Nate Silver's Blog, page 99

Politics Podcast: White House Chaos

 












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This week on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the team breaks down recent shake-ups at the White House and asks if President Trump’s new chief of staff, John Kelly, can correct course. FiveThirtyEight’s Perry Bacon Jr. joins to discuss leaks coming out of the White House and whether we should trust reporting based on anonymous sources. Plus, now that the Republican health care bill known as the “skinny repeal” has failed, what’s next for the GOP?

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

McConnell Overreached On Health Care And Paid The Price

What happened in the Senate early Friday morning was a rarely seen political event of the sort last observed in , when a financial bailout vote unexpectedly failed on the House floor. Republican leadership thought they’d lined up the 50 votes necessary to pass a “skinny repeal” health care bill in the Senate. They had only 49.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has had plenty of failures, along with plenty of successes. But it’s rare for Senate or House leadership to send votes to the floor unless they know the outcomes ahead of time and even more unusual for them to fail in such embarrassing fashion.

All of this drama obscures a more important point, however: Republicans have not yet come all that close to passing the health care bill they wanted. And they didn’t come that close Thursday night. True, the Senate was just one vote short of approving “skinny repeal.” But even if the Senate had approved the bill, they still had a long way to go in a process whose outcome was highly uncertain.

Many Republicans who voted for “skinny repeal” didn’t like it on its own terms — South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham called it a “disaster,” for instance — but instead viewed it as a vehicle to open up negotiations with the House on a more sweeping bill. But there’s no indication that a more comprehensive measure cooked up in those negotiations could have passed the Senate. Instead, McConnell had repeatedly failed to secure enough support for the Senate’s original health care bill, the Better Care Reconciliation Act; a vote to advance that bill failed 43-57 on Tuesday, with nine Republican defections.

If the House and Senate were unable to agree on a compromise, the House could have voted on “skinny repeal,” which — having already been approved by the Senate — would have gone to the president’s desk. The terms of the legislation, officially called the Health Care Freedom Act, included the provision to defund Planned Parenthood and other “goodies” that seemed designed to win over conservative votes in the House.

But “skinny repeal“ was massively less ambitious than the Senate’s BCRA or the House’s American Health Care Act. It wouldn’t have touched Medicaid. It wouldn’t have affected the Obamacare subsidies or the way the program was structured. And one of its key provisions, the repeal of the employer mandate, would have expired after 2024.

“Skinny repeal” would have eliminated the individual mandate, but even that wasn’t necessarily a conservative priority. Instead, the individual mandate had once been proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation. (Conversely, Barack Obama’s health care plan did not include an individual mandate when he was a presidential candidate in 2008.) Instead, the individual mandate — or some other mechanism like it — was a necessary evil to prevent a potential death spiral on the health care exchanges. Without the individual mandate, the Congressional Budget Office estimated, premiums on the exchanges would have increased by 20 percent next year, and the number of uninsured people would have grown by 16 million. Republicans would probably have “owned” these problems if they’d enacted “skinny repeal,” while getting few of the things (such as major tax cuts) that they really wanted. Thus, there was a lack of enthusiasm for the bill among a wide range of conservative and more mainstream Republican figures, including people like Graham and Sean Hannity.

There was also a third possibility: that despite the Senate passing “skinny repeal” last night, Republicans would have been unable to finalize any sort of health care bill at all. Bills that reach a House-Senate conference usually become law in some form, but there have been exceptions, and most legislation is not as contentious as health care.

So rather than talking about the GOP’s near miss on Friday morning, it might be better to ask why they’ve had so much trouble passing a health care bill. The 30,000-foot answer, in my view, is simply that they overreached.

Health care reform was never going to be easy for Republicans. About two-thirds of Americans are happy with their current health care coverage, so they’re inherently nervous about changes to the system. But the GOP chose a course that was massively disruptive — under BCRA, 22 million people would have become uninsured within 10 years — in a way that was out of all proportion to the narrow mandate that President Trump and Republicans received last year.

It’s worth bearing in mind that Trump lost the popular vote and won the decisive state in the Electoral College, Wisconsin, by less than 1 percentage point. He’s also historically unpopular for this stage of his term, with a 38 percent or 39 percent approval rating. Meanwhile, Republicans lost seats in both the House and the Senate last year, and Republicans are in a significant deficit with Democrats in voter preferences for control of the next Congress. Special election results so far also suggest a potential backlash against Trump and Republicans, with Democrats having run well ahead of how they typically perform in those districts.

Nor were AHCA and BCRA the sorts of policies that Trump had promised to voters. Instead, Trump had pledged to protect Medicaid and to replace Obamacare with “something terrific” that provided more coverage at a cheaper price.

It’s not a surprise, therefore, that AHCA and BCRA were massively unpopular. The five most recent polls on BCRA had shown an average of just 24 percent of voters in favor of the measures but 53 percent opposed, the sort of lopsided numbers that are rare in this highly partisan era.

Exactly how responsive Republican members were to these popularity numbers — and to other signs of resistance, such as protests and phone calls — is hard to say. None of the three “no” votes — Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain — is all that electorally vulnerable (and McCain might not run for re-election again because of his health). But they aren’t the only members of Congress to have created resistance to passage at various stages of the health care debate; nine senators voted against BCRA earlier this week, for example, as I mentioned.

If McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan had started with “skinny repeal” rather than defaulted to it as a last resort, they might have had more of a chance. The individual mandate, which would have been eliminated under “skinny repeal,” is quite unpopular. But they poisoned the well by putting forth unpopular plans such as BCRA first, losing trust not only with the public but also with an increasing number of Republican members of Congress, some of whom had accused them of duplicity in the process so far.

McConnell and Ryan aren’t the only leaders who shot for the moon when their parties had congressional majorities. Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid also did this in 2009 in seeking to pass Obamacare. But Pelosi and Reid had much larger majorities in 2009 than Republicans do now, and a much more popular president in Obama. Even then, Democrats still paid a significant electoral price for their health care bill, with a disastrous midterm in 2010. McConnell, Ryan and Trump will pay a political price too, one way or another — and now it looks like they won’t get a health care bill to make up for it.

Emergency Politics Podcast: Obamacare Repeal Fails

 












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Welcome to a FiveThirtyEight Politics emergency podcast: “Skinny Repeal Edition.” Early Friday morning, three Republican senators voted against the “skinny repeal” of the Affordable Care Act, putting an end to repeal attempts for now. The politics team discusses what went wrong for the GOP and what comes next.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Is Jeff Sessions Long For Trump’s World?

In this week’s politics chat, we ponder President Trump’s criticism of Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): I’m back from vacation! And I just want all of you to know that I don’t agree with the many, many people who emailed me and wrote to me on Twitter saying that the chats were wooden and horrible without me … you all did great!

Today’s topic: President Trump’s continued war on Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): So have you all heard of a jam session before? This is a Sessions session.

micah: Oh god.

natesilver:

Trump And Congress Are Probably On A Collision Course Over Russia

President Trump’s outburst against Attorney General Jeff Sessions might be the event that forces a confrontation with congressional Republicans over the Russia scandal. If Sessions is fired or resigns under pressure, the Senate will have to confirm his replacement. And if Trump nominates as Sessions’s successor someone such as Rudy Giuliani, who is seen by some as insufficiently independent from Trump or as likely to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, the moment may finally be upon Republicans in Congress to signal how far they’re willing to go to check Trump’s powers.

Or it could be something else. Trump could fire Mueller. He could pardon family members (Donald Trump Jr.) or close associates (Michael Flynn) implicated in the Russia scandal — or he could even try to pardon himself. Mueller could keep his job but eventually return with a finding that Trump had in fact attempted to obstruct justice — something that has been the basis for impeachment proceedings in the past.

I don’t know which one of these scenarios is most likely to happen. But the odds are that at least one of them will eventually occur, or something equally severe that I haven’t thought of — which will put Trump on a collision course with Congress and probably force them to confront the question of impeachment.

What will happen then? The consensus of the commentary that I’ve been reading, especially on the left, is that congressional Republicans would back down in such a confrontation, hemming and hawing about Trump but ultimately not doing very much about him. In fact, an increasing number of commentators are arguing that we’re already in the midst of a constitutional crisis because of Congress’s impending and inevitable failure to curb the president’s behavior.

This is a perfectly reasonable prediction of how Congress might react. We know that partisanship is an exceptionally strong force in American politics and that Congress has become more partisan over the past few decades. And we know that Trump has brought Republicans the presidency and majorities in both chambers of Congress. So if our political compass seems to be broken in these uncertain political waters, it makes sense to use partisanship as our lodestar and presume that the GOP’s response to Trump will never go much beyond the “troubled” or “concerned” stage.

Nonetheless, I’m not so sure about it. As my colleague Julia Azari pointed out on Tuesday, we’re somewhat off the beaten path in assessing how an increasingly partisan Congress might respond to a president whose behavior has become increasingly abnormal. I don’t think it’s easy to predict how Congress would react to, for example, Trump firing Mueller — and I don’t think what’s happened so far gives us all that much guidance either way.

So don’t think of this as a “hot take” so much as a glass of cold water — a caution against overconfidence in an environment without much data or precedent. Still, there are a few things I think we can say:

Pressure is building on the Russia story

One point on which I explicitly disagree with some of the commentary I’ve read — I even disagree with Julia on this! — is the notion that the Trump-Russia stories are part of a “repeating cycle where stories break and then fade away.” I think that’s a pretty good description of how the Russia story was playing out earlier this year, when stories alleging connections between Russia and the Trump campaign were largely based on anonymous sourcing and contained few verifiable details. That made it hard for stories to build upon one another, or to be persuasive to anyone except folks who didn’t like Trump in the first place.

But now? Big chunks of the story are on the record or have happened in full view of the public. We’ve got Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., having released emails that showed him helping to arrange a meeting between Russian contacts and Trump campaign officials in the hopes of obtaining damaging information on Hillary Clinton. We’ve got Trump having fired the FBI director, James Comey, for reasons he later told NBC News were related to the FBI’s investigation into Russia. And we’ve got a special counsel, Mueller, having been appointed and reportedly investigating Trump for obstruction of justice.

This is serious stuff. And the story will probably develop further; the pace of Trump-Russia revelations has been accelerating. In the chart below, I’ve tracked whether a Trump-Russia story was the lead political story of the day, based on the top story at Memeorandum, a news aggregation site, at noon each day.1 The chart contains three categories:

Red stories relate directly to reports about alleged ties between Russia and Trump and his associates, as well as the attempts by various governmental entities to investigate them;
Orange stories relate to Trump’s firing of Comey and its aftermath;
And yellow stories reflect other “Russia-adjacent” stories, such as Trump considering firing Sessions or accusing former President Barack Obama of having wiretapped him.2 While not about Trump’s ties to Russia per se, these stories are part of the cloud of dust kicked up by apparent Russian interference in the 2016 election, the various Russia investigations and Trump’s attempts to stop them.

Russia or Russia-adjacent stories led the news cycle 25 percent of the time through April 29, Trump’s 100th day in office. (A lot of those were wiretapping-related stories, which were arguably an attempt by the White House to muddy the waters on Russia; the percentage falls to 16 percent if you exclude those.) Since then, Russia or Russia-adjacent stories, including the Comey firing, have led the news 49 percent of the time (none of which have been wiretapping-related). And Russia or Russia-adjacent stories have been the news lead 56 percent of the time so far in July.

The point is that even if Congress didn’t react that strongly to Russia-Trump developments before, there also hadn’t been much proven misconduct to react to. Now, the story is more serious, with at least some evidence of attempted collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and various attempts by the White House to impede the investigation. So is Congress stepping up? Well, actually…

Congressional Republicans have taken some tangible steps on Russia

When The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins recently talked to Congressional Republicans and their staffs, he found a variety of reactions, ranging from members who thought the Russia story was a bunch of hot air to others who privately thought it could be grounds for impeachment. But, they were united in claiming they already had taken significant steps to check the president’s behavior. As Coppins reported:

But on one point, at least, there seems to be widespread consensus: All of them believe they’re already doing everything they can within reason to hold the president accountable — and they fiercely reject any argument to the contrary.

Needless to say, these Republicans are making a debatable assertion. As we reported, for example, Republicans in Congress didn’t have all that much to say about the Trump Jr. meeting. And while relatively few Republicans expressed support for the Comey firing, even fewer called for a special prosecutor or an independent investigation. (Mueller was appointed by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, rather than by Congress.)

There are some meaningful steps that Republicans have taken, however:

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Trump-Russia ties has been pretty serious, even if the House’s investigation has not been. The Senate has called (and sometimes even subpoenaed) a wide-ranging slate of witnesses. Comey’s testimony before the committee in June was a major spectacle, and committee chair Richard Burr asked Comey fairly evenhanded and nonpartisan questions.
The Senate and House recently passed sanctions against Russia by overwhelming, near-unanimous margins despite the initial objections of the White House.3
Members of Congress have warned Trump against firing Sessions, and the threat of a Democratic filibuster will likely prevent a recess appointment that would allow Trump to temporarily replace Sessions without a confirmation vote.

This certainly isn’t everything that Republicans might do, but it isn’t nothing, either. And if Congress hasn’t done that much to investigate Trump itself, it also hasn’t gotten in the way of the more important investigations — the ones being conducted by Mueller (who was widely praised by Republicans when he was appointed as special counsel) and by the media.

It’s still early, and impeachment is a very serious step

It took two years and almost two months from the discovery of the Watergate break-in on June 17, 1972, to Richard Nixon’s resignation under threat of removal from office on August 9, 1974. Even after what was probably the most infamous event of the Watergate ordeal — the Saturday Night Massacre on Oct. 20, 1973, in which Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox — it still took almost 10 months until Nixon resigned.

In most respects, Trump is ahead of Nixon’s schedule. He’s only been president for six months — and it’s been less than three months since Comey was fired and less than three weeks since Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russians at Trump Tower was revealed.

Trump also has only a 38 or 39 percent approval rating — whereas Nixon, five months after the Watergate break-in in November 1972, overwhelmingly won re-election with 61 percent of the vote against George McGovern. Recent polls4 show that about 43 percent of the public want Trump to be impeached, which is short of a majority — but also well ahead of where Nixon was in July 1973, when just 24 percent of the public supported impeachment.

How much further Trump’s approval rating might fall and how quickly that might happen is hard to say. His numbers did decline a few percentage points after the Comey firing, but they’ve been fairly steady since then. There’s undoubtedly some truth in the notion that partisanship will give Trump a cushion with Republican voters. At the same time, his numbers are historically poor for a president at this point in his term despite a fairly good economy, which usually boosts approval ratings. And there’s been considerable erosion in the number of voters who say they strongly support Trump. Voters who go from strongly supporting a candidate to reluctantly supporting him may turn out to oppose him a few months later.

Trump, like Nixon, also has a tendency to make enemies out of former allies when feeling embattled. Some media outlets that usually strongly support Trump, such as Breitbart, have come out strongly in defense of Sessions, for example. It’s not that hard to imagine a scenario — a year or two from now — where Trump is increasingly isolated, as George W. Bush was late in his second term.

But the impeachment process is slow, both by custom and design. And that’s for good reason: Removing a popularly-elected president is a drastic step, especially early in his term. If I had to imagine a world in which Trump winds up being impeached and removed from office, it would play out fairly gradually. Some event will probably spark a confrontation between Trump and Congress later this year or early next year. But it might take until 2019, after further White House missteps throughout 2018 and a big Democratic win at the midterms, for Republicans to be ready to impeach Trump. The confrontation is increasingly unlikely to be avoided — but the key tests of how Republicans in Congress will respond to Trump’s conduct over Russia have still yet to come.

Politics Podcast: One Last(?) Try On Health Care

 












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This week on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the team considers the GOP’s options as the party makes a final push (maybe? for a while?) to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Plus, the podcast visits Earth 2, a world where Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election by a small margin. How different would the political environment really be?

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

If Hillary Clinton Had Won

What’s different – and what’s the same – in a world where the 2016 election went the other way? Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, 2016 Election

Greetings, citizens of Earth 1! I’m filing this dispatch from Earth 2, where Hillary Clinton got just a few more votes last November than she did in your world. And I really do mean just a few more: On Earth 2, Clinton won an additional 0.5 percent more of the vote each state, and Donald Trump won 0.5 percent less. That was just enough for her to narrowly win three states – Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – that she narrowly lost in what you think of as “the real world.” Races for Congress turned out exactly the same here on Earth 2, so Clinton is president with a Republican Congress.

Things are really different on Earth 2! Merrick Garland is on the Supreme Court instead of Neil Gorsuch. Clinton didn’t enact a “travel ban.” The United States didn’t withdraw from the Paris climate accord. Kellyanne Conway has a CNN show.

We Got Drunk On Margaritas For Science

The margarita is one of those rare iconic cocktails that have a half-dozen recipes that can each lay claim to being the best, which poses some problems for your everyday margarita drinker. If you turn to the internet for help, you’ll find hundreds of recipes, and it can be tough to tell which ones are worth your while. The overabundance of choice means a person can find essentially any permutation of tequila, orange liqueur and lime billing itself as a marg.

We wanted to find the best margarita recipe, so we pulled 78 of the internet’s suggestions — we ignored all those lamentable sour-mix concoctions and coconut-pomegranate-passionfruit abominations, focusing just on the beverages anchored by tequila, lime juice and orange liqueur. Then we applied something called a k-means clustering algorithm to determine the four main types of margaritas. Taking a mere average would have resulted in a monstrosity of a drink that was trying to be several things at once, but the clustering algorithm gives us several distinct platonic ideals of a margarita, letting our human taster determine which one is best.

In the video above, you can see us head to Dutch Kills bar in lovely Queens, New York, to test those recipes and figure out which is the best of the bunch. Here are your contenders.

The Classic

1 1/2 oz. tequila

3/4 oz. orange liqueur

3/4 oz. lime juice

The Tequila-Forward

1 1/2 oz. tequila

1/4 oz. orange liqueur

3/4 oz. lime juice

1/4 oz. agave nectar

The Sweet & Easy

1 1/2 oz. tequila

3/4 oz. orange liqueur

3/4 oz. lime juice

1/2 oz. agave nectar

1/2 oz. water

1/4 oz. lemon juice

The Limey & Tart

1 1/2 oz. tequila

1/4 oz. orange liqueur

1 1/4 oz. lime juice

1/2 oz. simple syrup

Watch the video to see which recipe won!

Who Killed The Health Care Bill?

In this week’s politics chat, we talk about — what else? — the apparent failure of Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Those efforts collapsed Monday night when Sens. Jerry Moran of Kansas and Mike Lee of Utah said they would vote against a procedural motion to move ahead with the bill. So is the bill really dead? And, if so, who’s to blame for the bill’s failure? The transcript below has been lightly edited.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Good morning, chatters. Sometimes we have trouble picking a chat topic. And sometimes, when we’re trying to decide on a topic … the GOP’s effort to pass a health care bill collapses! So let’s talk about that.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Thanks to Jerry Moran and Mike Lee for allowing us to find a chat topic.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Do we want to talk about the politics of this? The policy of this?

natesilver: Well, Clare, there are basically four questions I want to cover:

Was this predictable? Why were Moran and Lee the ones to kill it?
To whom should we assign blame? What could McConnell have done differently? How much did President Trump matter?
Does McConnell’s new strategy — passing a repeal-and-delay bill — have any chance? And if not, what’s his goal with it?
Is this good news or bad news for Republicans running for Congress next year?

Let’s start with No. 1. How surprised were you guys when you heard this news? Harry, did you snort out your diet orange soda?

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): I think the legislation falling apart was predictable. I don’t think I could have picked Moran out of a lineup before a few weeks ago.

natesilver: Perry, your sources have been skeptical of the bill’s chances of passage for a while now, no? Somewhat more than the conventional wisdom held?

perry: Yes, true. This bill was just not popular with rank-and-file senators. Very few were strongly for it.

anna (Anna Maria Barry-Jester, lead health writer): I would say I’m not very surprised. I was also surprised it was Moran, but Kansas has been interesting this year. The state legislature nearly expanded Medicaid with a veto-proof majority.

harry: To answer the question: I wasn’t surprised. There were already two senators who opposed the bill. Only three were needed for the bill to fail. As Anna touched on, Kansas is going through an anti-very-conservative period. And while Moran would have been surprising as a “no” vote a few months ago, he’d previously come out against a version of this bill. There have been more surprising political events over the last year than this bill going down.

perry: So I thought the “no” group would be Rand Paul and Susan Collins (who had already announced that they opposed the motion to proceed) and then Shelley Moore Capito and Lisa Murkowski. I thought Lee would back the bill as long as Ted Cruz did, as they have been allied on issues involving Obamacare. I thought Moran would fall in line, as he is not known as a rabble-rouser. And I thought they would wait for Sen. John McCain of Arizona to get back from his surgery.

harry: Yeah, I think the surprising thing here is that they didn’t even wait for McCain.

clare.malone: I’ve seen the theory floated that this was a coordinated effort to provide cover for other senators who wanted to vote against the bill.

natesilver: Clare, I’m a proponent of that theory! I think people are overthinking why it was Moran and Lee. If Moran opposed the bill, that probably means a lot of senators did. He was just one of the electorally safer ones to do it. (Moran isn’t up for re-election until 2022, for instance, and even then he isn’t likely to face either a serious primary challenge or major problems in the general election.)

clare.malone: It’s sort of being pitched as an anti-McConnell plot.

natesilver: McConnell apparently didn’t know ahead of time, according to CNN’s tick-tock.

clare.malone: Yeah, with people like Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin saying Friday that McConnell was being underhanded.

natesilver: The Johnson thing was a bad sign, I thought. He was basically calling McConnell untrustworthy.

Anna: I believe “a significant breach of trust” were Johnson’s exact words.

perry: The reporting on senators being mad at McConnell is interesting — the idea that they don’t trust him.

clare.malone: Guys, Washington is so Shakespearean right now! So much talk of betrayal from within!

harry: Adam Jentleson, a former aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, had a great tweetstorm on Monday night arguing that what Johnson was doing was highly unusual.

perry: Yeah, I read that. But it’s a former Reid aide, so I was skeptical.

natesilver: Meanwhile, according to CNN, Trump was dining on “lemon ricotta agnolotti with heirloom tomato ragout” (aka pasta with tomato sauce) with a group of Republicans when the bill failed.

But let me take one more run at what happened on Monday night. What does it mean that Moran and Lee did this without letting McConnell — or Trump — know ahead of time? Why didn’t they give McConnell a way to save face?

clare.malone: Seems like they wanted egg on his face.

perry: That does go to something unusual happening here that would seem to call for more reporting.

natesilver: Do we know how many firm “yes” votes there were?

harry: 14, according to The New York Times.

clare.malone: That’s not that many, given that this is a marquee piece of legislation.

natesilver: No, it’s kind of pathetic.

So let’s move on to Phase II of our chat … the blame game! I’m giving each of you 100 Blame Points. Your job is to allocate them between the following people: McConnell, Senate moderates, Senate conservatives, Lee/Moran, Trump, Democrats and House Speaker Paul Ryan.

How many Blame Points, out of 100, do you give McConnell?

clare.malone: I didn’t know there was going to be so much math on this quiz.

Uh, 60 points to McConnell? Maybe more?

natesilver: So we have 60 points for McConnell? Anyone want to go higher?

perry: So I don’t know who (Ryan, McConnell, Vice President Mike Pence, probably not Trump) decided that this bill needed to cut Medicaid — not just the Obamacare expansion but to cap Medicaid spending overall. But whoever made that decision made this bill really, really hard to pass. The Medicaid cuts were in both the House and Senate versions of the bill, by the way.

clare.malone: Yeah, I think Paul Ryan gets the next most points. The House bill set a scene.

perry: I might just give Ryan 50 and McConnell 50. They didn’t plan this process well. They had a long time to have legislation ready, and they just didn’t.

natesilver: I’m giving McConnell 70 blame points, Trump 15, Ryan 10 and Cruz 5. (Cruz for being the ringleader of the group that wanted to push the bill to the right, but which may have cost it more moderate support than it gained in support from conservatives.)

anna: Getting through the Senate was always going to be the tough part for this bill. So fault Ryan for poor stage-setting or McConnell, who is supposed to know how to wrangle his people?

natesilver: The fact that random senators like Jerry Moran killed the bill suggest that McConnell wasn’t even close and was doing a really bad job.

clare.malone: What about Trump? Trump has been SO absent from this process — does that make him take more points or kind of excuse him from blame?

perry: This is a case where I give Trump almost no blame. He was basically not involved in the legislative process, leaving the details to Ryan/McConnell.

natesilver: I’m blaming Trump for not being more involved, especially at the early stages of the process when McConnell and Ryan drafted an approach that was going to be so unpopular and politically fraught.

anna: Trump has really not helped the situation. He’s been antagonistic with insurers, and his people ran attack ads against Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, who was one of the key swing votes on the bill!

harry: I was going to go with 50 points for McConnell. Ryan didn’t help because the bill he produced was too far to the right and also made Senate conservatives think they could get away with pushing the bill even further right. I’d go with 20 points for Ryan. Trump is the freaking president. I don’t care if he doesn’t know stuff. It’s not on-the-job training time. There is no curve. I’ll give Trump 20 points too.

clare.malone: The Heller stuff is … interesting strategy.

perry: Ryan wrote the initial Medicaid cuts, so I’m giving him a lot of the blame.

natesilver: Why McConnell and Ryan’s obsession — if you want to call it that — with cutting Medicaid? I wrote last month that McConnell was likely facing a very difficult path, so long as Medicaid cuts and a bunch of tax cuts (some of which were withdrawn in the final version) were the essence of the bill.

anna: That has been a longstanding Republican goal, Nate. I think they thought this was their chance.

clare.malone: I don’t think we’re giving Lee/Moran enough due here if these points are about how the bill was killed.

perry: I do wonder if Lee was going to keep opposing the bill no matter what. I feel like Lee and Paul wanted a bill that was going so conservative that it would have had a hard time getting 50 votes.

natesilver: I guess what surprises me — and it also surprised me about Paul Ryan in the House — is: Couldn’t they just have told conservatives who thought the bill wasn’t conservative enough to go eff themselves?

harry: Apparently, they didn’t think they could do that. Then again, the Freedom Caucus got rid of former House Speaker John Boehner. They may think they can get their way on pretty much everything.

perry: I actually thought telling moderates to eff themselves was the better strategy. The Senate proved me wrong.

natesilver: Everyone thought McConnell was smart to be following Ryan’s playbook. But Ryan had a much bigger margin to work with in the House than McConnell had in the Senate.

clare.malone: I think it’s difficult to tell moderates to screw off on a thing that takes away a benefit to their constituents that’s been enshrined for decades.

anna: I agree, Clare — and the funding reductions over time for Medicaid are enormous. Medicaid is the second-largest expense for most, if not all, states (behind education).

natesilver: My hot take (which comes with a dash of hindsight bias) is that the fact it was so hard to get a bill passed in the House was a bad sign for the Senate bill, and maybe McConnell shouldn’t have been inclined to emulate Ryan’s process.

clare.malone: Rightward tilt of power in the party, Nate. It’s the ideologues who are more likely to hold the normal process hostage.

harry: Funnily enough, many of the pieces written about why the House made a mistake shifting the bill too far to the right are holding up for now. I wasn’t sure that was going to happen.

perry: I found the House passage of its health care bill on May 4 so stunning that I thought it showed legislative acumen and party unity that would carry over. I was wrong.

harry: You weren’t the only one who thought that, Perry.

natesilver: Let’s move on to Phase III of our chat: What’s next?

McConnell announced that he will have the Senate vote on a “repeal and delay” bill that would eliminate Obamacare without immediately replacing it with anything, but then delay implementation of the repeal for two years while they figure out what will take its place.

clare.malone: Well, I just got a news alert saying three senators — Collins, Capito and Murkowski — have come out against the repeal-and-delay strategy. So it looks like that plan is dead already. Which maybe isn’t too surprising given that a lot of people were saying that it was irresponsible to repeal without a replacement option.

anna: Yeah, not too surprising.

First, only a quarter of people think Congress should repeal what it can now and try to write a replacement bill later.

Second, it’s worth noting that a “clean repeal” is still only a partial repeal of the full ACA. It keeps the requirement that insurers cover people with pre-existing conditions, but it gets rid of the individual mandate, the subsidies to buy insurance, the requirement that employers offer coverage and the Medicaid expansion. The CBO estimated that it would leave up to 32 million more people uninsured by 2026 and that premiums would go up by 100 percent.

natesilver: And that includes something like 18 or 19 million more uninsured in the first year alone, if I’m reading that right.

So did McConnell ever actually want a repeal-and-delay bill to pass, or was he just trying to save face?

clare.malone: Feels like salty saving face? But maybe I’m being naive.

perry: I think the repeal-and-delay vote, if it had come to a vote, was always mostly about forcing the moderates to come out against it. That way, McConnell can push blame onto them.

natesilver: How wobbly is McConnell here? If the next six months go badly for him — let’s say they botch tax reform too — could his leadership be under threat?

perry: The No 2. is John Cornyn of Texas. That is an answer. Cornyn has been constantly, constantly wrong in predicting passage of the bill.

natesilver: So Cornyn isn’t a very threatening understudy, you’re saying.

perry: Right. Whatever you think of Ryan, people thought for a while that he would be a future speaker.

clare.malone: But would it necessarily go in that order of succession? Couldn’t you put up a different candidate from the ranks of senators, someone seen as savvier?

perry: I’m not sure who that person is right now in the GOP Senate. Also, McConnell can just privately blame Trump for all that is wrong. Republican senators are leery of Trump. This could work.

clare.malone: Isn’t that a risk, though? To throw the president under the bus? He’s unpopular, but not with a core group of Republicans.

natesilver: Trump has had mixed messaging since Monday night, at least based on his Twitter feed. He’s advocated for repeal-and-delay, but he’s also tried to pre-emptively blame Democrats for the bill failing. So what does Trump want out of this?

harry: Trump wants wins.

perry: A signing ceremony.

anna: Exactly. He has made clear he doesn’t care where the policy ends up. He campaigned on no cuts to Medicaid; this bill drastically cuts Medicaid. And he celebrated passage of the House bill in the Rose Garden and then called that very bill “mean.”

natesilver: See, all that makes me want to assign more blame to Trump. I’m taking away 5 of McConnell’s blame points and giving them to the White House.

clare.malone: They might WANT to blame Trump, but will they? Nothing in the Republican senators’ past behavior leads me to believe they’ll take that stance.

natesilver: I’d think the way the White House went after Heller — and how they’re trying to squeeze Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake — could be very bad for Trump’s relationships with Congress.

But it’s time to move on to PHASE 4: Politics!

anna: Bye!

Politics Podcast: Trump’s Presidency At Six Months

 












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This week on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the team examines the most recent version of the Senate Republicans’ health care bill. Then, the group revisits Nate’s “14 versions of Trump’s presidency” and judges which path Trump is most likely on. Plus, Gallup conducted a poll asking respondents who disapprove of the president’s job performance why they disapprove. Was that a good use of polling or a bad use of polling?

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.