What is going on with Republicans right now?
A quick look at some old polls can offer some clues.
Before diving into the data: a heartfelt thank you. I re-launched Codebook over here at Substack last week, and since then the outpouring of support from subscribers has astonished and humbled me. While my cadence and approach here at Substack may look a little different than it did last year at Bulletin, I’m very excited about the community coming together here on this platform. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Not long ago, the U.S. House of Representatives recessed after a long day of voting, and voting, and voting once more on who would be the Speaker of the House for the next Congress. Republicans, coming back from the holidays with a razor-thin new majority, were unable to unify behind a single candidate with enough votes to prevail.
If you want expertise on the inner workings of the House, I would direct you to any number of highly-skilled experts on that subject. The good folks over at Punchbowl, my perennial favorite Robert Costa of CBS News, former top GOP House aide Brendan Buck, the congressional reporting team at CNN, all of them will be able to give you insight into the machinations behind the scenes that may (or may not!) lead to a Speaker being chosen tomorrow, and who he or she might be.
My expertise, rather, is on the voters: what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, and how we got to this place.
Let’s take a step back and consider the way most voters - of both parties - think about their own party versus the other side. Often in focus groups, hard partisans marvel in awe at what they view as an opposition that is unified, smart, ruthless, and willing to do what it takes to win.
Democrats will bemoan that their side is a mess. They’ll point to someone like Mitch McConnell and say they wish they had someone on their side with that willingness to be tough and get his way and hold the line. Meanwhile, Republicans will do the same. They’ll complain about their own party’s leaders, and then talk about how unified the Democrats are and how someone like Nancy Pelosi keeps her people in line. Each side thinks the other side is much better at wielding power.
But there is a certain degree of asymmetry in these discussions. When Democrats talk about the problems they have with their own side, it is usually done with a sense of resignation, like this is just the natural way of things. (“I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” - Will Rogers)
But Republicans? They don’t feel resigned, they feel betrayed. It bothers them a lot when they feel like their leaders are weak. In nearly every focus group I’ve done in the last decade, Republicans often say they view their party as being one that is supposed to be about strength and toughness and order. (These aren’t characteristics that have particular ideological valence.)
This is why the sense that things aren’t being run properly (see: Chip Roy’s speech on the floor today) or that the other side is getting too much in negotiations (see: the entire Freedom Caucus vs. Boehner saga) creates such consternation on the Right.
You see it in the polls. Republicans often have softer favorability toward their own party and party leaders compared to the Democrats, something I’ve seen in data for over a decade.
You can look at the most recent national data from my firm, Echelon Insights. We asked voters in December if they had a favorable or unfavorable view of the two parties. Among Democrats, only one in ten had an unfavorable view of their own party. Among Republicans, it was nearly double that (19%). Among liberals, only 12% had an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. Among conservatives, it was a whopping 29% unfavorable. (I assume the results of the midterms did not help.)
But you can also go back and look at assessments of past Congressional leaders. During Nancy Pelosi’s second turn as speaker, she generally got good marks from her own party. In October 2021, on the cusp of what some thought might be a “red wave”, she still garnered 73% job approval from Democrats, with only 20% dissenting according to Quinnipiac. Meanwhile, when former Speaker Paul Ryan was in a similar position, he - for a variety of reasons - rated lower among his own party, with 35% of Republicans saying they disapproved of how he was doing as Speaker, according to Quinnipiac in April 2018.
This isn’t just about Paul Ryan himself, as former Speaker John Boehner experienced the same dynamic. For example, in 2013, when Quinnipiac asked voters to rate various political leaders on a “feelings thermometer” - where you rate someone 0 for “very cold”, 50 for lukewarm or 100 for “very warm” - then-Speaker Boehner received a 55.7 among Republicans, while then-Majority Leader (and then-former-Speaker) Pelosi got 64.2 among Democrats.
Republicans are just consistently more likely to say they don’t like their own party’s leadership, and it has been like this for over a decade.
I was writing this post and, per usual, was idly scrolling through Twitter in the process. I laughed at this tweet which had been helpfully put into my feed by my lovely former podcast cohost Margie Omero:
“Democrats in Disarray” is a meme and there are plenty of examples of it over the decades. But it has been Republicans who, for quite some time, seem to view it as important to their identity as a party that they not be the ones in disarray. That leads to easier disillusionment in leaders and makes it easier for what happened today in the House to unfold.