March 14: Democrats Really Were in Disarray Over Spending Bill
Having spent much of the week watching the runup to a crucial Senate vote on appropriations, I had to express at New York some serious misgivings about Chuck Schumer’s strategy and what it did to his party’s messaging:
For the record, I’m usually disinclined to promote the hoary “Democrats in Disarray” narrative whereby the Democratic Party is to blame for whatever nightmarish actions Republicans generally, or Donald Trump specifically, choose to pursue. That’s particularly true right now when Democrats have so little actual power and Republicans have so little interest in following laws and the Constitution, much less precedents for fair play and bipartisanship. So it really makes no sense to accuse the powerless minority party of “allowing” the assault on the federal government and the separation of powers being undertaken by the president, his OMB director Russ Vought, and his tech-bro sidekick Elon Musk. If congressional Republicans had even a shred of integrity or courage, Senate Democrats would not have been placed in the position this week of deciding whether it’s better to let the government shut down than to let it be gutted by Trump, Vought, and Musk.
Having said all that, Senate Democrats did have a strategic choice to make this week, and based on Chuck Schumer’s op-ed in the New York Times explaining his decision to get out of the way and let the House-passed spending bill come to the floor, he made it some time ago. Nothing in his series of rationalizations was new. If, indeed, “a shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda,” while enabling the administration to exert even more unbridled power over federal programs and personnel, that was true a week ago or a month ago as well. So Schumer’s big mistake was leading Senate Democrats right up to the brink of a collision with the administration and the GOP, and then surrendering after drawing enormous attention to his party’s fecklessness.
This doesn’t just look bad and feel bad for Democrats demanding that their leaders do something to stop the Trump locomotive: It also gives the supreme bully in the White House incentive to keep bullying them, as Josh Marshall points out in his postmortem on the debacle:
“[P]eople who get hit and abused and take it tend to get hit and abused again and again. That’s all the more true with Donald Trump, a man who can only see the world through the prism of the dominating and the dominated. It is a great folly to imagine that such an abject acquiescence won’t drive him to up the ante.”
The reality is that this spending measure was the only leverage point congressional Democrats had this year (unless Republicans are stupid enough not to wrap the debt-limit increase the government must soon have in a budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered). Everyone has known that since the new administration and the new Congress took office in January. If a government shutdown was intolerable, then Democrats should have taken it off the table long before the House voted on a CR. Punchbowl News got it right:
“Let’s be blunt here: Democrats picked a fight they couldn’t win and caved without getting anything in return. …
“Here’s the lesson from this episode: When you have no cards, fold them early.”
Instead, Democrats have taken a defeat and turned it into a debacle. House and Senate Democrats are divided from each other, and a majority of Senate Democrats are all but shaking their fists at their own leader, who did in fact lead them down a blind alley. While perhaps the federal courts will rein in the reign of terror presently underway in Washington (or perhaps they won’t), congressional Democrats must now become resigned to laying the groundwork for a midterm election that seems a long time away and hoping something is left of the edifice of a beneficent federal government built by their predecessors from the New Deal to the Great Society to Obamacare. There’s a good chance a decisive majority of the general public will eventually recoil from the misrule of the Trump administration and its supine allies in Congress and across the country. But at this point, elected Democrats are going to have to prove they should be trusted to lead the opposition.
So when will the exit polls finally say that Bush lost?????
(and what Joe said above)
Joe: That’s easy. For one thing, the Hispanic vote wasn’t as large as billed but it was still a gain for Bush — same with Catholics.
More importantly, Republican and conservative turnout was way up, women voted much more Republican, and upper income people both increased their turnout and voted more Republican.
There you go, Joe. The mystery of Bush’s 3 point margin all cleared up!
You know, Ruy did explain that one (look for his immediate post-election posts): we got absolutely hosed among non-college whites (evangelical and otherwise), who broke Republican more than they have before, and we didn’t improve our national performance among Latinos (although we did improve in NDN-targeted swing states like CO and FL). We need to become competitive again among non-college whites outside the Northeast, so that the “southwestern strategy” doesn’t become our only possible path to 270 next time out. And we need to improve our Latino performance, rather than patting ourselves on the back because we’re not slipping all that much. Ruy and almost everyone else here know all these things already. (Simon Rosenberg knows them backwards and forwards, which is why he’s my pick, right now, for DNC chair.)
I’ve always suspected that the hispanic vote was less Republican than those early polls showed. And looking at the county results, they aren’t significantly different than the 2000 results; in Texas, Kerry gained about 1 percent from Gore’s Texas numbers, and Bush improved by about 1.5 percent. Only a handful of counties changed sides, mostly a few western counties switching to Bush, while Austin’s Travis County switched Democrat.
And to answer the question above, the black vote is only about 19 percent of the national vote, at most, and the hispanic vote, while about the same, is not as monolithically Democrat as the black vote. Hispanics in 2000 favored Gore, true, but 1 in 3 voted Bush, while less than 1 in 10 blacks voted Bush in 2000.
The evangelical percentage for Bush was the same, but the actual number of evangelicals voting was slightly higher. Statistics can be so slippery!
And the Catholic vote was still 50/50. Frankly, I’ve always thought that it was odd to still treat as broad a religion as Roman Catholic as if it were a monolithic group. To use an anecdotal example, one of my friends is a white pro-choice Catholic Democrat, and another is an asian pro-life Catholic Democrat. One is from VA and one os from OH. All they have in common is that they got baptised the same way. I think it’s time we stopped calling “Catholic” a group the same way we call races groups.
Does this mean that Bush catered to the wrong folks with his Commerce and AG pick??
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1. Re Ruy and Steve — as I understand it, the state exit polls and the NEP are separate and autonomous; as such… while one can be used to call into question the other, I don’t understand why changes in one mean that the other number, reliable or not, is to be altered commensurately.
2. Joe — because white married Protestants without college degrees are both numerous and shifted really strongly against the Dems.
And because we ought to remember that going from +0.5 to -2.8 – the Dems didn’t do THAT much worse.
Maybe those nomination announcements were made a bit prematurely… A.G. Gonzales and Commerce Secretary Gutierrez’s days may already be numbered.
Ruy: Can you please explain how,
if the Hispanic vote wasn’t as high for Bush as previously thought,
if the African American vote still went Democratic,
if the Catholic vote for Kerry wasn’t as low as it was thought to be and
that the Evangelical vote for Bush wasn’t measureably higher than 2000,
how, in 2004, did Bush win and Kerry lose?
I’ve been saying this, the future of the Democratic land base lies in the Southwest, not the Southeast. New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and eventually even Arizona will come our way. Many years from now, even Texas may become a swing state.