HFC in Decline?

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Kate Santaliz at Axios:

The House Freedom Caucus is on the cusp of an identity crisis.

Why it matters: The rabble-rousing group of hardline Republicans who once ousted a speaker and have held GOP leadership hostage over the past decade is shrinking in size and clout as several prominent members head for the exits.

The HFC is struggling to reconcile loyalty to President Trump with its own budget-cutting priorities — and the former often takes precedence. That's raising doubts about whether the group can remain an independent force on the party's right flank, rather than increasingly, after some grumbling, caving to Trump.

Driving the news: At least six of the HFC's most high-profile members are eyeing departures, sparking questions about who, if anyone, will fill the void.Rep. Chip Roy, one of the group's biggest agitators, is running for state attorney general in Texas. Three other especially vocal members — Reps. Byron Donalds (Florida), Ralph Norman (South Carolina) and Andy Biggs (Arizona) — are mounting gubernatorial bids. Rep. Barry Moore is running for Alabama's open Senate seat, while there have been reports that Rep. Andy Ogles is jockeying for a Senate appointment if Marsha Blackburn's bid to be Tennessee's governor is successful.

Several other HFC members, including Rep. Scott Perry (Pennsylvania) and caucus chair Andy Harris (Maryland), could face tough reelection battles in 2026.Internal strife has further thinned the group's ranks: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (Florida) decided to leave the HFC in March, while the group voted last summer to kick out Rep. Warren Davidson (Ohio) for breaking with its leadership, prompting Rep. Troy Nehls (Texas) to resign in protest.
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was kicked out in 2023 after publicly feuding with fellow HFC members over her support for then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Sometimes Oppo Guys Don't Even Have to Dig

 Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.  Jordain Carney and Caitlin Emma at Politico: 

House Republicans are heading home early for Thanksgiving recess after a conservative revolt tanked plans to pass more spending bills on Wednesday.

Hardliners sunk any chances of passage for two additional funding bills this week — marking a major setback for Speaker Mike Johnson less than 24 hours after working with Democrats to pass a bill that would thwart a shutdown deadline Saturday.

“It’s odd to me that these are the hostages they take, particularly when a number of them are taking a hostage that is unrelated to their concern. This is retaliation when something doesn’t go their way,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), chair of the more mainstream GOP Main Street Caucus.

GOP leadership then canceled the rest of the votes for the week, with Republicans predicting that Johnson’s spending headache won't get any easier once they return at the end of the month.

 

GOP Rep. Roy: I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing that I can go campaign on and say we did. One! Come and explain to me one meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done pic.twitter.com/Es8Sqy4SGj

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) November 15, 2023

A Very Bad Place

 Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.  

Lisa Lerer and Michael C. Bender at NYT:

Kevin McCarthy, the ousted speaker, was making his way through the Capitol when reporters asked what he thought of the chaos consuming House Republicans, who for nearly three weeks have been trying and failing to replace him.

His anser veered into the existential. “We are,” he said on Friday, “in a very bad place right now.”

That might be an understatement.

In the House, Republicans are casting about for a new leader, mired in an internecine battle marked by screaming, cursing and a fresh flood of candidates. In the Senate, their party is led by Senator Mitch McConnell, who spent weeks arguing that he remained physically and mentally fit enough for the position after freezing midsentence in two public appearances. And on the 2024 campaign trail, the dominant front-runner, Donald J. Trump, faces 91 felony charges across four cases, creating a drumbeat of legal news that often overwhelms any of his party’s political messages.

As national Democrats largely stand behind President Biden and his agenda — more united than in years — Republicans are divided, directionless and effectively leaderless.

MAGA Factions

Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

Olivia Beavers at Politico:

Tensions inside the conservative House Freedom Caucus have reached the point that some members are floating the idea of purging colleagues from the group.

At least two hardliners have discussed — and proposed to Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry (R-Pa.) — trying to boot members who no longer meet the group’s standards, according to three Republicans with knowledge of the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity. The lawmakers declined to name who’s behind the ouster calls, underscoring the sensitivity of the situation.

While the members suggesting a purge did not specify the people they want to remove, they are signaling that one target of any ejection push is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Some in the Freedom Caucus have focused on Greene, who’s become a close ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, to illustrate their fears that certain group members are too aligned with GOP leaders and too outwardly critical of the group when it splits on certain issues.

Zachary Petrizzo and Sam Brodey at The Daily Beast:

The messy feud between two of MAGA world’s biggest stars burst into public view on Wednesday, when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) a “little b***h” to her face on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The angry exchange came as the two lawmakers have been swiping at each other over their competing resolutions to impeach President Joe Biden. But tensions came to a head on Wednesday after Boebert leveraged a procedural tool to force a vote on her own impeachment resolution within days—undercutting Greene, who had offered her own resolution, but not with the procedural advantages of forcing a vote.

Greene apparently cursed out Boebert while the House was voting Wednesday afternoon, as the two spoke in a center aisle of the House floor; part of their interaction was captured on C-SPAN’s cameras.

 

Saw this conversation… not sure if it was a friendly one pic.twitter.com/tpz3z2Phtv

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 21, 2023

Georgia GOP

Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

Michelle Cottle at NYT:

The backstory: Some Republican incumbents took offense last year when the Georgia G.O.P.’s Trump-smitten chairman, David Shafer, backed Trump-preferred challengers in the primaries. (Mr. Trump, you will recall, was desperate to unseat several Republicans after they declined to help him steal the 2020 election.) Those challengers went down hard, and Mr. Kemp in particular emerged as a superhero to non-Trumpist Republicans. Even so, scars remain. “That’s a burn that’s hard to get over,” says Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist who served as an adviser to former Gov. Nathan Deal.

The clash also made clear that Republican candidates, or at least popular incumbents, don’t much need the party apparatus anymore. This is part of a broader trend: The clout of parties has long been on the slide because of changes in how campaigns are funded. That got turbocharged in Georgia in 2021, when its legislature, the General Assembly, passed a Kemp-backed bill allowing certain top officials (and their general-election challengers) to form leadership PACs, which can coordinate with candidates’ campaigns and accept megadonations free from pesky dollar limits.

The PAC Mr. Kemp set up, the Georgians First Leadership Committee, raked in gobs of cash and built a formidable voter data and turnout machine. The governor plans to use it to aid fellow Republicans, establishing himself as a power center independent of the state party.

As big-money conduits, leadership PACs can bring plenty of their own problems. But whatever their larger implications, in the current mess that is Georgia Republican politics, they also mean that elected leaders “don’t have to play nice in the sandbox with a group that is sometimes at odds with them,” says Mr. Robinson.

The governor says he will skip the state party’s convention in June, as will the state’s attorney general, its insurance commissioner and its secretary of state. At a February luncheon for his Georgians First PAC, Mr. Kemp basically told big donors not to waste their money on the party, saying that the midterms showed “we can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

The Shrinkage of the Blue Dogs

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.  

Ally Mutnick and Sarah Ferris at Politico:

Congress’ influential Blue Dog Coalition is getting chopped nearly in half after an internal blow-up over whether to rebrand the centrist Democratic group.

Seven of the 15 members expected to join the Blue Dogs this year, including Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) and Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.), are departing after a heated disagreement over a potential name change for the moderate bloc. For now that’s left the Blue Dogs with seven, all male members — their smallest roster in nearly three decades of existence. One freshman member remains undecided.

At the core of some of the breakaway Blue Dogs’ demands was a rechristening as the Common Sense Coalition that, they argued, would have helped shed the group’s reputation as a socially moderate, Southern “boys’ club.” Blue Dogs have long stood for fiscal responsibility and national security, issues with broad Democratic appeal, but some members felt the name had a negative connotation that kept their colleagues from joining. A majority of other members disagreed, saying they saw no reason to toss out a longstanding legacy.

Those tensions came to a head earlier this month as Blue Dog members met for a lengthy debate over the reboot that culminated in a secret-ballot vote to reject the new name, according to interviews with nearly a dozen people familiar with the situation, on both sides of the dispute. Shortly after that vote, Reps. Ed Case (D-Hawaii); David Scott (D-Ga.); Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.); Lou Correa (D-Calif.), Spanberger and Sherrill all left the group.

Libertarian Downfall

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.

Kelly Weill at The Daily Beast:

Across the country, aspiring Libertarian activists and entire state-level Libertarian parties are voluntarily quitting. On the same day in August, New Mexico’s Libertarian Party filed to disaffiliate from the national Libertarian Party (LP), and the Libertarian Party of Virginia filed to dissolve. Fed-up Libertarians have formed splinter groups in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. And in Evans’ state of Idaho, a contentious set of legal battles have drawn an iron curtain through the local Libertarian party, leaving Evans and other longtime associates on the outs.

At the center of the shakeup is a brash political action committee: the Mises Caucus. In the few years since its 2017 founding, this socially conservative group has swept state and national Libertarian organizations, officially taking control of the LP at the party’s convention this May. Mises Caucus supporters say the group is rebooting America’s third-largest political party. Critics say the caucus promotes bigotry, helps Republicans, and is driving everyone but Mises acolytes out of the organization.

Andy Craig:

Aside from [Gary] Johnson’s candidacy, the party had mostly drawn attention for antics ranging from the mildly amusing to utterly cringe-inducing, such as running an Elvis Presley impersonator as a perennial candidate, nominating someone who accidentally turned his skin blue by drinking colloidal silver, entertaining the presidential aspirations of the mentally unstable alleged murderer John McAfee, and treating C-SPAN viewers to a man stripping nearly naked on the national convention stage. But now, as Ken White, a criminal defense lawyer and respected commentator known by his online moniker Popehat, aptly observed on Twitter, “bigoted shitposters” have now wrested control from these “mostly harmless cranks.”

Under the direction of the so-called Mises Caucus, the LP has become home to those who don’t have qualms about declaring Holocaust-denying racists “fellow travelers” and who don’t think that bigots are necessarily disqualified from the party. They even went out of their way to delete from the party’s platform its nearly 50-year-old language stating: “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” The caucus is also reversing the party’s longstanding commitment to open immigration policies in favor of border enforcement. The new chair, Angela McArdle, proclaims that the party will now be dedicated to fighting “wokeism.” People with pronouns in their Twitter bios aren’t welcome anymore, but, evidently, white nationalists and Holocaust deniers are.

In May, Brian Doherty wrote at Reason:

The caucus's official platform is plumb-line libertarian, but its foes say that too many Mises Caucus members and fans downplay libertarian positions that might offend the right, are intentionally obnoxious and bullying, and are often racist. For example, the New Hampshire L.P., a powerful vector of Mises Caucus messaging, tweeted on Martin Luther King Day that "America isn't in debt to black people. If anything it's the other way around." (The tweet was later deleted.)

The sense the caucus is soft on or actively encourages racism attracted the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center just before the convention began, which aired the concerns in a story reported with cooperation from many Libertarian Party members upset with the Mises Caucus.

Both Heise and Mises Caucus stalwart Joshua Smith, who won the vice-chair election Saturday, denied the charges of racism. Heise* said in a phone interview prior to the convention that the basic vibe they are seeking is online youths into edgy comedic podcasts, a new counterculture for whom the old L.P. holds little appeal. Heise believes that the current rumored frontrunner for a Mises Caucus–approved presidential nominee in 2024, comedian and podcaster Dave Smith, is so well-connected to the Joe Rogan world that legacy respectable mainstream media will be meaningless for party messaging moving forward.

 

Dealing with GOP Crazies

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

From Politico Playbook:

PARTY DISCIPLINE — If you want to know more about the state of the House GOP Conference — and, likely, your future House majority! — today should provide a pretty telling snapshot. Ten months after rioters stormed the Capitol hunting for lawmakers, most House Republicans are expected to vote against rebuking one of their colleagues, PAUL GOSAR (R-Ariz.), who posted an anime video of himself stabbing Rep. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-N.Y.) in the neck.

At the same time, the GOP rank and file is having a heated debate about punishing the 13 centrist Republicans who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Nevermind that DONALD TRUMP pined for a big bipartisan win like this when he was in office. Fringe members like Rep. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE (R-Ga.) are pushing to strip the “traitors” of their committee assignments. She posted their phone numbers online, leading to harassing calls and at least one death threat.

The conversation that dominated Tuesday’s GOP Conference meeting wasn’t about Gosar’s video, but whether to boot moderate Rep. JOHN KATKO (R-N.Y.) from his position as House Homeland Security ranking member for backing BIF.

HOW THE VOTE WILL GO DOWN: A senior House GOP aide tells us leadership is confident that not many Republicans will side with Democrats in booting Gosar from his committee assignments — the exceptions being Reps. LIZ CHENEY (R-Wyo.) and ADAM KINZINGER (R-Ill.).

Here’s why:

1) An apology (to his colleagues, but not AOC): Leaders have told members that the video was posted by Gosar’s staff, not him, and that he deleted it when he found out. Publicly, Gosar has defended the video, saying it was “nothing hateful” and that the left “mischaracterized” his intentions. But at the Republican Conference meeting Tuesday, we’re told, Gosar expressed regret and said that he didn’t mean to promote violence. (This begs the question why Gosar hasn’t said this publicly or apologized directly to AOC, who regularly receives death threats.)

2) Accusations of Dems overstepping: GOP sources say Democrats might have gotten more support from Republicans had they moved to rebuke Gosar and stopped there. But even moderate Republicans think kicking him off the Oversight and Natural Resources committees is too much. There’s also a concern among moderate members about having to vote to rebuke every crazy thing their colleagues say, which these days, they argue, is a lot.

3) Help from Katko: We’re told that Katko stood up in conference Tuesday and said he didn’t plan to vote with Democrats on the punishment. After his support for BIF and, in January, his vote to impeach Trump, Katko’s announcement could (though probably won’t) help his fragile standing with the GOP’s right flank. But more importantly, it also might make other moderates think twice about punishing Gosar.

MCCARTHY’S BALANCING ACT — You can’t watch all this drama without also asking how this plays into House Minority Leader KEVIN MCCARTHY’s bid for speaker. On Tuesday night, MTG told reporters that if McCarthy doesn’t punish Republicans who voted for BIF, she might not back him for the top post if Republicans retake the House next year. On the other side, moderate members are frustrated that he hasn’t done more to rein in the far-right members coming after them.

Some House Republicans say privately that McCarthy is doing a poor job of balancing his speakership ambitions with his job as leader, and that it could come back to bite him. One noted that PAUL RYAN used to say that leadership is supposed to be “the heat shield” for members, but McCarthy is allowing moderates to get walloped by crazies. (Of course, we know how Ryan’s attempt to manage Trump’s rise within his conference turned out. No one’s saying this is easy stuff.)

“He is straddling the fence,” a House Republican member told us. “When you straddle the fence, you better hope it’s not a barbed wire fence.”

But another senior Republican aide argued that these parallel situations benefit McCarthy. By warning moderate members against censuring Gosar at the same time he’s telling Trump mini-mes that “now is not the time” to strip moderates of their committee assignments, this person said, McCarthy gets to position himself as a unifier.

Democrats, for their part, are disgusted with what they say is McCarthy’s lack of leadership and moral compass. “What Paul Gosar did is both despicable and beneath the office that he holds,” Oversight Chair CAROLYN MALONEY (D-N.Y.) told Playbook on Tuesday night. “Leader McCarthy won’t take responsibility for the actions of the actions of his caucus … This is a big deal. We saw that some of the Republican supporters will act on provocations of violence.” Our Congress team has more on the saga here

The Trump Revolution Eats Its Own

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.

Greg Bluestein at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Four years ago, Brian Kemp went to a Cobb County GOP breakfast to launch his campaign for governor to a cheering crowd of supporters. A few weeks ago, the leaders of the county GOP voted to “censure” him for not meeting campaign promises.

The dramatic change highlights more than just the governor’s ongoing struggles with the Republican base after refusing Donald Trump’s entreaties to overturn the results of November’s presidential election. It’s also an example of how pro-Trump activists who emphasize loyalty to the former president have won control of party infrastructure and more influence across the state.

Those Trump-aligned activists showed up in record numbers at party gatherings this year, where they channeled anger over the former president’s defeat into efforts to take control of the machinery of local GOP organizations. That’s happened in at least a dozen counties across the state, including several in metro Atlanta and its exurbs.
...
It reflects a broader trend as Trump loyalists wage internal war on mainstream Republicans who long controlled the gears of power. Some were encouraged by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s call to “take this back village by village” by seizing control of the GOP machinery from the ground up. 

...

[Bobby Donnelly] had been part of a tea party faction that a decade ago tried to take over the Forsyth GOP and, by 2020, had mostly succeeded. It had wrested control of four of the county’s six executive committee posts. Donnelly had risen to become the party’s vice chair.

In 2021, Donnelly and the rest of the committee’s leaders were wiped out by newcomers motivated by Bannon and others to clean house.

“The funny thing is we were all pro-Trump. It’s a Trump civil war. It’s Trump versus Trump,” said Donnelly, who lost his bid to lead the county GOP.

“…people like Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, RNC Chairman Ronna McDaniel and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp are the most important allies in the conspiracy to steal our elections… These people hate you… There is no solution to this problem short of a Constitutional Convention.” pic.twitter.com/gPAwmEEzCv

— Christian Vanderbrouk (@UrbanAchievr) October 13, 2021

Republicans: Winning Is Not the Most Important Thing

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.

The state of the GOP is not good. 

Perry Bacon at FiveThirtyEight:

In theory, political parties are principally focused on winning elections, since that is how they gain power to implement their agendas. So why aren’t these activists and elected officials changing gears out of sheer self-preservation? One reason is that they are doing pretty well electorally without such changes. (More on that in a bit.)

But just as importantly, many of the key people and institutions in the Republican Party might prefer a risky and often-losing strategy to one that would really increase their chances of electoral victories. The path to Republicans becoming a majority party in America probably involves the GOP embracing cultural and demographic changes and pushing a more populist economic agenda that is less focused on tax cuts for the wealthy. But some of the most powerful blocs in the GOP are big donors who favor tax cuts, conservative Christian activists who are wary of expanding LGBTQ rights and an “own the libs” bloc exemplified by many Fox News personalities and elected officials such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are very critical of immigration and the Black Lives Matter movement. The big donors and conservative Christian activists have policy goals that are fairly unpopular but that they are deeply committed to (such as overturning Roe v. Wade) — so they aren’t going to bend for electoral reasons. For the “own the libs” bloc, winning elections isn’t that important anyway — they aren’t really invested in policy or governing and will be fine if Republicans remain out of the White House and in the minority on Capitol Hill.

In short, the Republican Party has an activist base whose interests aren’t that compatible with pursuing a strategy that maximizes winning national elections.

This isn’t a new problem for Republicans. After their losses in both 2008 and 2012, Republicans talked a lot about changing the party, particularly doing more outreach to voters of color, in a way that the GOP has not in the wake of 2020. But that was mostly talk. Republicans didn’t make any real changes after either of those elections either, in part because the party’s base was very resistant.

“I don’t think the Republicans have any desire to assess their favored policies,” said Lawrence Glickman, a historian at Cornell University who studies the conservative movement in the United States.

In a recent column, former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele and ex-Florida Rep. Carlos Curbelo wrote, “This crusade against voting rights lays bare the GOP’s greatest political liability: The party remains frozen in time, even as new demographic blocs have begun to gain power.”

Democratic Factions

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.  

Thomas B. Edsall at NYT:

Once the mainstream of the Democratic Party’s electorate settled on a candidate to support in this year’s campaign, however flawed Joe Biden may be, Bernie Sanders’s call for a revolution overturning the current American variant of capitalism no longer had a chance.

The fact is that a decisive majority — 60 percent — of the Democratic electorate is made up of men and women loyal to the centrist party establishment, such as it is, and to organizations, from unions to party committees, that are aligned with it.

And there is little or no evidence that the greater part of the American people have the desire, or the stomach, for political revolution.

Earlier this month, Shom Mazumder, a political scientist at Harvard, published a study, “Why The Progressive Left Fits So Uncomfortably Within The Democratic Party,” that analyzed data from a 2019 survey of 2,900 likely Democratic primary voters. “I saw two clear poles emerge within the Democratic Party,” he writes:

The “establishment” and the “progressive left.” A third group also emerged, and while it’s not as clearly defined as the other two, it has some overlap with the establishment and tends to be more fond of Wall Street, so I’m calling that “neoliberals.”

“Establishment” voters, in this scheme, means center-left voters who make up just over 60 percent of the total. They stood out as favorably inclined to Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee — in other words, to the Democratic establishment.

“Progressive left” Democrats, at just under 20 percent, were most favorable to labor unions, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America. These Democrats viewed business interests — as exemplified by Wall Street — negatively, and they weren’t happy about Joe Manchin, the centrist senator from West Virginia, either.

The third group, “neoliberal” Democrats, at 20 percent, is as large as the progressive wing. These voters like what the progressives don’t like — Wall Street, Manchin — and dislike pretty much everything progressives favor, including Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America.

The GOP Center Cannot Hold

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the conservative movement and the grifters who have drained its resources.  The GOP's moderate wing is not in great shape, either. (The update of the book -- recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.)

Susan Davis at NPR:

Three weeks after Democrats took control of the U.S. House in the 2018 midterm elections, about 40 reelected and recently defeated lawmakers in the centrist Republican Main Street Caucus gathered at the Capitol Hill Club to sift through the electoral wreckage.

The caucus — then led by Reps. Rodney Davis of Illinois, Jeff Denham of California, Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida and Fred Upton of Michigan — was scheduled to hold its regular meeting with the outside group that inspired its name, the Republican Main Street Partnership, led by president and CEO Sarah Chamberlain.

Founded in the late 1990s, RMSP raises money to support the Republican Party's moderate wing. GOP lawmakers embraced the RMSP name when, in 2017, it launched the caucus — an official member organization registered in the U.S. House. The member caucus was driven by a desire to counterbalance the weight of the conservative wing inside the House GOP. Lawmakers believe that rebuilding the centrist coalition is key to improving the GOP's odds of winning a House majority in 2020.
...
That Nov. 28 meeting set off a cascading series of events over the next two months. Lawmakers demanded, and were denied, an audit of RMSP's activities. Lawmakers ultimately abandoned the member caucus, and others quietly distanced themselves from RMSP and Chamberlain. Today, lawmakers still don't have answers to their questions about how Chamberlain runs the organization and whether it might be running afoul of campaign finance and tax laws

The Democrats' Generational Factions

In Defying the Odds, we discuss leftward drift of the Democratic Party.  The update -- recently published -- includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

Ryan Grim at WP:

The way the older and younger House members think about and engage with the Republican Party may be the starkest divide between them. Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Joe Biden, Steny Hoyer and Chuck Schumer were shaped by their traumatic political coming-of-age during the breakup of the New Deal coalition and the rise of Ronald Reagan — and the backlash that swept Democrats so thoroughly from power nearly 40 years ago. They’ve spent the rest of their lives flinching at the sight of voters. When these leaders plead for their party to stay in the middle, they’re crouching into the defensive posture they’ve been used to since November 1980, afraid that if they come across as harebrained liberals, voters will turn them out again.

The Ocasio-Cortezes of the world have witnessed the opposite: The way they see it, Democratic attempts to moderate and compromise have led to nothing but ruin. Republicans aren’t the ones to be afraid of. “The greatest threat to mankind is the cowardice of the Democratic Party,” [AOC spokesperson Corbin] Trent told me.

New Way California

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional races as well as the presidential election.

Alexei Koseff at The Sacramento Bee:

Pushed out by party activists last summer for negotiating with Democrats on a climate change program, former Assembly Republican Leader Chad Mayes is doubling down on his fight to reshape the California GOP – with a key assist from former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Mayes announced Tuesday the formation of New Way California, an initiative that aims to expand the appeal of Republican policies and reverse the party’s declining prospects in the state. Republicans, who now make up just a quarter of registered voters in California, have not won a statewide election in more than a decade and hold fewer than one-third of the seats in both houses of the Legislature.

“There really is one-party rule here in California,” Mayes said at a press conference. “Republicans have failed to be able to reach out to average folks in California. They don’t think that we care about them, they don’t think that we are working for their benefit.”

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to The Right: A Bad Week for the GOP

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

Alex Isenstadt and Gabriel Debenedetti at Politico:

Republicans are confronting a growing revolt from their top donors, who are cutting off the party in protest over its inability to get anything done.

Tensions reached a boiling point at a recent dinner at the home of Los Angeles billionaire Robert Day. In full view of around two dozen guests, Thomas Wachtell, a retired oil and gas investor and party contributor, delivered an urgent message to the night’s headliner, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: Just do something.

Wachtell, who has given tens of thousands of dollars over the years to Senate Republicans, recalled that McConnell responded defensively. Passing legislation takes time, the Republican leader responded, and President Donald Trump didn’t seem to understand how long it required.

“Anybody who was there knew that I was not happy. And I don’t think anybody was happy. How could you be?” said Wachtell, who has previously given over $2,000 to McConnell but recently stopped donating to Senate GOP causes. “You’re never going to get a more sympathetic Republican than I am. But I’m sick and tired of nothing happening.

Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns at NYT:

Since last week, Senate Republicans lost one of their own when Roy S. Moore, the firebrand former state judge, trounced Senator Luther Strangein a Senate runoff in Alabama. The retirement of Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee kicked off a potentially fratricidal fight for his seat, with the establishment’s preferred successor, Gov. Bill Haslam, declining to run on Thursday.

An audiotape surfaced of Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, lambasting Republican leaders and urging conservative donors to close their wallets to lawmakers who are disloyal to President Trump. And a House Republican, Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, was forced to resign this week after a text from his mistress became public in which she mocked him for trumpeting his staunch opposition to abortion as he pressured her to terminate a pregnancy.

Former Representative Michael Grimm of New York has also resurfaced after serving time for felony tax fraud to challenge his Republican successor on Staten Island — with the backing of Mr. Trump’s former strategist, Stephen K. Bannon.

Sanders Wing v. Democratic Party

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the Sanders candidacy and the liberal drift of the Democratic Party.

At Politico, Gabriel Debenedetti reports that the Sanders wing is demanding purity from the rest of the party.

Many Democrats are concerned that Sanders no longer has any control over the vast political network surrounding him after his 2016 campaign manager Jeff Weaver left the helm of Our Revolution in June. That national political organization, Sanders' post-campaign creation, is now led by former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner, who was a strident supporter of the Vermonter and a Clinton critic in 2016.

Last month, Democrats across Capitol Hill were quick to circulate a BuzzFeed report in which Turner called the DNC “dictatorial” and “insulting.” They were concerned that a group with the reach of Our Revolution’s could be doing significant damage to the party’s efforts to re-engage with Sanders voters.

...
Just as Turner was complaining about the DNC, a range of Democratic senators and their top political staffers were closely following a string of stories that quoted Sanders supporters criticizing [Kamala] Harris.[!]

In one interview, the co-founder of a group called People for Bernie said Harris was being anointed as the candidate "of extremely wealthy and out-of-touch Democratic Party donors."

...
At no point was this worry more apparent than after the leaders of the National Nurses Union refused last month to rule out supporting primary challenges for Senate Democrats who don’t support his Medicare-for-all health care bill. The group, one of Sanders' closest allies, vowed to “[hold] the Democrats accountable.”

Sanders’ own campaign pollster called the measure a litmus test in the same POLITICO report. And Turner — whose group houses the huge email list Sanders’ team built during his campaign and subsequently refused to hand over to the DNC — said “there’s something wrong” with Democrats who don’t support Sanders’ measure.

Yet it took three weeks for Sanders himself to weigh in. He told the Washington Post that his health care legislation wouldn’t serve as a litmus test for whether or not to back fellow senators. It was hardly a disavowal of his allies’ rhetoric, though, and the delay left other lawmakers sweating about primary challenges for nearly a month.

Trump v. Freedom Caucus

The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don't get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2017

It didn't take long for the swamp to drain @realDonaldTrump. No shame, Mr. President. Almost everyone succumbs to the D.C. Establishment. https://t.co/9bDo8yzH7I

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) March 30, 2017

Eliza Collins and Herb Jackson report at USA Today:

Moderate House Republicans have apparently rejected overtures from the conservative House Freedom Caucus — the most critical group in sinking the Republican bill to repeal and replace Obamacare — which was seeking talks about whether a compromise repeal plan is possible.

Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., — one of President Trump's closest allies in the House — told reporters Thursday that the moderates' caucus, called the "Tuesday Group," met and "unequivocally" decided not to meet with the Freedom Caucus.

“It’s not changing the opinions in our conference. We’ve moved on,” Collins continued. “We have to move on to tax reform. My own hope is they will be more pliable for tax reform having the conference suffering this defeat on health care reform. I truly believe health care has moved on and won’t be dealt with until 2019, if then.”

“I am not negotiating with anyone, I’ve seen stories that there are discussions about certain negotiations between the Tuesday Group and the Freedom Caucus that’s not the case,” Rep. Charlie Dent, a co-chair of the Tuesday Group said Wednesday morning on CNN. “Do I talk to other members? Absolutely. Am I negotiating with anyone about the bill that was just put aside? No.”

GOP Rep. @justinamash on Trump's tweet: “It may allow a child to get his way, but that’s not how our government works.”

via @frankthorp pic.twitter.com/7ogWHR4zrU

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) March 30, 2017

And from Playbook:

ONE MORE -- at 10:27 a.m.: “The failing @nytimes has disgraced the media world. Gotten me wrong for two solid years. Change libel laws?” Linking to a post from the New York Post’s John Crudele criticizing the Times http://nyp.st/2nzskL2

-- THE STRATEGY here -- if there is one -- isn’t particularly clear. If Trump is going to “fight” the House Freedom Caucus and Democrats, he is going to run into trouble on Capitol Hill. If Trump isn’t working with the Freedom Caucus or Democrats, he won’t have a single bill to sign. The Freedom Caucus is roughly 30 of 237 House Republicans. He needs 218 lawmakers to pass a bill …. Catch our drift? Not to mention, the Freedom Caucus alone is not to blame for Trump’s health care bill’s failure -- moderates were opposed to the legislation, too. AND … Change libel laws? Get real

House GOP Factions, 2015

At FiveThirtyEight, David Wasserman writes of the factional divisions that will challenge Paul Ryan as he becomes speaker-in-waiting.

The Cook Political Report has plotted House GOP members on this leadership/anti-leadership spectrum by assessing members’ records on five critical votes in 2015. On all but the election of the speaker, the GOP required at least some Democratic votes to obtain a majority needed for passage:

Share of House Republicans who backed leadership on five key 2015 votes

• 87% — Election of John Boehner for speaker (Jan. 6)
• 86% — Long-term fix for Medicare physician reimbursement rates (March 26)
• 53% — Reauthorizing federal support for Amtrak (March 4)
• 37% — Funding government without defunding Planned Parenthood (Sept. 30)
• 30% — Funding Department of Homeland Security without overturning Obama’s immigration executive order (March 3)

Then we grouped members together according to their propensity to vote for or against party leadership on these votes, using a rubric devised by Cook National Editor Amy Walter in 2013:
House GOP factions in 2015

• 51 “Dependables”: voted with leadership all five times
• 39 “Allies”: voted with leadership four of five times
• 51 “Helpers”: voted with leadership three of five times
• 53 “Skeptics”: voted with leadership two of five times
• 25 “Agitators”: voted with leadership one of five times
• 11 “Rebels”: voted with leadership zero of five times

Note: 17 Republicans didn’t cast enough votes to be counted in one of the above groups.
Most House Republicans aren’t simply “establishment” backers or “tea party” rebels. In fact, the plurality in the middle belongs to what The New York Times has dubbed the “Vote No, Hope Yes” caucus. These Republicans vote strategically with the leadership just enough of the time to jockey for plum committee assignments, but they voted against Boehner enough to shield themselves from a tea party primary back home.

Primaries: Issues and Outcomes

Brookings reports:

Elaine C. Kamarck and Alexander Podkul discuss the initial findings of The Primaries Project in their paper “The 2014 Congressional Primaries: Who Ran and Why.” Some key findings include:

 

Major ideological divisions within each party and how they impacted electoral results. Republican Establishment candidates have triumphed nearly two-thirds of their disputed races while Tea Party candidates have only taken half of their contested primaries.

 

• The top five issues for each party during the primary season and — not surprisingly — Obamacare tops both Democratic and Republican talking points.However, while over 60 percent of Democrats mentioned the health care law, nearly 80 percent of Republicans did. In fact, four of the Republican's five top issues outstripped mention of Democratic priorities, suggesting that the GOP remains unified with regard to candidate issue campaigns.

 

Margins of victory between Democrats, Republicans, and their nonincumbent challegers have been dipping during the past six election cycles. However, while Democrats' margin of victory reached a 10-year trough at 48 percent in 2012, Republican margins of victory have continued to shrink to 45 percent in 2014. The shrinking margins for Republican incumbents go a long way toward explaining why to many observers the Republican Establishment, in spite of their victories over the Tea Party, has adopted many of the issue positions of their Tea Party challengers.

GOP Factions: A Diagram

A new study from the Public Religion Research Institute Institute  nicely sums up the relationship of the GOP, the Tea Party, and the Christian Right.  They overlap, but are not identical.




This analysis is roughly consistent with what Henry Olsen observed earlier in the year:

REPUBLICAN VOTERS fall into four rough camps. They are: moderate or liberal voters; somewhat conservative voters; very conservative, evangelical voters; and very conservative, secular voters. Each of these groups supports extremely different types of candidates. Each of these groups has also demonstrated stable preferences over the past twenty years.

The most important of these groups is the one most journalists don’t understand and ignore: the somewhat conservative voters. This group is the most numerous nationally and in most states, comprising 35–40 percent of the national GOP electorate. While the numbers of moderates, very conservative and evangelical voters vary significantly by state, somewhat conservative voters are found in similar proportions in every state. They are not very vocal, but they form the bedrock base of the Republican Party.