could bother some of the GOP members of Congress expected to implement the legislative elements of the MAGA to-do list for 2025.
It’s far too early, however, to imagine that the chaos machine humming along at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will fall silent even for a moment. OMB could very well issue a new funding-freeze memo the minute the injunction stopping the original one expires next week. If that doesn’t happen, there could be new presidential executive orders (like the ones that suspended certain foreign-aid programs and energy subsidies) and, eventually, congressional legislation. Democrats and Trump-skeptical Republicans will need to stay on their toes to keep up with this administration’s schemes and its willingness to shatter norms.
It’s true, nonetheless, that the electorate that lifted Trump to the White House for the second time almost surely wasn’t voting to sharply cut, if not terminate, the host of popular federal programs that appeared to be under the gun when OMB issued its funding freeze memo. Sooner or later the malice and the fiscal math that led to this and other efforts to destroy big areas of domestic governance will become hard to deny and impossible to rescind.
There are significant methodology differences between the Washington Post and New York Times polls. The Times poll weights for Hispanic status as well as race; the Post poll weights only for race.
I would expect low-income Hispanics to vote strongly Democratic and be particularly underrepresented among poll respondents. Failure to adjust the sample for income, Hispanic status, or any proxy for these variables will impart a Republican bias to the results. (Education is not a proxy for income this year — the Post shows no trend of voting with education, and the latest Pew poll even shows Kerry support rising with education level.)
The Times poll also weights for whether the respondent lives in a Democratic, Republican, or swing county; the Post poll does not. This variable may function to some degree as a proxy for income — although as I noted out in my posting on the Times poll, the weighting is based on 2000 turnout and thus partially cancels out increases in Democratic registration. This weighting functions in some ways as a weaker version of party-ID weighting.
It seems to me that these methodological differences could easily explain much or all of the Times poll’s tendency to show Kerry doing better. It’s really unfortunate that none of the polls seem to publish any of their demographic weighting coefficients (except that we sometimes get numbers from which the party ID coefficients can be calculated) — it would be very helpful to know how significant and how stable the weighting coefficients are.
Ok,
Buhrabbit, I’m not referring to ANY conspiracy theory. They don’t hide anything in any manner whatsoever. Fox does their propaganda in the open. CNN has tried to be fair lately, but they are under enormous pressure from Fox to be just as un-journalistic. CBS is numbed (due to their own failure, largely). NBC has the same problems as CNN. And everyone who claims Washingtonpost and NYTimes are liberally biased is just a freeper. There’s just the LATimes and the magazines.
The rest what’s going on is reported on Media Matters. It’s bad enough.
RKC,
1. Gore’s reputation of being a nerd is part of the spin put on him. I have heard people talking of genuine affection to him. He’s known to be a interesting and interested fellow when the lights are off. He had problems to show this. I agree that he failed miserably in that first debate. But hey, that guy on the other side was even harder to bear..
2. The media hasn’t been any fairer to Kerry! That’s just bogus, with all due respect. What’s happened is that the left has learned a few lessons. They see what’s coming, they anticipate. There is a blogosphere, there is moveon.org. There is an increasingly unpopular war and a higher misery index. But that’s about it. The media went for more than a month with a campaign built on PLAIN LIES, for Christ’s sake!
3. Scepticism of polls? The bad September polls had a devasting effect on the Democratic electorate, much worse than four months of bad polls on the Republicans.
4. The registration efforts are good signs, and I’m glad for them. But the Reps have learned one or two things from the late surge to Gore in 2000. We’ll see if they can match us.
Listen, I don’t want to be gloomy. On the contrary, I’m all giddy since the debate. But this is an uphill struggle, and the opponent is not just the administration. I’m absolutely devasted of the things going on in the media, these days. We’ll need 20 years and more to reestablish some sort of decent journalism.
That’s all. But I hope that my pessimism is nuts.
Solving for party affiliation (minimizing RMS error against WP data), I get the following breakdown in party affiliation in the WP poll: (36%D/38.2%R/25.8%I).
If renormalized to the 2000 results of (39%D/35%R/26%I), the WP/ABC poll yields the following prediction:
Bush: 49.1
Kerry: 48.2%
Nader: 0.5%
The mean RMS error for my fit was 0.46%, within the 0.5% rounding error but just. Why doesn’t their poll supply party affiliation sample percentage, anyhow?
Solving for party affiliation (minimizing RMS error against WP data), I get the following breakdown in party affiliation in the WP poll: (36%D/38.2%R/25.8%I).
If renormalized to the 2000 results of (39%D/35%R/26%I), the WP/ABC poll yields the following prediction:
Bush: 49.1
Kerry: 48.2%
Nader: 0.5%
The mean RMS error for my fit was 0.46%, within the 0.5% rounding error but just. Why doesn’t their poll supply party affiliation sample percentage, anyhow?
-Fe Wm.
A least-squares fit on the WP/ABC data for party affiliation (why don’t they just provide this?) is as follows:
D= 35.99%
R= 38.21%
I= 25.8%
If the data is rescaled to Gore’s D39% R35% I26% model, we have, for the presidential race:
Bush: 49.1%
Kerry: 48.21%
Other: 0%
Neither: 0.65%
Would Not Vote: 0.26%
DK/No Opinion: 0.65%
Not a perfect fit on the thing – mean RMS error of 0.46% (still within the 0.5% rounding error, but just) – maybe I miskeyed some data, or something. Still, close race.
-Fe Wm.
This poll has weird sampling.
In the internals, for 1169 likely voters you get:
Bush 12%D 92%R 47% Ind = 51% of the total
Kerry 86%D 7%R 47% Ind = 46% of the total
Nader 0%D 0%R 2% Ind = 1% of the total
Using this information, you can solve backward to find out how many Ds, Rs and Is were likely voters. Here’s what I came up with:
A party ID of 24% Democrat, 27% Republican and 50% Independant out of likely voters. That seems to be an absurdly high number of independants as well as oversampling Republicans. I guess the most important thing to notice from this poll is they are running even among independants. Also, Kerry improved his status with independants by 4% from the last poll.
In response to Frenchfries’ comments, consider the following:
1. In 2000, even those who supported Gore generally considered him an unlikeable nerd. In 2004, while the flip-flop label has stuck amongst Republican partisans, most democrats know that it’s spin and consider Kerry a man of integrity.
2. In 2000, the media was totally unfair in its treatment of Gore. In 2004, the media has been largely unfair to Kerry, but he’s been treated a little better than Gore in 2000.
3. In 2000, all the polls right before the election showed Bush ahead, which should have discouraged Gore supporters from turning out. We don’t know what the polls will say right before the election this time, but we have learned to be more skeptical of polls and therefore are less likely to be discouraged by them.
4. In 2000 Gore did not have a massive voter registration drive in his favor. I’d guess that with Gore in 2000 and Bush in 2004, there was little participation in the primaries because the nominee was never in doubt. In 2004, we’ve had two waves of voter registrations: First, for the democratic primary process, in which there was a record level of participation, and second for the general election, and signs are that the democrats are way ahead in registrations.
My point is this: Even with everything against him, Gore still won the popular vote in 2000. This time, Kerry has the same things going against him that Gore did, but he has several advantages in his favor that Gore did not have. That suggests to me that Kerry still has a good chance of winning, even if he is behind in the polls on election day. I think the opposite of Frenchfries’ point is true: Bush can only win if there is a surge to HIM.
When the Newsweek poll came out showing Kerry ahead, the Kerry campaign downplayed it, saying they’ve had questions about that poll in the past. I think that’s the right approach: Whether we’re up or we’re down, we should downplay the polls. Remember, if Kerry is ahead in the polls on election day, there is a risk that Kerry voters won’t show up, assuming that they don’t need to. IMO, the message from the Democrats should be: Never mind the polls, whether we’re up or we’re down, just GET OUT AND VOTE.
I hope its clear from my post re: Zogby that I am not referring to a conspiracy theory. My beef is that at some point the media’s definitions of “fair” has ceased to be about truth finding, but instead is about speed. Also, there is their need to convince the right that they are balanced so they often will entertain ideas no matter how factually incorrect. I have a question for example, with no only the polling issue, where a 2 pt Bush lead is a lead, and a 2 pt Kerry lead is a tie (as I said do a google search), but also with a media that can’t say that Kerry’s Global Test is not the same as what Bush is saying on the stump. They have a very clear point of reference to make this judgement- namely what Kerry said in the debate- yet no mention is made of this. How much sense does this make if you are going to go with your lead story being about the global test. This goes beyond theories of laziness, it goes to theories of fear of not appearing balance, and as a result, not actually being balanced. Here, the solution should have been not just repeating Bush’s lie, and then saying Kerry says my opponent is lying about what I said (which confuses the point) but to add this is Kerry’s statement in the context of the debate. This way neither the right or left could claim unfair treatment- yet the way they choose to do it- clearly is unfair treatment. I think its just poor reporting for ourside that’s hurting us a lot. I am not certain what can be done about this in this cycle but we need to address this.
I highly highly doubt Bush is up 5 after the first debate.