By Chris Stirewalt | Friday, September 26 |
By Chris Stirewalt Friday, September 26 |
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© J. Scott Applewhite, Associated Press |
Gaming out the politics of a shutdown |
Washington is almost as bad about abusing truisms as farmers and sports announcers. And right now, the Washington equivalent of the black bands on a woolly bear caterpillar or "defense wins championships" is this old chestnut: "The party in control of Congress gets the blame for a government shutdown." It looks like we are about to find out about that. The deal to fully fund the federal government reached in March expires at the end of the day Tuesday, and both parties have puffed themselves up as big as they can to say they actually welcome a shutdown because the other side will get the blame. This is pretty typical pre-shutdown theater. But a couple of things are atypical. First, it's the Democrats who are the ones in the minority holding things up and, of course, the vagaries of a second-term President Trump. The White House says not only that Republicans will be advantaged politically for a shutdown that looks increasingly inevitable, but that Trump will use the opportunity to restart the DOGE-style purge of federal agencies. It's a credible and, at least to some degree, effective threat. The fears of what Trump would do with a freer hand to slash federal outlays during a shutdown is a big part of what drove Democrats to agree to extend funding without much of a fight back in March. And Democrats are more than a little uneasy about their new role doing what then-President Barack Obama once said was to "hold the entire economy hostage over ideological demands." In 35 years of shutdown showdowns, the Democratic position has almost always been that a "clean" or unconditional extension of current funding levels is the obviously correct answer. As with the debt ceiling, it's been Republicans, who mostly favor less government spending, who have been willing to engage in brinkmanship. But locked in the minority and with a weak, unpopular leader in the Senate, Democrats say they're ready to go for it on fourth and long rather than punt again. Not only is Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) having a hard time keeping his conference in line, he's looking over his shoulder at home. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) is weighing whether running for Schumer's seat in New York or heading straight for a White House run makes the most sense for 2028. Schumer, who would be 77 by then, hasn't ruled out seeking a sixth term. And the action is all in the Senate right now. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) got a continuing resolution through on a party-line vote last week and isn't even planning to reconvene until after Tuesday's deadline has passed. Trump is refusing to meet with Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) to negotiate. The name of the game in the Senate is finding something that all 53 Republicans and at least seven Democrats can agree on. And while the pressure is mostly on the Democrats, two Republicans also voted against the package, for very different reasons: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) wants to restore or maintain health insurance funding targeted by Trump and the GOP, while Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) wants spending cuts, not extensions. That means Murkowski could be gotten as part of a deal, while Paul will be less likely to join a package that is even more expensive than the one he already opposed. That means Majority Leader John Thune (S.D.) will need perhaps eight Democrats for a deal, provided the sweeteners don't send more Republicans over the edge like Paul. Meanwhile, there's a fight among House Republicans over how long the eventual continuing resolution should be. Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) has been breaking rocks for months to pass the suite of regular bills that Congress is supposed to pass every year to fund the government, but usually doesn't. He's had quite a lot of bipartisan success moving the legislation, but won't make the deadline. The fight is over whether to do it the right way, which means short extensions until the larger project is done, or do another full-year extension that will be packed with pork, full of gaps and jammed through in a midnight vote. Once the shutdown starts, the chances of any kind of fiscal responsibility begin to decline dramatically. But Democrats swear they're ready to take the plunge, pointing to a pair of surveys from blue-team pollsters that say Republicans would be worse off, one from Data for Progress that says 59 percent of surveyed voters, including 54 percent of independents, would blame Republicans, compared with 34 percent who would blame Democrats, and another poll from Navigator Research that says 48 percent of surveyed Americans would blame Republicans compared with 26 percent who would blame Democrats. Are a couple of partisan polls actually going to tell us what a shutdown would mean when it's time for midterms? Certainly we can bet that a shutdown, especially one in which Trump used the opportunity to further slash the federal workforce, would have negative consequences for Republicans trying to hold the governorship in Virginia, home to so many federal employees and contractors, this November. But will what happens next week still matter next year? There have been four politically significant shutdowns since the mid-1970s, when budget legislation created the cliff as a means to encourage dealmaking. (Lolz.) All four were Republican creations, including the first serious showdown when House Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, punished then-President George H.W. Bush for breaking his "no new taxes" pledge. It was brief, but happened just a month before the midterms. Were the relatively modest losses for Republicans — one seat in the Senate and eight seats in the House — exacerbated by the shutdown? Probably, but it was just a three-day stunt. Gingrich delivered a much more consequential shutdown when, thanks in part to Bush's broken pledge, Bill Clinton won the White House. The shutdown that gave Washington its current rules for the blame game was really two shutdowns spread between November and January in 1995 and 1996. Republicans in control of the House for the first time since the 1950s after the 1994 midterms took Clinton to the wall, but Clinton won. Not only did the GOP have to cave, it set Clinton up as the reasonable man for his 1996 reelection bid. That shutdown also set the current framework for shutdown tactics, the so-called Washington Monument strategy, in which the administration makes any closures as public and painful to the other side as possible. Certainly Trump is going all in on that one this time. The agonies of the Gingrich shutdown helped prevent any more such moves for 17 years, until the famous Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) shutdown of 2013, in which Cruz, working with House Republicans, blockaded a spending deal for 16 days, demanding the repeal of ObamaCare. This is the template Democrats are using this time, but instead of a health insurance repeal, they want to repeal the Republican cuts to health insurance from the Trump reconciliation package and extend some expiring ObamaCare subsidies. At the time, Republicans worried that the stunt, which was always doomed to fail, would cost them in the 2014 midterms. But that is certainly not what happened. Republicans expanded their House majority by 13 seats and won back the Senate with a whopping nine-seat gain. Could it have been even more if it weren't for the shutdown? Did the shutdown actually help the GOP? Who could say, but the safer bet was that voters weren't thinking very much about it at all a year later. Democrats are hoping for something like that, or, if they're very lucky, something like the longest and most recent shutdown: the Trump self-shutdown of 2018 and 2019. Stung by midterm losses, Trump refused to sign any continuing resolution that didn't include billions more for building his wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, which had been refused by the Republican-controlled Senate. Surely, that 35-day intraparty fight didn't do anything to help Republican chances in the 2020 election. We shouldn't draw too many direct lessons from that episode since what immediately followed the shutdown was a massive pandemic that very obviously overwhelmed Trump's leadership capacities. Plus, a quadrennial election is a very different animal from a midterm, especially the highest-turnout presidential election in modern history. The lessons from the analogous Cruz shutdown ought to be encouraging for Democrats if this first shutdown of their own creation really is inevitable. Swing voters next year simply may not care, and their base is certainly looking for a fight. |
Holy croakano! We welcome your feedback, so please email us with your tips, corrections, reactions & amplifications: WholeHogPolitics@TheHill.com. If you'd like to be considered for publication, please include your name and hometown. If you don't want your comments to be publicized, please specify. |
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Change from last week: ↓ 8.2 points Change from one month ago: ↓ 2.8 points |
[Average includes: Quinnipiac University 38% approve - 54% disapprove; Ipsos/Reuters 41% approve - 58% disapprove; American Research Group 37% - 58% disapprove; Gallup 40% approve - 56% disapprove; AP-NORC 39% approve - 60% disapprove] |
Republicans start to soften on immigration crackdown |
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Writer Lindsey Liles traveled to eastern North Carolina to tell the story of Julie Moore, the woman who made her community fall in love with the Venus flytrap. Garden & Gun: "Moore has been married twice and divorced twice and refers to those former partners as her favorite and least favorite ex-husbands. (The least favorite called her the Nightmare on Elm Street when they lived on Elm Street.) Her medical chart includes a note that she bites when coming out of anesthesia because her doctor learned that the hard way. She's a certified burn boss (yes, that's an official title) and loves nothing more than mobilizing people to wield cleansing, controlled fire. She's aware that she looks innocent and demure and says it helps her 'get away with a lot.' She's a big-picture thinker, a connector of people and ideas, and the Green Swamp, as an outstanding example of an intact longleaf pine ecosystem, has a special place in her heart." |
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New Jersey gubernatorial race gets interesting: New Jersey Monitor: "Republican Jack Ciattarelli and Democrat Mikie Sherrill are locked in a tight race to succeed Gov. Phil Murphy, according to a new poll released Thursday. Each candidate received 43% from the 935 self-reported likely voters surveyed by Emerson College Polling, marking a slowdown for Sherrill, a four-term congresswoman who has led the contest in every other public poll of the race. Just under 11% of respondents were undecided, and 3% plan to vote for a different candidate ... Spencer Kimball, the poll's executive director, in a statement noted that poll results show state and federal executives are unpopular. 'Both President Trump and Governor Murphy are underwater among Jersey voters. Sherrill is trying to tie Ciattarelli to Trump, at the national level, and Ciattarelli is trying to tie Sherrill to Murphy and the cost of living at the state level.'" |
Spanberger struggles to deflect GOP attacks on trans sports: WSET: "[Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger] responded to a recent ad from Republican candidate Winsome Earle-Sears, which claimed, 'She voted to allow men in girls' sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms.' When asked if she supports transgender women playing in girls' sports and using girls' restrooms, Spanberger said, 'So in Virginia, until very recently we have had a process in place where on an individual, one by one basis, schools, principals, parents, coaches were making decisions based on fairness, competitiveness and safety, where a child might be able or might not be able to play in a particular sport.'" |
Huge spike in support for Newsom's gerrymander retaliation: KTLA: "A new Emerson College Polling survey … finds that a slim majority of California voters support Proposition 50, a November ballot measure that would temporarily change congressional district maps in response to Texas doing the same. The poll, conducted on Sept. 15-16, found that 51% of voters plan to vote "yes" on Prop. 50, while 34% say they'll vote "no." Another 15% are still undecided. Among voters who say they are very likely to vote, support rises to 55%. [Up from 33% to 25% last month.]" |
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Dems continue to bring the heat in special elections with Arizona win — The Hill Three Supreme Court cases that could reshape midterms — Washington Examiner Harris endorses Mamdani, but never says his name — New York Times Senate or White House? Ocasio-Cortez mulls next steps — The Hill Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) floats primary challenge against Sen. Ed Markey — Boston Globe Rep. Tom Tiffany (Wis.) becomes top contender for GOP nod to replace retiring Wisconsin governor — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel |
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TABLE TALK: THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY |
"Trump 2028. I hope this never ends." — South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham enthusing about the president's oft-threatened but only sometimes withdrawn bid for a constitutionally forbidden third term. "It's a good relationship, and it's a relationship that is based on mutual respect, having been in the trenches together. And admiration. And it's sincere, sincerely." — Former Vice President Kamala Harris in an appearance promoting her new book, which at many points lambastes former President Joe Biden, saying the two are still in close contact. |
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"We see 'Democrats support this, that, etc, oppose whatever.' Then we see the same with Republicans. But there are not just two parties, right? Aren't there four, but only two get a ballot position? Traditional Democrats, progressive Democrats, traditional Republicans, MAGA Republicans. Then we have centrist swing voters that have to choose supporting one of these four? So why is polling still using 20th century techniques when 21st century party dynamics exist. Can we not update polling and reporting to include support/opposition to policies based on voter identity, not party identity?" — Ron Petterson, Pfafftown, N.C.
Mr. Petterson,
There are a lot more than four parties if we're thinking in terms of ideological groupings. We've got the socially conservative, fiscal liberals, the fiscally conservative, social liberals, the socialists, the anarchists, the Catholic integralists, and on and on and on… But yes, the next broadest grouping after the two main parties is something like what you laid out. My preferred taxonomy goes, from left to right: progressives, liberals, conservatives, nationalists. On many things, liberals and conservatives are closer together than they are with their coalition partners. The same for the progressives and the nationalists. Liberals and conservatives typically agree on the means by which policies may be pursued, preferring the pluralistic, individual rights-oriented system of the Constitution. The progressives and the nationalists also tend to agree on which means may be used — typically more democracy, majoritarianism and broad government authority in all spheres of life. What keeps the coalitions together, though, is that while they often disagree on the means that may be used, they are aligned on the ends they seek. Conservatives would be happier living in the world the nationalists would engineer than in the progressive utopia, while the liberals would typically prefer the left-coded super state. That means that the people who agree on the most important questions — the primacy of the Constitution, the proper balance between freedom and order, etc. — are kept apart by the transitory issues of any given moment. Vice President Vance and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both envision a federal government with the power to shape the lives of its citizens in both the broadest and most intimate ways. Conversely, a liberal like Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and a conservative like Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul would both accept tight restrictions on the government's authority to pursue their own objectives. The fight over means takes place within the parties. The fight over ends takes place between the parties. And whether you believe the ends justify the means or not, it is outcomes that drive elections more than the process by which they are obtained. But these are not "21st century party dynamics." These are just "party dynamics," always and forever. We know so much about the nature of these coalitions, because we have lots of very good public opinion research about what all the different subgroups want and don't want from their coalitions. Take some time and plunk around in the data from the National Opinion Research Center or the Pew Research Center and you will see polls that reflect the dizzying array of ideas and ideologies held by Americans. And may I further recommend this very insightful piece from my friend Ian Murray on why things fall apart. But when it comes to elections, the coalitions remain extraordinarily strong. So the red and the blue are sufficient come November. Partisanship, after all, is a hell of a drug. All best, c
"How does the Cooperative Election Survey compare to other surveys of Republican voters, do you think this breakdown of the GOP is a useful way to think about the party?" — David Smith, Warrenton, Va.
Mr. Smith, On the question of the poll, first the good news: It's big, with 50,000 respondents. It's consistent, with surveys dating back to the 2006 midterms. It's comprehensive, with lots and lots of questions on lots and lots of issues. The bad news, though, is that it's now conducted by YouGov, the British online pollster famous for its cheap, plentiful surveys favored by so many news organizations looking to save a few quid. While I don't use YouGov for horse-race polling because of those problems, that doesn't mean all of its survey work is useless. Even a poor poll, consistently administered, can still show us changes in attitudes. But the best news of all is that we don't have to rely on the CES the way we did back when it launched, thanks to the delightful data from the aforementioned National Opinion Research Center or the Pew Research Center, which both do fantastic election breakdowns. Now, as for The Economist's description of the tribes of the GOP, the magazine sorts Republicans into five groups: Moderates, Culture Warriors, Economic Populists, Neocons and the Isolationists. I guess if you're a Brit trying to make sense of American politics, I get the part about putting such a heavy emphasis on foreign policy. I also see how they might imagine that somehow Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ted Cruz are in the same faction. And I'm sure they did a far better job than I would do if I tried to sort U.K. politicians, but all in all, it's going to be a no from me. Let me instead recommend the National Public Opinion Reference Survey from Pew for who is in the parties and the VoteCast data for what those people believe — or at least what they believed at election time. One of the problems with any kind of ideological sorting of the kind The Economist attempted is that tribalism often, ahem, trumps ideology. Ideological stances often come after political ones, essentially post-facto rationalizations. Like the man said, "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." See you at The Town Duck, c |
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WKRC: "A teaching assistant has been arrested following a series of disturbances at a high school, where a mysterious odor plagued the campus for weeks. Alexander Lewis, 32, faces charges of disturbing schools and malicious injury to property after allegedly using a spray designed to mimic the smell of feces. Deputies said Lewis purchased the spray online and used it multiple times between Aug. 25 and Sept. 19, causing significant disruptions. The odor reportedly triggered health issues among students and staff, including headaches, nausea and dizziness, and resulted in nearly $55,000 in inspection and air conditioning repair costs for the district. … In August, the district assured parents via email that inspections of the school's gas lines, propane systems and air quality revealed no dangers. However, officials now believe the odor was intentionally caused by Lewis. Lewis appeared in court, where a judge set his total bond at just over $9,000." |
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Write to WholeHogPolitics@TheHill.com with your tips, kudos, criticisms, insights, rediscovered words, recipes, and, always, good jokes. Please include your real name — first and last — and hometown. Make sure to let us know if you want to keep your submission private. My colleague, Meera Sehgal, and I will look for your emails and then share the most interesting ones and my responses here. Clickety clack! Special thanks to Anna Sugg and Caleb Parker for their contributions to this week's note. |
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Chris Stirewalt is political editor for The Hill and NewsNation, the host of "The Hill Sunday" on NewsNation and The CW, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of books on politics and the media. |
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