House Republicans

The 5 Main Factions Of The House GOP

And how they’re likely to govern for the next two years.

By Alex Samuels

Feb. 1, 2023, at 6:00 AM

In the first few years after former President Donald Trump assumed office, he essentially became a one-man litmus test for the Republican Party. Conservatives’ bona fides hinged less on their voting records, and more on their fealty to him.  

Then something weird happened. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who worked hard over the years to establish his loyalty to Trump, was suddenly being called a “moderate” as he suffered through more than a dozen unsuccessful votes for House speaker. The defectors who initially refused to vote for him were now part of the “hardline” or “extremist” faction of the party — depending on which news article you read. That group also included Trump boosters who nevertheless said when it came to the speaker vote, the former president should be taking cues from them. 

So what does it actually mean to be a “moderate” or “conservative” U.S. House member in the Republican Party of 2023? Don’t look for big policy divides to explain the difference — members are largely unified around an agenda of cutting certain spending programs, limiting abortion and keeping a lid on taxes. That’s not a new phenomenon: Four years ago, when my former colleague Perry Bacon Jr. analyzed what he believed were the five wings of the Republican Party, the categorizations revolved around Trump because, well, Trump defined the party.

The goalposts for what makes a “moderate” versus “conservative” lawmaker are always shifting. But as Republicans settle back into control of the House of Representatives, I set out to update Perry’s analysis — and concluded that while Trump still holds outsized influence over the party, he’s no longer its central pivot point.

Instead, I’d argue that a number of important fissures define the current House congressional GOP — and the embrace of Trump and Trumpism is just one of them. Voting records, ties to the establishment and caucus membership, for instance, all played a role in how I measured Republican House members against one another, drawing on data as well as expert opinion.

I’ll be honest and say that these categories may not be perfect and that there’s a potential for change in just a few years (Perry’s article was only written in 2019!) as loyalties switch and new issues come to the fore. And, as I’ll explain in more detail below, some members have their feet in multiple camps — or at least a pinky toe. Still, I’d put congressional Republicans in five main camps. I’ve ordered from most moderate to most conservative — or extreme:

Moderate establishment

• These Republicans side with the broader GOP on most issues but are the members most likely to find common ground with Democrats. They’ve been known to attack leadership or their colleagues who are further to the right — or at least disagree with them. They’re often members of bipartisan groups like the Problem Solvers Caucus.
• Prominent members: Reps. David Joyce of Ohio, Young Kim of California, Nancy Mace of South Carolina. 

Don’t expect members of this shrinking, often quiet group to rise into notable positions of party leadership anytime soon. “It seems like they’re increasingly becoming an incredibly endangered species,” said Julia Azari, a FiveThirtyEight contributor and political science professor at Marquette University.

Case in point: If I were writing this story last year, I probably would have put former Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez or Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger in this camp. But after both publicly assailed the former president and advocated for his impeachment, neither ran for another term.

These members have to toe a fine line to keep their jobs. They likely won’t agree with the mainstream GOP on everything — just look at how Mace spoke about abortion messaging costing Republicans in the 2022 midterms, or how Joyce said that he’s on the fence about kicking certain Democrats off of Republican-led committees — but expect to see them largely in line with Republicans’ anti-Biden messaging, or be outspoken about things important to their base, like preserving “family values” or slowing inflation. In short, the people I’d put in this category are those who are willing to buck party leadership sometimes — but not so much that they’re in imminent danger of losing their seats. And, in general, their voting records tend to be more moderate compared with other Republicans. 

Conservative establishment

• They’re part of the establishment and/or party leadership but still boast conservative records. They’re sometimes willing to speak out against members to their right, but generally try to be peacekeepers. In a nutshell: These Republicans straddle the line between the moderate and pro-Trump wings of the party.
• Prominent members: Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York, Tom Emmer of Minnesota and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

I would put most Republicans in prominent leadership positions (regardless of whether they’re in the House or Senate) in this group. While they do adhere to some tenets of Trumpism — like admonishing the “fake news” media, at least in Stefanik’s case — they simultaneously need to be seen as having the best interests of the GOP’s ideologically diverse caucus at heart. You likely won’t see these members attacking the former president like more moderate Republicans, or driving a wedge within the caucus like the pro-Trump insurgent wing does. But it’s clear that these members still espouse some type of loyalty to Trump, as they’ve been known to broker deals for him — or on his behalf.

Part of getting to a position of leadership in the first place is moderating your views so that a larger swath of members think you’ll prioritize their interests. In practice, that could mean pushing a fairly traditional Republican agenda, like cutting taxes or entitlements, without wading too much into the culture wars that have animated the furthest right House members. McCarthy is a great example of this. The current House speaker entered Congress as a conservative “Young Gun” but moved toward the middle to help get the position he’s in now, according to Hans Noel, a professor of government at Georgetown University who has researched how Trump shifted the meaning of what it meant to be a conservative. 

“At first, [McCarthy] was the upstart person who was challenging things,” Noel told me. “But now he’s been around for a while, and he’s likely realized that, in order to have a career, you have to moderate your positions a bit.” The shift was cosmetic — his policy positions remained largely the same — but his stature within the party grew. 

You might be wondering, too, why I put Stefanik in this category, given that she has a fairly moderate voting record. That’s largely because, since entering the lower chamber ahead of the 114th Congress, Stefanik has gotten more conservative. According to ideology metrics based on her voting record, Stefanik went from a fairly moderate member of Congress between 2015 and 2021, to a more conservative one from 2021 to 2023. Plus, she’s explicitly embraced Trump as she’s climbed into leadership roles over the past few years — which means she arguably embodies elements of both this wing and the pro-Trump insurgent wings. 

One difficulty I ran into in writing about this group, though, was in pinpointing where its loyalties really lie. Are they loyal to Trump? Or to the GOP as a whole? Politicians often take their cues from leadership in their own party, and if Trump were no longer in the picture, it’s unclear where members of this faction would swing.

Far-right establishment 

• These are the conservatives who likely align with the Freedom Caucus ideologically but make fewer waves. They’re the preferred leaders of the Tea party conservatives and pro-Trump insurgent factions.
• Prominent members: Reps. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina.

Here, you have the members whom far-right members are comfortable with in leadership roles. In fact, I’d go one step further and argue that they’re the glue that holds Freedom Caucus and the conservative establishment together, as this wing won’t broker all that much with Democrats and/or the more moderate GOP House members. 

That dynamic was on full display during the House speaker fight, when Scalise was floated as a possible consensus speaker who could speak to the 20 anti-McCarthy Republicans. On average, these members’ voting records tend to be more conservative compared with Republicans in other top leadership positions. 

These members might not agree with everything the Freedom Caucus proposes, though. For example, Scalise, for his part, has sometimes quietly staked out neutral or mainstream positions when his colleagues have gone the other way. For example, he broke with most other top House leaders when he didn’t get involved in Cheney’s GOP primary. And, perhaps most notably, as Freedom Caucus members continued to promote the false claim that it was fraudulent, McHenry voted to certify the 2020 election’s results.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/whats-deal-freedom-caucus-fivethirtyeight-96551491

Tea party conservative 

• Here are the Freedom Caucus members who are driven by ideology. They’re often associated with conservative groups like the Club for Growth.
• Prominent members: Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Byron Donalds of Florida, Chip Roy of Texas.

Members of this group are some of the most conservative in the House. In fact, I’d lump a good chunk of the Freedom Caucus into this wing. But what I think differentiates these members from, say, the pro-Trump insurgent (more on them below) is that Tea party conservatives are more clearly motivated by ideology — e.g., supporting less government spending — than by grievance.

Tea party conservatives can veer between fiery House floor speeches, wonky strategizing over procedural quirks and breezy talks with members of the various GOP factions. Their brand of conservatism, at times, might compel them to break form with Republican allies. For example, when Trump said in a tweet that four Democratic members of Congress — all women of color — should “go back” to “where they came from,” Roy denounced his actions. Jordan has had streaks of independence, too, including, in June when he broke from Freedom Caucus members and voted to honor Capitol police for their response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Members of this group support Trump, too, but their loyalties aren’t tied to a specific leader. And they often strategically show their support for the former president (i.e., vociferously defending him during impeachment hearings), since they arguably also want to increase their power in the House. Yes, members of this group can be obstructionists at times, but their politics are often guided by a strong adherence to their ideas — regardless of whether it is politically expedient or in line with Trump’s wishes. 

Pro-Trump insurgent

• These are the rabble-rousers. They’re led by Trump but largely avoid criticizing him publicly, even if they don’t fully embrace his views. Most of them voted against certifying President Biden’s 2020 electoral victory. Their beliefs are malleable, and more motivated by grievance more than ideology. 
• Prominent members: Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. 

This might not be the biggest wing, but it’s definitely the loudest — and wields a lot of power given the GOP’s narrow House majority. In fact, it’s the members in this camp who made it so difficult for McCarthy to attain the speakership in the first place. 

That’s in part because the politicians in this bloc are primarily motivated by grievance and, as such, are not afraid to take on the establishment even if it means being seen as unserious lawmakers by the rest of the caucus and GOP voters. Moreover, since this wing is defined by a fealty to Trump, these members are the most likely to defend anything the former president says or does. Of course, during the vote for House speaker, many in this camp — specifically Gaetz and Boebert — initially refused to vote for McCarthy, even though he was Trump’s chosen candidate. But many of these members had personal quibbles with McCarthy that led to them not wanting him to be speaker. And those intraparty arguments, I’d argue, stand separate from members’ support for Trump. Plus, reporting suggests that Trump helped encourage at least some defectors to come around to voting for McCarthy— or at least voting “present.” 

This group’s loyalty to the former president was arguably displayed most prominently during the Jan. 6 investigations. Its members not only diminished the events of that day but have been steadfast in promoting the debunked narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president. 

But this bloc is more flexible than it appears. In fact, I’d argue that Greene, at least as of late, is trying to teeter between this category and the far-right establishment (or, at least, I think that’s where she wants to be). This tension was on full display during the House speaker vote, when she publicly chastised ideologically aligned members (like Boebert) for refusing to back McCarthy’s bid.

Azari told me that continued infighting among this group might be a good thing for the larger party. There’s also no incentive for the GOP, she said, to have this insurgent bloc grow in size. “It’s not to Republicans’ benefit for them to be at the forefront of the party,” she said. “They are really not super popular figures with the broader population.”

The speaker fight was just the beginning. I’d expect the fissures between these groups to become more noticeable as long as Republicans hold onto a narrow majority in the House. Up next, we’re likely to see debates over things like whether Democrats should be allowed to have committee seats, whether McCarthy should negotiate with Biden and Democrats over raising the debt ceiling and much more. 

But don’t get too cozy with these (albeit imperfect) categorizations. “Over time, conservatives have become more conservative on a number of more nativist, social and racial issues. And they’ve become slightly more moderate on at least some economic issues,” Noel said. “But there could be lots of new issues that come in, and those could become the cleavages that start to shake things up again.”

House of Representatives

One Major Concession From The Speaker Election Isn't As Major As It Seems

By Nathaniel Rakich

Jan. 17, 2023, at 6:00 AM

As now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy was frantically striking deals in Congress to secure him the speakership earlier this month, his allies at the Congressional Leadership Fund promised something that, on its face, seemed like a big concession. The political action committee promised not to spend money for any candidates in an open-seat primary in a safe Republican House district. In exchange, another major GOP group, the anti-establishment Club for Growth, agreed to endorse McCarthy for speaker.

This could potentially help more conservative Republican candidates win House primaries in 2024, since their more mainstream opponents will have less money behind them. The Congressional Leadership Fund has long been one of Republicans’ most prolific outside spenders in general elections, and in the 2022 midterms it dipped its toes into primaries as well. It issued its first-ever primary endorsements and spent more than $10 million as part of an effort to elect relatively moderate Republicans and more closely align the new GOP caucus with McCarthy. (So much for that.) So Jake Sherman, one of the most connected journalists in Washington, tweeted that the Congressional Leadership Fund’s agreement to stand down was a “BIG BIG agreement” and a “BIG WIN for conservatives.”

But when you actually look at what the Congressional Leadership Fund did last cycle, it’s more like a MEDIUM MEDIUM deal. The agreement is more of a non-proliferation treaty than a cease-fire. It has so many caveats that the Congressional Leadership Fund’s 2024 primary spending may not look all that different from 2022’s. But that alone could still be a big deal if it keeps the GOP’s most deep-pocketed establishment PAC from going nuclear on the hard right.

Until this most recent cycle, the Congressional Leadership Fund wasn’t a major player in primaries. In 2020, it got involved in only one, protecting incumbent Rep. Kay Granger from challenger Chris Putnam in Texas’s 12th District. But in 2022, it made independent expenditures for or against Republicans in 34 House primaries. And with the usual caveats about not reading too much into win rates,¹ it was on the winning side in 29 of them. 

But the vast majority of this spending would still be allowed under the terms of the Congressional Leadership Fund and Club for Growth’s grand bargain. The Congressional Leadership Fund agreed only to stop spending in open-seat primaries in safe Republican districts; in fact, its president specifically said, “CLF will continue to support incumbents in primaries as well as challengers in districts that affect the Majority.” 

That means that, if this arrangement had been in place in 2022, it would have prevented the Congressional Leadership Fund from interfering in only two primaries that accounted for just 7 percent of its primary spending. Only six of the 34 districts in the table can be considered safely Republican (which I’m somewhat arbitrarily classifying as seats with FiveThirtyEight partisan leans² redder than R+12), and four of those six had Republican incumbents running in them.

What’s more, the Club for Growth wasn’t opposed to the Congressional Leadership Fund’s preferred candidate in any of the 34 primaries the Congressional Leadership Fund spent money on. (Though some other anti-establishment actors, like the campaign arm of the House Freedom Caucus, did support a different candidate in Texas’s 8th.) So it’s hard not to wonder whether the Club for Growth actually got anything meaningful out of this deal — and whether the Congressional Leadership Fund really gave up that much.

But there’s probably a little more than meets the eye here. The agreement also stipulated that the Congressional Leadership Fund wouldn’t grant resources to other PACs that interfere in incumbent-less Republican primaries in safe seats. Instances of indirect spending like this are harder to track down, but we know that the Congressional Leadership Fund tried this strategy in at least one primary last year, donating money to a PAC that attacked far-right Republican Joe Kent in Washington’s 3rd District (although it wasn’t an open seat, so this specific instance wouldn’t have run afoul of the new rules either). 

And crucially, even if the pact doesn’t significantly change the Congressional Leadership Fund’s behavior, it will at least prevent them from throwing their weight around in more open-red-seat Republican primaries. The $10,767,799 that the PAC spent in GOP primaries in 2022 was a mere drop in the bucket compared with the $260 million that it raised for the cycle (most of which was spent attacking Democrats in the general election). There was always a threat that the Congressional Leadership Fund could get involved in primaries in safe Republican seats that the Club for Growth did care about, like Missouri’s 7th this year. Now, that threat is gone, at least on paper.

Then again, it was only a threat on paper to begin with. 

2022 Election

A Record Number Of Black Republicans Could Be Headed to Congress

By Alex Samuels

Jul. 28, 2022, at 6:00 AM

In today’s Congress, Republicans are still far more likely than Democrats to be white. But after the midterm elections in November, a record number of Black Republicans could be headed to Capitol Hill.

According to reports, the National Republican Congressional Committee says 81 Black candidates are running on the GOP ticket for the U.S. House in this year’s primaries, a marked increase from the 2020 primary cycle. Not all of these candidates will make it to Congress, though, as a number have already lost their primary elections outright or in runoffs. But it’s likely that, come January, Republicans will have the most Black members serving together in the U.S. House since 1889. The U.S. Senate could also break a record this year: If Republican nominee Herschel Walker defeats Sen. Raphael Warnock in Georgia, and Sen. Tim Scott wins his reelection bid in South Carolina, there will be two Black Republicans serving in the upper chamber — the highest number ever.

There wasn’t always a dearth of Black Republican representation in Congress. Seven served in the House in the 43rd (1873-75) and 44th (1875-77) congresses,³ but following the end of the Reconstruction era, in 1877, Black representation declined. This didn’t begin to reverse in earnest until 1995, when two Black Republicans served together in the House again. The number of Black GOP representatives never increased beyond that, though, and many congresses had no Black Republicans at all. Next year will likely be different, however, as at least four Black Republicans — including two incumbents, Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida and Rep. Burgess Owens of Utah — are favored to win seats in the House this fall, according to FiveThirtyEight’s 2022 midterm election forecast. But as you can see in the chart below, representation of Black Republicans still has a ways to go.

Following the end of the Civil War, in 1865, and the official end of slavery later that year, the first Black lawmakers were elected to the House: Jefferson Franklin Long of Georgia and Joseph Hayne Rainey of South Carolina.⁴ In total, more than a dozen Black men — all Republicans — served in the House during the Reconstruction period thanks to the newfound political power of emancipated men in the South, who got the right to vote in 1870.⁵

The Reconstruction era was, in short, a time of extraordinary promise when it came to civil rights of Black people and all Americans. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were all ratified during this period, and the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, which expanded eligibility for U.S. citizenship, was enacted. All four provisions were notable in that they helped ensure Black Americans — at least the men — could finally participate in the political process. But this period proved short-lived, as Reconstruction ended abruptly in 1877, and with it, so did the federal government protections that safeguarded Black Americans’ newly won freedoms. 

Indeed, a backlash among white Americans gripped the country, and Black men were heavily intimidated and even terrorized when they tried to vote. Many southern states passed laws requiring poll taxes or literacy tests to vote, and what came to be known as Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation across the region and diminished the political clout of Black men. Mississippi even rewrote its state constitution to circumvent the 15th Amendment, which gave Black men the right to vote. Black voter participation fell as a result of these combined efforts, and by the 51st Congress (1889-1891), only three Black Republicans were serving in the House: Reps. Thomas Ezekiel Miller of South Carolina, John Mercer Langston of Virginia and Henry Plummer Cheatham of North Carolina. By March 1901, during the 57th Congress, there were no Black congressmen at all.

This isn’t to say there was no Black representation in Congress in the first half of the 20th century. In 1934, the first Black Democrat was elected to the House, and that number has steadily grown over the years — to nearly 60 today. As I’ve reported previously, though, the dynamics of the two major parties didn’t really start to take shape until around the 1930s, when programs intended to help communities of color — such as those in Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal — ushered in a wave of Black voters’ switching their party loyalty to Democrats.

Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University, told me that Black Americans first became a critical part of the Democrats’ coalition under Roosevelt, as they were more adversely affected by the Great Depression. But it was in the 1960s, Gillespie said, that Black voters became “almost unanimously Democratic,” as that was when the Republican Party started to take more staunchly conservative stances on civil rights issues — Sen. Barry Goldwater, the frontrunner for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, for instance, announced that he would vote against the comprehensive civil rights legislation that the House had passed earlier that year. Fast-forward to today and only two Black Republicans are serving in the House: Donalds and Owens. 

In other words, there has long been an opportunity for Republicans to expand their ranks of Black members of Congress, but it wasn’t until recently that the party really began investing in Black candidates, according to Leah Wright Rigueur, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. She told me that the Republican Party is starting to capitalize on some Black voters’ dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party, and that there’s now a larger pool of potential candidates for Republicans to recruit and support. 

In fact, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis of primary race winners, 13 Black Republicans are guaranteed a spot on the November ballot this year in House races.⁶ It’s possible that number could grow, too: John James, for instance, is favored to win the Republican primary for Michigan’s 10th Congressional District in August. And if he does, our forecast gives him a 69 in 100 chance of winning the general election.⁷

What will happen with other Black GOP candidates is less clear, though. Take Jennifer-Ruth Green, an Air Force veteran and political novice running who won the Republican nomination for Indiana’s 1st District. She has currently out-fundraised the incumbent, Democratic Rep. Frank J. Mrvan, but the seat she is vying for has a partisan lean of D+7, which makes this race a challenge. Our forecast, however, still rates this race as competitive and currently gives Green a 31 in 100 chance of winning the general election.⁸

But that’s about it as far as potential Black Republican representation. In total, only a fraction of the 13 Black Republican nominees so far look likely to defeat their Democratic opponents this fall. 

Winning their races is only half the battle for Black Republicans, though, as they often struggle with acceptance within the Republican Party and face challenges in trying to prove their conservative ideological bona fides. In some cases, Wright Rigueur told me, especially if they’re running in districts that are predominately white, they must avoid issues of race and stick to party talking points. “They are very much in line with where the party is and haven’t strayed from the party line,” Wright Rigueur said. She added that they may have slightly more freedom to talk about these issues if they’re running in a district with a more diverse constituency but that, ultimately, they steer clear of “controversial topics on race and racial antagonisms.”

Racism is another factor working against Black Republicans trying to make a name for themselves in the party. Even prominent Black Republicans like Scott, the South Carolina senator chosen to give the party’s response to President Biden’s address to Congress, have reported receiving a barrage of racist comments. Unlike Democratic politicians of color, however, Republicans often downplay racism within their own party. For instance, in a closed-door meeting with colleagues, Scott shared racist voicemails he and his staff had received but publicly declared that “America is not a racist country.” 

That said, national Republicans have taken some steps to foster a more diverse delegation. For example, the super PAC American Patriots PAC, which supports conservative candidates, and super PAC American Values First spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Jeremy Hunt, a Black Republican and former Army captain who ran for a Georgia U.S. House seat earlier this year, even though he ultimately lost his primary bid. Some critics viewed this as a fig leaf that obscures the party’s past and current obsession with white grievance politics, but Republicans have hailed the shift as a slow but genuine transformation of a party that was established on an anti-slavery platform and is now attempting to recruit and support candidates of color who could represent and appeal to a broader range of voters. 

There’s evidence that these efforts might be working — albeit slowly — too. In 2020, then-President Donald Trump performed slightly better with Black voters than he did in 2016. And, more recently, some polling suggests that Black voters are souring on Biden and are more open to supporting GOP candidates this year. 

The Republican Party still has relatively few Black candidates running, though, because at the end of the day, few Black Americans identify as Republicans. This also isn’t exactly a new opportunity, as the GOP has long had the chance to peel socially conservative Black voters away from the Democratic Party, but that has proved easier said than done. 

“Since 1964 or so, the Republican Party has had an image problem on issues related to race, and when that gets brought up, it often gets dismissed by members of the party as being mere ‘identity politics,’” Gillespie said. “And because of that, the Republican Party hasn’t really been able to reach out to Black voters and potential candidates in a meaningful way.”

So don’t lose the forest for the trees. While the number of Black Republicans elected to Congress this year might be a historic milestone, it wouldn’t change the fact that Black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic and that Republican officials — and their base — are still overwhelmingly white. In other words, the Republican Party still has a long way to go.

Of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021, three have retired instead of running again, while all but one of the other seven has a Trump-endorsed primary opponent.⁹ That means primary voters in nearly all of these districts will be able to choose whether they want to punish disloyalty to Trump and move the GOP into even closer alignment with Trumpism.

Opposition to these incumbents ramped up in February, most notably when Trump decided to put his stamp of approval on primary challengers in two of the three reddest districts represented by pro-impeachment Republicans: South Carolina’s 7th Congressional District and Washington’s 4th Congressional District. Trump’s endorsement isn’t guaranteed to make someone a winner, but there is reason to think it can be helpful: Republican pollster Echelon Insights found in February that an endorsement by Trump without support from local GOP leaders would give a Republican primary candidate a narrow edge of 3 percentage points, for instance. And while that was far weaker than a candidate who had backing from both Trump and local party leaders (+29 points), Trump’s support by itself was valuable, as candidates backed by only local officials (-10 points) or by neither Trump nor local leaders (-22 points) performed notably worse.¹⁰

Let’s start with South Carolina’s 7th District. At the start of February, Trump endorsed state Rep. Russell Fry in his bid to take down Rep. Tom Rice. Trump was likely attracted to Fry in part because the state legislator has backed Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was illegitimate. But Fry may also be best positioned to challenge Rice: He has outraised all the other challengers still in the race, and he came in third in a primary poll conducted by SoCo Strategies back in early December. (Moreover, in a boon to Fry, the second-place candidate dropped out just before Trump announced his support for Fry.) As such, Trump’s endorsement could help opposition to Rice consolidate around Fry in the still-crowded primary field, improving Fry’s chances of advancing to a possible runoff against Rice, as South Carolina is one of seven states that requires a candidate to win a majority of the primary vote to capture a party’s nomination.

Then, about a week after backing Fry, Trump endorsed Loren Culp, the former police chief of a small Washington town, in Washington’s 4th District against Rep. Dan Newhouse. Culp isn’t as strong of a pick as Fry — he’s struggled with fundraising, raising less than $150,000 through the end of 2021 — but he may have caught Trump’s eye in his 2020 gubernatorial bid when he refused to accept defeat, citing unsubstantiated claims about election irregularities. He lost by 13 percentage points. It remains to be seen whether Culp will gain more traction with Trump’s endorsement. 

Washington has its own primary wrinkle, though. It uses a top-two system in which candidates from all parties run on the same ballot and the top-two finishers advance to the general election, regardless of party. This could potentially help Newhouse, as it’s not just Culp running against him. Jerrod Sessler, a former NASCAR driver, has thrown down about $350,000 of his own money and could attract some Republican-leaning support in the primary, too. But if Culp and Sessler are able to split the GOP voting base while Democrats largely back one candidate, it’s possible Culp or even Sessler edge out Newhouse for one of the two spots and join the Democrat in the general. Still, this district has sometimes sent two Republicans to the November election, so it’s possible that it ends up being Newhouse and one of his GOP challengers.

Another endorsement raised eyebrows in February, but this one wasn’t from Trump. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced his support for former Republican National Committee member Harriet Hageman, the most prominent opponent of Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney (who has been a vocal critic of Trump). Trump had already backed Hageman in September, but it’s still highly unusual for a party’s legislative leader to endorse a colleague’s primary challenger. 

The Wyoming GOP appears to be done with Cheney, too, having passed a resolution in November that essentially excommunicated her from the party. Helpfully for Hageman, most other high-profile Republicans have left the race, which should make it easier for anti-Cheney forces to coalesce around a challenger. Cheney already looks to be in real trouble. The early December SoCo Strategies poll found Hageman leading Cheney 39 percent to 19 percent, and prior surveys found Cheney struggling. Cheney does have a massive financial advantage, though: By the end of 2021, she had raised $7.2 million and had $4.7 million in the bank. By comparison, Hageman had garnered roughly $750,000 and had around $380,000 cash on hand. Cheney also appears set on staying in the race despite her difficulties, and some observers have speculated that she may even be looking to take on Trump and his supporters nationally in 2024.

Cheney isn’t alone in having to push back against fierce intraparty opposition, though. While he hasn’t officially announced that he’s seeking reelection, Republican Rep. Fred Upton’s campaign began running ads at the end of February, so it looks like he’s angling to run again, or at least testing the waters. In the ad, Upton told the camera, “If you want a rubber stamp as your congressman, I’m the wrong guy,” and Upton isn’t kidding: He’s likely to be the only pro-impeachment House Republican seeking reelection who also voted for the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package — the other three have announced their retirements — which has made him a target of the right. 

But while Upton has given his opponents plenty of ammunition, he might also be in a better position than Cheney thanks to the particulars of his primary race in Michigan’s new 4th District. Upton faces fellow Rep. Bill Huizenga, a more conservative incumbent who opted to run here after his old district was carved up in redistricting. This makes Upton the only pro-impeachment Republican also running against another incumbent, but both Upton and Huizenga must face Trump-endorsed state Rep. Steve Carra, who has pushed Trump’s fraudulent claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Provided Trump sticks with Carra, whom he endorsed before Huizenga also challenged Upton, that could actually make it easier for Upton to win a plurality if opposition to Upton splits between his two challengers.

As for the other three pro-impeachment Republicans who are running again, two of them face potentially competitive primary contests. In Michigan’s 3rd District, freshman Rep. Peter Meijer must contend with John Gibbs, a former Trump administration official who has the former president’s backing. Meijer has dominated Gibbs in fundraising, but a poll sponsored by EMILY’s List found Meijer only leading Gibbs 26 percent to 13 percent, and trailing once voters were told that Trump supported Gibbs. This survey could definitely point to potential danger for Meijer, although we need to treat it with caution considering EMILY’s List, as an organization that backs female Democratic candidates who support abortion rights, would like to see Meijer lose his primary to improve the Democrats’ chance of winning the swingy 3rd District. 

In Washington’s 3rd District, meanwhile, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler faces veteran Joe Kent, who has Trump’s endorsement. This is another top-two primary, but there’s already reason to think Herrera Beutler might find herself coming up short, as a February poll from GOP pollster Trafalgar Group found her running close to even with Kent in the low-to-mid 20s while Democrat Brent Hennrich led with 33 percent. If Hennrich does win most Democratic support in the top-two race, Herrera Beutler will have a challenging time finishing in the top two, as other polling has also shown her struggling to keep up with Kent among Republican voters.

Lastly, Republican Rep. David Valadao is the only pro-impeachment Republican in the House who lacks a Trump-endorsed primary challenger, and it’s unclear whether Trump will wade into this race. (Like Washington, California also uses the top-two primary system.) That may be in part because Valadao looks to have the toughest general election path, as California’s new 22nd District is notably bluer than any of the other districts discussed here. Still, Valadao has previously won on Democratic-leaning turf, so it could be Valadao who faces the least amount of electoral danger compared to the other House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump last year.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/trump-prosecuted-jan-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-83309234

But it’s easy to blow these disagreements out of proportion. On one hand, they are certainly relevant in that they threaten to derail two potentially transformative pieces of legislation. But they do not mean that Democrats are a hopelessly — or even significantly — divided party. Instead, it’s really the narrowness of Democrats’ congressional majorities that makes passing big legislation difficult, as even a small number of defectors can make the difference in a bill passing or failing.

For instance, the number of House moderates who attempted to hold up the reconciliation bill last month was only nine — enough to make the difference in a tight chamber, yes, but a drop in the bucket compared with the entire Democratic caucus, and plenty of moderate Democrats in the House didn’t stand in the way. (The progressive dissent may be more widespread — one congressman claimed that “dozens” of progressive votes were on the fence — but it’s hard to know how seriously to take these threats, given that only a few representatives have gone public with them.) In addition, more stories will get written over the course of a long negotiation, which can lead to a media emphasis on the messy sausage-making process over the (often less acrimonious) outcome.

In fact, there’s good reason to think that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s current Democratic caucus is the opposite of in disarray. When it comes down to brass tacks, Democrats are (so far) the most united House caucus of the last three sessions of Congress. According to FiveThirtyEight’s Biden Score, which measures how often individual members of Congress vote in line with Biden’s position, 203 out of the House’s 223 Democrats¹¹ have voted with Biden 100 percent of the time, and all but two have voted with him at least 90 percent of the time. 

This makes the current Democratic caucus far more cohesive than both the current Republican caucus and the Democratic caucus during the 115th Congress (based on the Biden and Trump scores¹² of the median 90 percent of their members), when Democrats were last in the House minority.

One reason why Democrats have been so unified is that there are structural reasons to expect a majority caucus to be more cohesive than a minority one. For one thing, minority-party members’ “votes don’t make or break legislation a lot of the time,” Gregory Koger, a professor of political science at the University of Miami, told FiveThirtyEight, so “there is a little more leeway for them to break with their party.” For another, majority-party members (especially when the president is also of that party) have a clear electoral incentive to get things done. “All Democrats — regardless of whether they’re moderate or progressive — really need the Biden administration to succeed,” said Ruth Bloch Rubin, a political science professor at the University of Chicago. But on the other hand, the minority party has “competing incentives: They want the president to look ineffective but also want to bring things home to their district.”

Perhaps most importantly, the majority party also has an advantage in that it sets the congressional agenda, and congressional leaders don’t typically bring bills to the floor unless they are sure they are going to pass. As a result, only bills with broad support within the caucus get voted on, making the majority party look more cohesive than it would if the minority party was calling the shots. 

In some ways, however, this is a key shortcoming of our Biden Scores: They don’t measure the votes not taken or what goes on behind the scenes. “In historical cases, a lot of really important negotiation happens before legislation hits the floor,” said Bloch Rubin. “Not to undercut the value of looking at final votes … but a lot of the time that’s not where the most important action is.” In fact, a real-life example of that is unfolding before our eyes right now in the Senate, where it’s likely that the opposition of moderate Sen. Joe Manchin will force Democrats to lop off a trillion dollars or two from the reconciliation bill. (Manchin, though known as one of the biggest internal thorns in Democrats’ sides, has a 100 percent Biden Score.) A similar dance occurred with Democrats’ voting-rights bill earlier this year: The For the People Act was too far-reaching for Manchin’s tastes, so it was pared down into the less ambitious Freedom to Vote Act, which Manchin helped craft and is now likely to support.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/white-evangelicals-rethinking-politics-fivethirtyeight-80316696

So it makes good sense that Democrats in the 117th Congress are more united than Republicans are in the 117th or Democrats were in the 115th. But it doesn’t explain why they are even more united than the Republican majority was in 2017-18. During that 115th Congress, the middle 90 percent of Republicans (so again disregarding the outliers in the top and bottom 5 percent) had Trump Scores between 81 and 99 percent. That 18-point range is not nearly as narrow as the 3-point range that separates the middle 90 percent of the current Democratic caucus. Put another way, Republicans were a bit more cohesive when they had the majority than they are now — but Democrats are a lot more cohesive now than when they were in the minority.

Why have Democrats been so successful at keeping their caucus in line? Koger sees two reasons: the fact that Democrats’ majority is so narrow (there are only eight more Democrats in the House than Republicans) and Republican opposition to the Democratic agenda. “If Pelosi could count on 20, 30 or 40 percent of Republicans to vote for a bill, there would be less pressure on Democrats to unite,” Koger said. But now, “when the majority party wants to do something, that typically involves corralling all its members.” 

In other words, a larger majority means leadership has a wider margin of error; they can afford to not whip votes as aggressively or to allow members to vote their conscience (or cast a vote that might be more defensible to their constituents). But when a House majority is this narrow, there is more pressure to toe the party line. “It’s a lot of pressure to go out on the floor and sink a vote,” Matt Glassman, a former congressional staffer and now a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told FiveThirtyEight. “Everyone knows they can do it, but everyone’s terrified of doing it.” 

As such, both Bloch Rubin and Glassman expressed skepticism that progressives would ultimately scuttle the infrastructure bill. “They all want this infrastructure bill to pass,” said Bloch Rubin, and Glassman likened the negotiations to a performance where “everyone is trying to get to yes” but publicly threatens to vote no in order to “move policies incrementally closer to where they want them to be.” 

In this, progressive Democrats differ from their far-right counterparts in the House Freedom Caucus, who are more doctrinaire and willing to torpedo their party’s agenda — for instance, voting down a 2018 farm bill because then-House Speaker Paul Ryan did not first hold a vote on a controversial immigration bill. “The progressive caucus has never really wanted to take the next step and fight stuff on the floor,” Glassman said. “[They] work within the system.” This fundamental difference between the parties’ extreme flanks is another big reason why this Democratic majority is more cohesive than the last Republican one.

Pelosi, who has a reputation as a master legislative tactician, deserves some credit as well. “I would hardly say that structural factors alone are doing the work,” said Bloch Rubin. “She knows how to play her cards well.” In fact, Glassman told us that Pelosi’s unique strength isn’t in whipping votes; instead, both he and Bloch Rubin pointed to her ability to manage the factions within the Democratic coalition. Her job is essentially negotiator-in-chief, “making sure all members of the coalition are OK with the outcome,” Glassman said. “And I think Pelosi is very skilled at making sure everyone gets just enough of what they want.”

Ironically, though, an open negotiation process like the one Democrats are currently in can leave outside observers with the impression that a party is divided even if the legislation being debated ultimately succeeds. “It’s very hard to tell the difference between a caucus that’s in disarray and one that’s in the late stages of bargaining with each other,” Glassman said. “The visible evidence is the same.” Media coverage of the negotiations usually doesn’t help matters, either; according to research by political scientist Mary Layton Atkinson, the press covers controversial legislation far more often than it does bipartisan legislation, and that coverage generally focuses on the conflict and drama of the negotiations over the substance of the bill. To Bloch Rubin, though, this type of coverage misses the broader point that Pelosi has proven adept at steering Democrats’ squabbling factions toward an outcome that actually benefits her party in the end.

Glassman identified one other reason why Democrats appreciate and appear so unified under her: “She protects them from votes they don’t want to take on the floor.” In other words, she is good at agenda-setting and not holding votes until negotiations are complete. We saw an example of this just days ago: The infrastructure vote was actually originally scheduled for Monday, but Pelosi postponed it until Thursday in order to buy more time for negotiations. “I'm never bringing to the floor a bill that doesn't have the votes,” she explained to ABC News.

All this is not to say you should ignore the very real policy differences between Democrats’ moderate and progressive flanks. (For one thing, they’ll continue to be an important fissure in Democratic primaries in 2022 and 2024.) But those divisions popping up in Congress does not necessarily make Democrats ineffective at governing. Negotiations, by definition, highlight disagreements, but the final proof will be in whether Democrats pass the infrastructure bill on Thursday (and, on some later date, the reconciliation bill). 

In other words, it’s possible for a party to have divisions but not be divided — and a strong congressional leader like Pelosi can make that happen.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/gop-critics-trumps-big-lie-struggling-win-reelection-80138507

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/spot-gerrymandering-state-fivethirtyeight-80189920

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): With Congress fully back in session, Democrats are once again in the business of legislating. This fall, they’re trying to push through a number of ambitious policies, including both the bipartisan Senate infrastructure bill and their ambitious $3.5 trillion (for now) spending plan, which they’ll most likely pass via budget reconciliation. 

But that’s not all. Democrats have also said they’ll try to pass a bill on voting rights and, in light of the Senate parliamentarian’s decision to exclude a pathway for citizenship for immigrants from the upcoming reconciliation bill,  will continue to push on this front, too. And, of course, looming over all this is the possibility of a government shutdown — there are just eight days before the government potentially runs out of money — as well as an impending fight around raising the nation’s debt limit (Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he and Senate Republicans will refuse to raise it).

So we’re taking a step back today to assess just how likely each of these proposals are to pass Congress, what we think might end up in them if they pass and how Americans feel about them.

Let’s start with the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. What do we make of its chances of passing?

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/spot-gerrymandering-state-fivethirtyeight-80189920

lee.drutman (Lee Drutman, senior fellow at New America and FiveThirtyEight contributor): A $3.5 trillion bill probably has 0 percent chance of passing. A $2.5 trillion bill, on the other hand, has a much better chance of passing.

This is all part of a negotiation process, some of which is taking place in public, but most of which is taking place in private. Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have said they can’t vote for a bill this big. But there’s still plenty of room to trim, and Manchin and Sinema and other moderates can say they got a victory if they reduce it. The fact is $3.5 trillion has an anchoring effect that makes $2.5 or $2 trillion seem reasonable. 

This is a classic bargaining strategy.

alex (Alex Samuels, politics reporter): I agree with Lee. I feel like it will pass, but I’m almost certain it won’t cost $3.5 trillion. I say that because, once again, it seems like progressive and moderate Democrats are at an impasse about the price tag associated with the bill and members are essentially talking past each other. 

The reason why I think it still passes, though, is because it’d be a pretty humiliating defeat for President Biden if it didn’t. I know there are a lot of threats being thrown around from both progressive and moderate Democrats, but I want to think that the glue holding everyone together is that no one wants to harbor blame for tanking Biden’s agenda — and there’s a lot on the line here. So it’s likely not everyone is going to be happy, but maybe out of a shared sense of not wanting everything to fail, Democrats will find a way to figure this out?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): Agreed. Manchin — who, of course, is one of the crucial moderate swing votes that Democrats need to convince in order to pass their agenda — has said that $3.5 trillion is too much and has called for a “pause” on the legislation (presumably so it can be pared down to a number he feels better about). 

The flip side of this, though, is that some progressives — such as Rep. Pramila Jayapal — have said they won’t vote for anything smaller than $3.5 trillion. Their preference is closer to $6 trillion, so they already see the $3.5 trillion number as a compromise.

So the question is, who blinks first? And if no one blinks, there goes Biden’s signature domestic legislation. For that reason, I agree with Alex that the Democrats will figure out a way to make it work.

alex: Yeah, considering how underwater Biden’s approval rating is now, I think there’s a need for the Democrats to succeed in passing this, showing they can be effective leaders.

sarah: Right, because to Alex’s original point — no Democrat wants to be responsible for sinking this, moderate or progressive. So it seems as if we have consensus here — you all think some version of this bill will pass eventually, just not necessarily at its current price tag.

Do we have a sense yet for what will actually make it into this bill? And whether some proposals are more popular than others?

lee.drutman: I think the things that get cut are the things that the moderates will want to fight for. For instance, if Sinema opposes pricing reforms to prescription drugs and wants to make that a key issue, it’s likely that it will be struck from the reconciliation bill.

alex: I’m using a July AP-NORC survey to answer to your second question, Sarah, but it seems like while things like funding for roads, bridges and ports are pretty popular, some additional things that might be tackled in Democrats’ solo bill weren’t quite as popular — especially among Republicans.

While about two-thirds of Americans surveyed (67 percent) said they support funding for affordable housing, just 41 percent of Republicans do, compared to 85 percent of Democrats. There is also a pretty large gap in support for free community college tuition, with 27 percent of Republicans in favor versus 76 percent of Democrats. And of the 12 topics AP-NORC asked about, both Republicans and Democrats were least in favor of things like funding for electric vehicle charging stations (23 percent and 64 percent, respectively) and funding for passenger and freight rail services (37 percent and 68 percent). 

nrakich: I’m not sure that what is popular with the public is going to determine what stays and what goes, though. To Lee’s point, it’s all about what’s palatable to these moderate senators. And sometimes, they are reluctant to pass things — like a higher minimum wage — that are nevertheless broadly popular with the public. 

It’s interesting to think about why that is: Are they misreading the electorate? Are they trying to satisfy their donors? Do they just genuinely oppose liberal fiscal policy?

sarah: But as Democrats jockey back and forth on this party-line reconciliation bill, does that put their bipartisan infrastructure bill in jeopardy at all? 

Asking because the bipartisan bill actually passed the Senate in August, but Democrats in the House won’t vote on it until this other bill is ready, although as we saw with moderates in the House, appetite for this strategy might be waning among some Democrats.

nrakich: Yes, that bill is in danger too — and we’ll have an answer pretty soon. House Democratic leaders have said they will put the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill to a vote on Sept. 27 — contrary to the wishes of progressives who didn’t want to vote on it until after the $3.5 trillion bill was resolved. The question now is whether progressives follow through with their threats to vote against the infrastructure bill if they don’t get their way. 

alex: I agree that the infrastructure bill is probably in danger now, too, because as Nathaniel said earlier, a lot of this comes down to who blinks first. And it seems like the biggest bargaining chip progressive Democrats have right now is threatening to tank the infrastructure bill.

nrakich: If you look at how often House Democrats have voted in line with Biden’s position so far this year, all but one Democrat has done so at least 89 percent of the time. 

That’s why I think if push comes to shove, even progressive Democrats will hold their nose and vote for the infrastructure bill. House leadership probably wouldn’t be holding this vote next week if they didn’t believe it would pass.

Maybe a few progressives will vote against it out of protest, but I bet it will be just few enough that the bill still passes (perhaps with the support of a few moderate Republicans too?).

lee.drutman: I agree with Nathaniel. Progressives have actually moved the needle quite a bit, and my guess is they understand that. A lot of this is about positioning for the future.

Progressives will vote against it only if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t need their votes. It’s also possible multiple votes fail before a deal is reached.

sarah: It’s also possible the government runs out of money … throwing any talk of passing either this infrastructure bill or the other one on the backburner, no?

As I said at the outset, there are just eight days before the government potentially runs out of money — and Republicans don’t seem likely to pass Democrats’ short-term government funding bill.

What are the risks Democrats face with the possibility of the government running out of money and Republicans also refusing to raise the nation’s debt limit? Does this potentially undermine Democrats’ larger legislative goals?

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/gop-critics-trumps-big-lie-struggling-win-reelection-80138507

lee.drutman: I think a government shutdown is quite likely. I would guess both sides see it in their interest because it sharpens the differences.

nrakich: Really, Lee? That’s interesting. I feel like a government shutdown with Democrats in full control of the federal government would be quite embarrassing for them.

sarah: Yeah … it certainly didn’t go well for former President Donald Trump and Republicans in 2019 when they played the government shutdown game. 

nrakich: Exactly, Sarah. And during that shutdown — and the one in 2013 — Democrats presented themselves as the responsible, anti-shutdown party. It would be quite the 180 for them to now allow one. 

lee.drutman: But there’s the short-term and the long-term aspect. The 2022 midterms are still a ways off, and the Republican strategy is to obstruct, obstruct, obstruct, and make Biden seem like a failure, while the Democratic leadership’s strategy is to get the moderates to see that Republicans are unwilling to compromise — maybe even convincing moderates to agree to get rid of the filibuster.

I think McConnell is trying to triangulate here — that is, show just enough willingness to compromise so as not to provoke Manchin and Sinema into abolishing the filibuster — but not so much as to actually help Democrats.

nrakich: Wow. That seems like a very high-risk, high-reward strategy. Do you think the demise of the filibuster is really that important to institutionalist Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Pelosi? And for that matter, what about Biden, who still (publicly, at least) opposes ending the filibuster? 

alex: I’m super, super skeptical, since there’s never been widespread support among Democratic lawmakers, let alone the public, to end the filibuster. Late last month, we found that public attitudes on filibuster reform barely budged even when voting rights were on the line, so I’m not super confident there’s an appetite for reforming it for any of Democrats’ other priorities. 

lee.drutman: It’s all part of the long game, though. If Biden is going to abolish the filibuster — or at least reform it — it has to be at the end of a process where he can say he’s changed his mind because of Republican obstructionism. Same for Manchin.

sarah: The one thing I find interesting around the impending fight over government funding is that this crisis over the government spending too much money isn’t new. In fact, Republicans racked up a significant amount of spending debt under the Trump administration — America’s debt rose by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s presidency. But as FiveThirtyEight contributor Dan Cox wrote earlier this year, it’s possible voters won’t factor that into the current fight over the debt ceiling and will instead blame Biden/Democrats for big spending proposals.

That’s why it seems as if the fight over the debt limit comes at an especially difficult time for Democrats. Do we know how Americans feel about government spending now?

nrakich: Americans are happy to spend lots of money on things they want. Quinnipiac found that 62 percent of Americans favored the $3.5 trillion spending bill on social programs such as child care, education and Medicare expansion. That poll notably mentioned the price tag, which not every poll asking about the budget bill does. 

alex: And it doesn’t seem like the price tag of the bill is turning off voters the same way it is for moderate Democrats. An August HuffPost/Data for Progress survey, which tested three hypothetical spending amounts, found that support — regardless of the price tag — was almost the same. Over 60 percent of respondents in each group said they supported the proposal by about a 2-to-1 margin regardless of whether pollsters said the bill would cost $1.5 trillion, $2.5 trillion or $3.5 trillion.

lee.drutman: For Democrats, I think the far more consequential bill for the midterms and for the 2024 presidential election is their latest attempt to pass sweeping voting rights legislation, the Freedom to Vote Act.

I’m just not convinced government spending is going to move many voters in the midterms. Republicans are going to accuse Democrats of spending too much money no matter what.

We’re at a very strange point in our politics in which the connection between policy and election outcomes is very tiny. The fundamentals have always been more important than policy, but now that’s true more than ever before, given just how few voters are changing their minds. For instance, despite all that happened between 2016 and 2020, the 2020 presidential election saw the smallest share of voters who changed which major party they voted for, going back to at least the 1948 and 1952 presidential elections.

sarah: Lee brought up one of Democrats’ other big priorities this fall: passing a voting rights bill. Alex, Nathaniel, you’ve both covered this issue a lot for FiveThirtyEight — what do you think the odds are that Democrats are going to be able to get something through Congress?

nrakich: I don’t think a voting-rights bill will pass. Even the Freedom to Vote Act — which is essentially a compromise version of H.R. 1, the For the People Act, with controversial provisions like public financing for campaigns removed or reduced — was met with a cool reception from Senate Republicans. Even moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins still felt like the bill was too much of a federal takeover of state election administration. 

So to me, it just keeps coming back to the question of ending or circumventing the filibuster. While it’s not impossible that Democrats could, say, create a voting-rights exemption from the filibuster in order to pass this bill, I don’t think it’s likely. Manchin and Sinema’s opposition seems firm.

alex: Slim to none, if I’m being honest … The Guardian reported earlier this week that the Freedom to Vote Act likely won’t move this week as Manchin is looking to shore up Republican support. But getting Republicans on board with any voting rights legislation is highly unlikely, as we’ve said before.

lee.drutman: I’m more bullish on the Freedom to Vote Act — I give it a 50-50 shot.

sarah: Why, Lee?

lee.drutman: Democrats see this as a priority. Although, of course, part of this is a performance again. That is, Manchin has to make a very public showing of trying to get Republicans on board and he has to fail.

But the dangers of a contested 2024 election are becoming more real to Democrats as Republicans continue to push baseless claims of election fraud and pass restrictive voting laws in the process. 

The bottom line is Biden is going to come under tremendous pressure to intervene. Democratic activists are just extremely fired up about passing a voting rights bill.

alex: I’ll admit that at one point I thought Manchin would support ending the filibuster to pass a voting bill, but now I feel less confident about that, namely because he said in April that he won’t vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster. 

I can’t tell which is more plausible: Democrats ending the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation or 10 Republican senators signing onto the newest bill.

nrakich: Ooh, good question, Alex.

lee.drutman: Alex — I would say the first. The second has a 0 percent chance of happening.

alex: I would say neither.  

nrakich: I agree with Lee that this particular bill definitely won’t get 10 Republican votes. But I’d be curious what would happen if Democrats tried to pass, say, a stand-alone gerrymandering ban.

alex: Plus, Republicans and Democrats have different approaches to voting rights legislation, and polls do a fairly good job of capturing that. According to this Morning Consult/Politico survey from June, Democrats (70 percent) are way more likely than Republicans (32 percent) to think restricting voting access is a major threat to American democracy.

nrakich: Right, Alex — Republicans just fundamentally see voting differently from how Democrats see it. According to a Pew Research Center poll from July, 78 percent of Democrats feel that voting is a “fundamental right for every U.S. citizen and should not be restricted.” But 67 percent of Republicans believe that voting is a “privilege that comes with responsibilities and can be limited.”

sarah: OK, so it doesn’t seem as if there is consensus among you all on whether Democrats will be able to get a voting rights bill through Congress. What about immigration reform and passing a pathway to citizenship, now that the Senate budget parliamentarian has said that can’t be included in the upcoming reconciliation bill? Is that even less likely to pass Congress than the voting rights bill?

lee.drutman: I would say immigration reform is dead for now. It’s not a great issue for Democrats, especially going into the midterms, and it’s certainly not the issue that 50 Democrats are going to abolish the filibuster for.

alex: I think it’ll happen eventually, Sarah, but I’m also not sure anything will happen imminently here either because it doesn’t seem like Democrats had a concrete Plan B after the Senate parliamentarian ruled against their efforts to include immigration reform in the spending bill?

I’ve read reports that Schumer and other Democrats want to hold additional meetings with the parliamentarian to find alternative ways to include citizenship opportunities. But since there’s probably not enough Republican support to pass an immigration bill without using the reconciliation process, I think the odds are stacked against Democrats on this one, too.

nrakich: I think it has a better chance than voting rights legislation, though, if only because there’s still a chance it could pass via reconciliation.

It’s also worth noting that creating a path to citizenship for many immigrants is quite popular with the public. In an NPR/Ipsos poll from May, 66 percent said they supported it for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children, and 70 percent supported it for immigrants with temporary protected status.

sarah: OK, we’ve covered a lot of ground regarding what’s at stake this fall. What are you going to be paying special attention to moving forward as Democrats try to pass big parts of their agenda?

alex: I’ll be keeping a close eye on whether there’s any movement on axing the filibuster, though I’m highly skeptical this will happen. And I’m curious to examine the bubbling tensions between progressive and moderate Democrats more. I know that’s not a specific *policy thing* to watch, but it’s still fascinating, considering a lot of media attention has been on fissures within the GOP.

nrakich: I’ll be watching the infrastructure vote in the House on Sept. 27. How many progressives will vote for it? And if most of them do, does that undercut their current claims that they won’t accept a number lower than $3.5 trillion for the reconciliation bill?

lee.drutman: I suspect we’re going to see a lot of failed votes for Democrats over the next several weeks and a lot of public bargaining and a lot of “Democrats in disarray” stories. But I’ll be watching to see what compromises senators are spelling out between the lines, and what they are not taking off the table.

I never ever bet against Nancy Pelosi.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/gavin-newsom-wins-california-recall-election-fivethirtyeight-politics-80029242

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/upcoming-elections-us-political-climate-80002422

Facing fervent opposition from Trump supporters in his district, a Trump-backed primary challenger and a potentially thorny redistricting process — Ohio will lose a congressional district after apportionment — Gonzalez decided there was no future for him in the GOP. It’s early yet, but Gonzalez’s retirement could foreshadow what awaits the other nine House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump; many of them could face a difficult path to reelection. And if they retire like Gonzalez or lose reelection, the outcome will likely be an even Trumpier Republican Party in Washington.

At this point, all but one of these 10 Republicans has received a formal rebuke from their state or local party committees, as the table below shows. Additionally, all 10 now face at least one primary challenger (or faced, in the case of Gonzalez). While not all of these intraparty opponents are real threats, many are shaping up to be roadblocks to renomination. This is particularly true in the four districts where Trump has endorsed a primary challenger, including Gonzalez’s race, where former Trump aide Max Miller has the former president’s backing and, now, no incumbent to run against.

And outside of Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the 2021-22 redistricting process could be an added complication for these representatives, too.¹³ These 10 members can largely be split into two groups: those most endangered by primary challenges and those most endangered by redistricting. Let’s start with those facing the toughest primary hurdles — the three incumbents besides Gonzalez who face a Trump-endorsed challenger.

Trump’s endorsement track record is a bit of a mixed bag in that there is some evidence that he padded his record in 2020 — that is, endorsing candidates who were already likely to win — so it’s unclear how powerful a Trump-endorsement will be in 2022. But at this point, Cheney may be in the most trouble, despite being the strongest fundraiser and the most well-known of the Republicans who backed impeachment.

Earlier this month, former Republican National Committee member Harriet Hageman entered the Wyoming House race, with an endorsement from Trump. Hageman could prove to be a powerful opponent, too, considering her political background and competitive showing in the 2018 GOP primary for Wyoming governor — she won 21 percent in a crowded race, finishing just 12 percentage points behind now-Gov. Mark Gordon. Hageman may also be able to consolidate anti-Cheney sentiment in the state, which would be a blow to the incumbent, who would benefit from a large, fragmented field. Tellingly, three other primary challengers have already withdrawn from the race, two of whom then endorsed Hageman. Just one notable candidate has refused to drop out at this point: state Sen. Anthony Bouchard. But it’s hard to know how much support Bouchard’s candidacy will garner due to the disturbing revelation that he impregnated a 14-year old girl when he was 18 and married her when she was 15.

Also in this category are Reps. Fred Upton of Michigan and Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington. Upton faces Trump-backed state Rep. Steve Carra, who recently introduced legislation to audit Michigan’s 2020 election results. This, in large part, explains his endorsement by the former president, which could help topple Upton, who was also censured by at least five GOP county committees in his district for supporting impeachment. Upton has been around for a long time (he won his first election in 1986), but he might be vulnerable, too, as his lone 2020 primary opponent won 37 percent despite raising almost no money and attracting little notice — and this was before Upton voted to impeach Trump. Meanwhile, Herrera Beutler’s main challenger in Washington is Trump endorsee Joe Kent, a former Special forces officer and husband to a Gold Star recipient. Like Carra, Kent has questioned the 2020 election results, telling CNN in July that “I think Trump won, but I want to prove it.” However, the electoral math might be more complicated in Washington than Michigan because of Washington’s top-two primary system (also used in California), where the top-two vote getters — regardless of party — advance to the November general election. If Democrats consolidate around one candidate, Herrera Beutler could still attract enough backing from some Republicans and independents to finish second and advance. Moreover, the anti-Herrera Beutler vote could be fragmented among Kent and Heidi St. John, a Christian author and home-schooling advocate who has criticized Kent as a carpetbagger who only recently moved to the southwestern Washington district.

While Reps. Tom Rice of South Carolina and Dan Newhouse of Washington don’t yet have Trump-endorsed opponents, they still face more primary woes than redistricting problems. Rice, for instance, has to win a majority of the vote in the Republican primary — or a majority in a runoff if no candidate initially wins more than 50 percent of the vote. This isn’t true of the other Republicans we’ve examined, which means a crowded candidate field could be especially tricky for Rice as he can’t skate by with a plurality win in the primary. Rice currently faces at least three serious-looking GOP opponents in conservative media personality Graham Allen, state Rep. Russell Fry and Horry County school board chair Ken Richardson, along with a host of other Republicans. (Eight Republicans are running against Rice so far.) Newhouse, meanwhile, also has three notable Republican opponents: Loren Culp, a former police officer and Washington’s GOP nominee for governor in 2020, as well as state Rep. Brad Klippert and businessman Jerrod Sessler. Like Herrera Beutler, Newhouse might benefit from Washington’s top-two primary format if he can retain enough base support while the other Republican contenders split the rest of the GOP vote. And Newhouse has performed this feat before in his solidly red district and gone on to win in November against another Republican, so it’s plausible that his impeachment vote could win over some independent and Democratic voters in both the primary and the general. But it would not be a shock to see Trump step in to better help Republicans consolidate around one opposition candidate — perhaps Culp, who made false claims about widespread voter fraud in the state’s 2020 gubernatorial election.

As for the other four other Republican representatives who voted to impeach Trump, they may face more danger from redistricting at this point. Reps. John Katko of New York and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois both hail from states where Democrats could change their district lines to make it harder for the Republicans to win reelection. Katko has held onto his Democratic-leaning district since he first won in 2014, but in an effort to defeat him, New York Democrats could make his seat even bluer and/or draw him in with Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney in the hopes that her more conservative track record would help her best Katko in a GOP primary, perhaps making her easier to defeat in a general election. So far, Katko has only attracted minor primary opposition, but Trump said this summer he would back a high-profile conservative challenger if one could be found. Meanwhile, Kinzinger’s seat in exurban Chicago could be dismantled by Democratic mapmakers in Illinois, potentially forcing him into an uphill race against an incumbent. And if he faces another Republican, he might have a particularly difficult time winning a primary given his criticism of Trump. After all, even if Kinzinger ends up with a decent district to run in, he will still face a primary challenge from former Trump administration official Catalina Lauf.

The two remaining Republicans who voted in favor of impeachment, Reps. David Valadao of California and Peter Meijer of Michigan, don’t have to worry about Democratic state legislators targeting them because their states use independent redistricting commissions. However, Valadao already holds the bluest seat of any Republican in the House, so any shift to the left could cost him reelection. Valadao also has to navigate the top-two primary format, but unlike Herrera Beutler and Newhouse, he doesn’t have much Republican opposition. The only notable Republican to pop up is Chris Mathys, a former Fresno city councilman who actually ran a distant third in a GOP primary for a House seat in New Mexico last year. Meanwhile, the initial draft maps from Michigan’s redistricting commission created a Grand Rapid-based district that Trump would have carried by less than 1 point in 2020. If lines like that hold true for the final map, that could make Meijer’s seat slightly more Democratic than it is right now (Trump +3 in 2020). That area moved to the left during the Trump era, and it could continue to do so. But working in Meijer’s favor is that he lacks a high-profile GOP primary opponent — the most notable name at this point is Tom Norton, who finished a distant third behind Meijer in the 2020 primary.

With Gonzalez already headed for the exits, the departure of some or most of these 10 members could have large consequences for the Republican Party — and democracy itself. Nine of the 10 Republicans who voted for impeachment ranked among the 28 Republican House members who have been most likely to vote in ways to protect electoral democracy, according to FiveThirtyEight’s recent analysis of congressional voting patterns.¹⁴ In fact, Cheney, Katko and Kinzinger were the likelist members of the House GOP to vote in favor of pro-democracy positions. But those three may be most in danger of losing their seats. And now with Gonzalez’s retirement and the difficult paths to reelection for many of the other Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, it seems there’s not so much an intraparty debate with the GOP about Trump’s position in the party, but rather a one-sided battle where the small minority looks set to get even smaller.

On Thursday, Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez announced he was retiring from Congress at the end of his term. He is one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump after his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses how the other nine Republicans are faring in their bids to win reelection and debates whether CNN’s new polling methodology is a good or bad use of polling. Plus, they offer some final takeaways from California’s recall election.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player 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 is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. 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.

There is a growing strain of illiberalism both within the Republican Party and among Republican voters. But what does that illiberalism actually look like among elected members in Congress?

Quantifying politicians’ commitments to upholding democracy isn’t easy. Even defining “democracy” is complicated — scholars disagree on its exact definition — let alone trying to establish how closely politicians or parties adhere to democratic principles. There’s no ongoing survey of how strongly elected members of Congress believe in democratic principles, for instance, and it’s not clear what such a survey would even tell us, given that politicians (and their staffers) are often masters at spin. But just like aggregating politicians’ votes can tell us something about where they fall ideologically on economic or social policies, one thing we can do is look at how members of Congress vote when issues of democracy are brought to the floor. 

Of course, the catch here is that matters of democracy are rarely brought for a floor vote. “Most aspects of democracy are not up for debate in Congress in any given year,” said Michael Coppedge, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame and one of the principal investigators at Varieties of Democracy. That’s an important caveat because the comprehensiveness of such a metric is limited by what Congress actually votes on. “There’s a lot that’s taken for granted that’s essential to what democracy is,” Coppedge said. “Instead, what we get our votes on [are] skirmishes on the periphery of what democracy means.”

One more complication is that there is no single agreed-upon list of what are (or aren’t) issues of democracy. Never mind what the more-democratic position is on each issue. 

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/republicans-govern-winning-majority-threatens-democracy-77381725

Bearing all of that in mind, I’ve built two different metrics to help us understand a legislator’s stance on democracy. First is a minimalist definition of democracy, limited to basic requirements like free and, in theory, fair elections and other measures that help safeguard democracy. Second is a more expansive definition, which contains everything in the first category, but also includes bills that expand civil liberties and who has political power. That way, we can see where politicians converge on these two metrics — and where they differ.

First, the most bare-bones definition: “issues of electoral democracy.” Included in this definition are the most basic requirements of any functioning democracy, like free elections and freedom of the press. And while most of these issues typically don’t come up for congressional votes, some did this year — most notably, the counting of electoral votes from Pennsylvania and Arizona in the 2020 election, usually a ceremonial event that this year faced objections from members of Congress and coincided with the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. Four other types of bills fall into this category: a bill that would have set up an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack;¹⁵ when that failed to pass the Senate, a bill to create a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol;¹⁶ a bill to increase the independence of government oversight of the executive branch;¹⁷ and the second bill to impeach former President Donald Trump,¹⁸ as he was charged with inciting “an insurrection against the government of the United States.” We realize that bill was more political than the others in this category — and we did debate whether to include it — but ultimately we decided that being too political wasn’t a good reason for exclusion, especially as the bill did deal with a core democratic principle: the peaceful transfer of power in America’s elections. (For what it’s worth, including this vote did not meaningfully change the results.)

How politicians vote on these issues doesn’t just reflect the extent to which they back President Biden’s policies, which FiveThirtyEight tracks via its Biden Score metric. Though party lines are important here, this stripped-down metric of democracy still shows substantial variation — particularly among Republicans.¹⁹ On the other hand, Democrats are mostly clustered together in the upper-right hand corner.

Take Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Bill Cassidy, Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse. All five of them opposed the objections to counting electoral votes in both Pennsylvania and Arizona and supported the National Commission to investigate Jan. 6 — all three of the pro-democracy bills the Senate voted on in this category, even though they differ quite a bit in the extent to which they support Biden’s agenda. Similarly, in the House, Republican Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, Tom Reed, John Katko, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney all voted largely in favor of the pro-democracy measures in front of the House, even though Cheney rarely votes with Biden otherwise.

On the other end of the spectrum, you can see which representatives have voted against both Biden and the bare-bones pro-democracy measures Congress has taken up. For instance, Sens. Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Tommy Tuberville, Roger Marshall and Cindy Hyde-Smith have all voted against the democratic position every single time, even though Hyde-Smith tends to vote with Biden markedly more than the others.

But this bare-bones metric is, of course, a fairly narrow definition of what it means to live in a democracy, which is why I created a second metric that also includes bills that try to create a more expansive and inclusive democracy. Using legislative scorecards from organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the government watchdog group Common Cause and the nonprofit research organization Vote Smart, I looked at all of the other bills that Congress brought to the floor this year that could also be considered key to a functioning democracy, in addition to the ones I’ve already mentioned.²⁰ Bills that fall into this second category include:

• Bills aimed at expanding civil liberties, like the rights of groups like women — in addition to bills focused on hate crimes, like the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act; expanding immigration rights, like the American Dream and Promise Act; increasing transparency and accountability in policing, like the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and LGBTQ equality, like the Equality Act;
• Bills that expand voting rights and access, like the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act;
• Bills addressing the historical legacy of slavery in the U.S. like making Juneteenth a federal holiday or removing confederate statues from the Capitol. (Groups like Vote Smart placed these bills in the “Civil Liberties and Civil Rights” and “Constitution” categories; these measures recognize the role slavery had in entrenching inequality in the U.S.)²¹

Interestingly, the overall picture doesn’t change that much when you look at this fuller set of bills — although partisan differences are somewhat starker. While the bare-bones metric had a few Republicans on par with Democrats, this is no longer the case: There are no Republicans who are more supportive than Democrats of the more expansive definition of democracy.

In the Senate, it’s still Collins, Murkowski, Romney, Sasse, and Cassidy that lead Republicans on this metric — supporting almost all of the bills that fall in this second metric. The notable exception is the For the People Act, which no Senate Republican voted in favor of. Meanwhile, we saw more movement in the House, which voted on more “small-d” democratic bills and whose democracy score increasingly correlated with the Biden score. However, there were still some Republicans who supported a majority of these more expansive democratic positions, such as Fitzpatrick, Reed, Katko and Kinzinger, even though most of them vote with Biden less than half of the time. Cheney, however, fell on this more expansive metric in large part because she didn’t support legislation like a bill to prohibit discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity, the For the People Act and the Washington, D.C. Admission Act.

And this brings us to an important point. As this more expansive definition of democracy shows, many of these issues have become polarized by party. That can make it hard to disentangle anti-democratic politics from partisan politics, according to Gretchen Helmke, a professor at the University of Rochester and one of the founders of Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists that monitors democracy and threats to it. H.R. 1, the For The People Act, is an instructive example: Democrats have pushed this bill as small-d democratic because it makes it easier for people to exercise their right to vote, but they also first introduced it in 2019 as a statement of what the party stood for, when it had no chance of passing a Republican-controlled Senate and White House. So have Republicans voted against this bill as part of a stance against voting rights, or have they opposed it because they worry it delivers Democrats a sweeping legislative victory? There is no one answer here. In nearly every bill we looked at in the fuller metric, it was very hard to separate the politics from the policy.

Of course, this metric is not based on a random subset of possible issues. Democrats, who currently control both houses of Congress, might be strategic in what they choose to move forward, political scientist Jake Grumbach noted. Grumbach, a professor of political science at the University of Washington and the author of a recent paper tracking the state of liberal democracy at the state level, cautioned that Democrats might want to avoid difficult decisions for their members by introducing bills that could divide the party, leading them to keep bills off the floor on which the party doesn’t agree — a form of selection bias that plagues all studies of congressional voting behavior.²² We should therefore be careful about drawing any conclusions about the liberal and illiberal tendencies of the elected officials in our sample. But to see where your representative or senators fall, check out the full set of scores for all legislators on this metric in the table below:

At this point, the core of democracy in the U.S. is not up for debate. “We’re fighting battles today over certain aspects of the democratic process, but not the core of it, for the most part,” Coppedge told me. But the fact that questions of democracy have become so clearly partisan is not good for the future of democracy. And given just how politically divided that fight has already become, it’s more important than ever to track how Congress votes on the matters of democracy that do make it to the floor.

Graphics by Ryan Best and Anna Wiederkehr.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/best-2020-post-mortem-tells-us-electorate-78700694

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/americans-ending-war-afghanistan-79488089

This was the first head-to-head match up between a Democrat and a Republican for a congressional seat in Joe Biden’s presidency, and the fact that Stansbury won by such a comfortable margin could be a positive sign for Democrats headed into the 2022 midterm elections. Special elections can tell us a lot about the national environment, but only once we have results from a lot of them. And so far, our sample size of federal special elections is small: Only four have taken place during Biden’s tenure, and the trend at this point is split. Republicans outperformed the district’s partisan lean in two of them, while Democrats have also now overperformed in two.

On Tuesday, for the first time in Joe Biden’s presidency, one Democrat and one Republican will go head-to-head in a federal election: a special election in New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District. Given the district’s Democratic lean, the election will almost certainly add one member to the Democrats’ narrow House majority. But the final margin will still be important, as it could hint at where the national political environment stands and what Republican messaging could look like in the 2022 midterms.

When then-Rep. Deb Haaland resigned from the House in March to become interior secretary, it kicked off a two-and-a-half-month sprint to fill her Albuquerque-based congressional seat. Instead of holding primaries, the local Democratic and Republican parties chose their nominees, and electability seemed to play a major role in their choices: Both Democratic state Rep. Melanie Stansbury and Republican state Sen. Mark Moores represent competitive districts in the Albuquerque suburbs and have won some tough races. Stansbury defeated a seven-term Republican incumbent in 2018 and won reelection in 2020 by 10 percentage points, although her margin was a tad smaller than Biden’s 55-43 win in her district. Moores, though, has a track record of outperforming the top of the ticket: He won reelection in 2020 by 6 points even as then-President Donald Trump lost his district 51 percent to 46 percent.

Moores started off the campaign strong, too, outspending Stansbury $164,000 to $126,000 on TV ads in April. His campaign message has also been laser-focused on public safety ever since Stansbury expressed support for a mostly symbolic proposal from criminal-justice reformers that would reduce funding for the police, abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and close all federal prisons. In a city whose high crime rates are a perennial political football, Moores saw an opening and used his debate appearances and TV ads to argue that Stansbury wanted to defund the police. Stansbury was, in turn, forced to moderate her position (her campaign now says she supports some parts of the proposal but not others) and shore up her law-enforcement bona fides with a TV ad of her own.

But at the beginning of May, Moores went dark on TV for more than a week, and Stansbury began to dominate the conversation: From May 1 to May 19, she aired $194,000 worth of TV ads to Moores’s $18,000. And overall, for the entire year and counting all campaign spending (not just TV ads), Stansbury outspent Moores $875,000 to $470,000 as of May 12. She also had more than four times as much cash on hand ($525,000 to $126,000) ready to deploy for the final stretch.

With this strong finish, Stansbury has eliminated whatever suspense there was about the outcome of the race. The Democrat’s closing ads have all been positive, and the race has seen little outside spending — signs that neither side views the election as particularly competitive. And the one public poll of the race, conducted May 18-21 by election news websites RRH Elections and Elections Daily, gave Stansbury a 16-point lead over Moores among likely voters, 49 percent to 33 percent. (Independent Aubrey Dunn and Libertarian Chris Manning combined for 8 percent.) That said, don’t be surprised if the final results look fairly different. House races are relatively hard to poll accurately, and special elections are even harder. (Of course, what this poll does suggest is that the polling error would need to be truly colossal for Moores to win.)

And realistically, Stansbury was always the heavy favorite to win this race. New Mexico’s 1st District is dependably blue: According to Daily Kos Elections, Biden carried it 60 percent to 37 percent in 2020. And the presence of Dunn and Manning is probably making Moores’s climb even steeper, considering that they probably appeal disproportionately to conservative voters that might otherwise back Moores (Dunn, in fact, was elected state commissioner of public lands as a Republican in 2014).

But how well Moores performs, even in a losing cause, is worth watching. First, if Moores exceeds expectations, Republicans may conclude that attacking Democrats over police reform is a winning strategy and adapt their 2022 playbook accordingly. Similarly, Democrats — many of whom already believe the “defund the police” movement hurt them in 2020 — may grow warier of publicly supporting progressive criminal-justice reforms. Of course, it’s dangerous to draw conclusions from just one special-election result; they are, after all, conducted under unusual circumstances, and a tough-on-crime message may work in Albuquerque but not in Albany. But if a party changes its behavior based on the result, that makes the result important even if it wasn’t inherently so.

Second, the result can be indicative of the national political environment — when combined with the results of other special elections in the same cycle. When a party consistently does better than average in special elections, it bodes well for it in the next general election. For example, in the 11 federal special elections leading up to the 2018 midterms, Democrats did, on average, 17 points better than the seats’ FiveThirtyEight partisan leans²³ — foreshadowing that year’s blue wave.

It’s still early in the 2022 election cycle, but the New Mexico special election is in a position to either reveal a trend or throw cold water on one. Only three federal special elections have taken place so far in 2021 (although they were all top-two primaries, not traditional general elections as in New Mexico), and Republicans outperformed the district’s partisan lean in two of them, while Democrats overperformed in one.

If the final margin in New Mexico’s 1st District is significantly redder than its D+18 partisan lean — say, if Stansbury wins by fewer than 12 points — it would start to look as though Republicans have been consistently overperforming in 2021’s special elections. But if Stansbury wins by a Bidenesque margin, Republicans would have two favorable special-election results, and so would Democrats — in other words, the outlook would be inconclusive.

That said, four special elections is a pretty small sample size, so we’d be wise not to read too much into even the average special-election margin swing at this point. It’s also worth noting that, in our other major tool for picking up on midterm trends, the generic congressional ballot, Democrats still lead in almost every poll. 

However, that uncertainty may not be enough to stop a media narrative about Democratic underperformance from forming. Democrats, for instance, got plenty of flak for not seriously contesting May’s special election in Texas’s 6th District, which may be one reason why they are putting more effort into this race. The White House has even dispatched second gentleman Doug Emhoff to campaign with Stansbury, and Biden himself endorsed her last week. Tonight, we’ll find out if those efforts succeeded at padding Stansbury’s margins.

Poll(s) of the week

On Wednesday, House Republicans voted to remove Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming as conference chair, the party’s third-ranking position in the House. Her main offense is well-established at this point: Cheney repeatedly refused to stand by former President Donald Trump’s false claims about election fraud in the 2020 presidential contest, openly criticizing him and drawing the ire of her GOP colleagues in the process.

Her ouster is notable, too, in that it is the highest-profile example to date of how expressing public opposition to Trump is disqualifying within GOP ranks, despite what Republicans may say otherwise. 

Consider that 71 percent of Republicans told Pew Research Center in March that the GOP should accept elected Republicans who disagree with the party on some issues, with 43 percent saying the same of Republicans who openly criticize Trump. And a new Reuters/Ipsos survey found that 61 percent of Republicans felt the party would be stronger if it embraced both Trump supporters and Trump critics.

Yet this sentiment hasn’t really applied to GOP politicians who have been critical of Trump, like Cheney or Utah Sen. Mitt Romney. Nearly every Republican who voted to impeach Trump — including Cheney — has been admonished by the party and has attracted at least one primary challenger.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/rep-liz-cheney-doesnt-home-gop-77620462

This is, in part, because Trump remains immensely popular with the Republican base, as two polls released on Wednesday show: Politico/Morning Consult found that 82 percent of Republican voters held favorable views of Trump, while 77 percent of Republican adults told The Economist/YouGov the same thing. His false claims that the election was stolen from him is popular among Republican voters, too. Recent surveys show around 7 in 10 Republicans still believe that President Biden didn’t legitimately defeat Trump last November.

Cheney may have maintained her leadership position had she dialed back her criticism of Trump. After all, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy supported her ahead of a February attempt to oust her, and that vote failed by more than a 2-to-1 margin. But Cheney’s ejection is also illustrative of how little ideology in the party matters compared with loyalty to Trump. 

Take the vote to fill Cheney’s old spot in the party leadership, which is expected to happen Friday. Trump and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise have backed New York Rep. Elise Stefanik to fill the post even though her voting record is more liberal than 98 percent of other House Republicans, according to Voteview, and she voted with Trump less often than most in her caucus, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Trump Score. By comparison, Cheney’s voting record is about smack dab in the middle of her caucus, as you might expect of someone in leadership, and she voted with Trump 93 percent of the time. But this doesn’t matter as much as Stefanik’s public loyalty to the former president. She vociferously defended him during his first impeachment trial and has echoed his false claims about the 2020 election. This is not to say that ideology is unimportant. GOP Rep. Chip Roy of Texas has criticized Stefanik for being insufficiently conservative and looks set to mount a bid against her to become conference chair.

Anti-Trump attitudes seem to override most other political considerations among Republican voters, too. For instance, despite Cheney’s conservatism and longstanding commitment to the GOP, the Economist/YouGov survey found that only 20 percent of Republicans had a favorable view of her versus 58 percent who held an unfavorable view. Politico/Morning Consult found that only 14 percent of Republican voters had a favorable opinion of Cheney compared with 43 percent with an unfavorable view of her — in addition, 50 percent of GOP voters supported her ouster, while just 18 percent wanted to keep her in leadership.

Cheney’s standing in Republican circles used to be firmly rooted — she was once viewed as a potential future speaker of the House — but her downfall is the latest evidence that loyalty to Trump is the defining characteristic of today’s Republican Party. Because of her opposition to him, Cheney may find herself in the political wilderness.

Other polling bites

• A new poll from the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, found more opposition than support for the recall of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. The referendum is still likely to happen because the recall campaign has far more petition signatures than required, but only 36 percent of California registered voters said they supported recalling Newsom; 49 percent opposed the move. This falls largely in line with the findings of recent nonpartisan polling, although some Republican-sponsored polls have suggested a successful recall is more plausible.
• AP/NORC’s latest poll indicates increasing confidence in vaccinations but continued partisan divides in vaccination rates. The survey found that 53 percent of Americans were extremely or very confident in the quick and safe distribution of vaccines, while 46 percent expressed confidence that vaccines had been fairly distributed. This represents a marked uptick over AP/NORC’s February poll, when less than 30 percent expressed high degrees of confidence in fair, quick and safe distribution. The new poll also found that 45 percent of Americans were extremely or very confident the vaccines had been properly tested for safety and effectiveness, up from 39 percent in February. However, while 79 percent of Democrats said they’d gotten the vaccine, only 56 percent of Republicans said the same. And far more Republicans (32 percent) than Democrats (8 percent) said they probably or definitely would not get the vaccine at all.
• The fighting between the Israeli military and Hamas in Gaza has exposed a rift within the Democratic Party between staunch defenders of Israel and those who are more critical of its government. Back in February, Gallup found for the first time that a majority of Democrats favored putting more pressure on Israelis to make compromises to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But increased criticism of Israel could risk losing political support from some American Jews, who remain overwhelmingly Democratic in their political preferences, according to a new report from Pew. Overall, 71 percent identified as or leaned toward the Democrats in 2020, compared with 26 percent who identified as or leaned toward the Republicans — figures that are mostly unchanged from Pew’s 2013 findings. But among just Jewish Democrats, the 2020 report also found that 52 percent said they felt very or somewhat “attached to Israel,” and 48 percent felt U.S. support for Israel was about right; 17 percent said the U.S. wasn’t supportive enough of Israel, while 29 percent said the U.S. was too supportive.
• The general funds for the Paycheck Protection Program, which originated from the 2020 coronavirus stimulus package, ran out on May 4, but voters told Morning Consult they supported continued federal assistance to many sectors of the economy. There was net support (support minus opposition) for small businesses (+73), restaurants (+62), local governments (+45) and retailers (+44), and to a lesser extent hotel companies (+23), movie theaters (+16), airlines (+14) and car manufacturers (+4). Backing for assistance across these industries was generally down from Morning Consult’s poll in March 2020, when PPP was first implemented, but support has remained high overall for many of them. Also according to the new survey, 55 percent of voters believe the economy is still hurting and needs further assistance from Congress, compared with just 31 percent who say no more assistance is necessary.
• A new poll from Ipsos found that 89 percent of Americans included meat as part of their diet, and 59 percent agreed that eating red meat specifically was part of the American way of life. The polling comes as Republican politicians and celebrities on the right have falsely claimed that the Biden administration was trying to limit Americans’ red meat intake. The poll found that 26 percent of Americans agreed that there was a movement to ban meat in the U.S., while 35 percent disagreed. Only Republicans were more likely to agree than disagree that such a movement existed (44 percent agreed, 21 percent disagreed), while independents were more evenly divided (28 percent agreed, 33 percent disagreed). Democrats, however, overwhelmingly rejected the idea (53 percent disagreed, 13 percent agreed).

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,²⁴ 52.9 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 40.8 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of +12.2 percentage points). At this time last week, 53.4 percent approved and 40.0 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of +13.3 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 53.6 percent and a disapproval rating of 39.5 percent, for a net approval rating of +14.0 points.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/buy-social-media-ban-hurts-trumps-2024-aspirations-77587835

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/partisanship-explains-pandemic-behavior-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-77553762

EDITOR’S NOTE (May 12, 2021, 9:27 a.m.): House Republicans booted Rep. Liz Cheney from leadership, given her refusal to back down from criticizing former President Donald Trump and his baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Last week, we talked about what Cheney’s ousting would mean for the Republican Party moving forward.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Liz Cheney is once again in danger of losing her position as the No. 3 House Republican.

Earlier this week, she criticized former President Donald Trump on Twitter for continuing to falsely claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, saying that:

Cheney, of course, is no stranger to criticizing the former president. She was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. And she has already survived one attempt from her party to push her out of leadership because of this vote. 

Cheney is unlikely to survive a second attempt to oust her, however. In leaked audio on Tuesday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said, “I’ve had it with her,” and many House Republicans have expressed similar frustrations with Cheney’s leadership — upset that so much attention has been focused on the GOP’s intraparty bickering.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/republicans-govern-winning-majority-threatens-democracy-77381725

So, let’s talk about why Cheney is once again on the chopping block and what that means for the Republican Party moving forward — that is, can we finally stop debating whether the GOP is Trump’s party now? 

But first: the role of the “Big Lie.” For a while now, refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election has proven a fealty test of sorts to Trump, and it’s one Cheney has refused to take. How much of that is responsible for Cheney’s current situation versus her politics being increasingly out of step with the rest of the party?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): It’s the entire reason for her current situation, Sarah.

Ideologically, Cheney is a faithful conservative — at least as conservatism used to be defined. According to DW-Nominate, which uses voting records to quantify the ideology of every member of Congress on a scale from 1 (most conservative) to -1 (most liberal), she has a score of 0.515.

And according to FiveThirtyEight’s Trump Score, she voted in line with Trump’s position 93 percent of the time. Instead, her main transgression appears to be not going along with the “Big Lie” (and voting to impeach Trump for using it to egg on a violent mob).

micah (Micah Cohen, managing editor): Yeah, agreed. The idea that Cheney’s troubles are about policy — the argument that her hawkish foreign policy views or her free-trade-y views are behind her split with the bulk of the GOP — is a bit … silly?

sarah: Let me push back on that a little. I concede that the question I asked is perhaps a bit unfair in that the two are obviously connected. That is, the reason we’re talking about Cheney being deposed is because of her refusal to repeat Trump’s baseless claims; however, it does make sense to me on some level that there isn’t a greater effort to keep her in leadership because she’s increasingly out of step with the rest of the party.

Kaleigh (Kaleigh Rogers, tech and politics reporter): A massive segment of the U.S. population, almost entirely Republican, still falsely believes the election was illegitimate. The strategy for Republicans in Congress has mostly been to not support the “Big Lie” — but not refute it either — because doing so risks alienating their base. Cheney has gone against the grain on this and is an easy target to make an example of.

Americans are living in two different realities right now.

sarah: Kaleigh is onto something that I thought this line from The New York Times encapsulated well on why House Republicans are now ready to part ways with Cheney: “Many, including Mr. McCarthy, had hoped that after surviving the February vote of no confidence, Ms. Cheney, as an elected leader, would make like the rest of the party and simply move on.” 

It’s as Kaleigh said: Republican leaders aren’t necessarily full-throatedly supporting Trump’s baseless claims (at least not at the national level). But it’s a risky gambit they’re making since Trump has made the “Big Lie” a sort of fealty test.

kaleigh: The GOP is stopping short of insisting members embrace the “Big Lie,” but they recognize that it doesn’t serve them to refute it either.

micah: Yeah, agreed.

So, McCarthy’s beef with Cheney is more about messaging, I think, than fealty to Trump: Cheney’s repeated criticisms of Trump’s false claims keep that issue front and center when Republican leaders would prefer to just talk about something else.

Even beyond Cheney, though, the problem for GOP elites in Washington is that state-level Republicans do want to keep the “Big Lie” going and at the center of the conversation.

But here’s what’s really worrying. Political parties have had plenty of litmus tests over the decades — positions you almost have to have to be a member in good standing. For Republicans in most of the country, being anti-abortion or against tax increases, for example.

The problem with this particular litmus test is, it’s not about policy and it’s anti-democratic. So, over the years, we’ve seen the GOP grow more conservative, in part perhaps due to these litmus tests. But now the party is filtering itself through a sieve that will filter out anyone who (i) is willing to acknowledge reality out loud and (ii) is unwilling to undermine democracy.

kaleigh: Right, Micah. They’re playing a dangerous game here. They’re maybe justifying it by not explicitly endorsing it, but that defense falls apart if they punish Cheney in this way. Because if you don’t have to embrace it but you also aren’t allowed to refute it, you end up in the same place.

micah: Yeah. We’ve already seen the GOP shift in this direction during the past couple decades and in the Trump era. See here and here. But it feels like we’re heading even more into a world where one of the two major parties is defined by its willingness to lie and undermine democracy.

That’s scary!

And “defined” is the operative word there — as opposed to a party that simply includes some people who are willing to lie and undermine democracy. And even that was scary enough!

nrakich: What I find interesting is that Republicans seem primed to oust Cheney now when they actually voted to keep her in leadership a few months ago. That says to me that this issue is not going away.

micah: Yeah, what changed?

kaleigh: Is it two strikes and you’re out?

sarah: I think it’s more than that. You all raise important points about how the Republican Party is moving in an anti-democratic direction, but at the same time, Cheney’s being on the outs is more complicated than her refusal to not dispute Trump’s false claims that he won.

There appear to be real frustrations with Cheney’s leadership in the GOP, with some members suggesting that by Cheney’s continuing to spar with Trump, she is preventing the Republican Party from presenting a unified front. It certainly has the effect of keeping the “Big Lie” in the news, when as you all said earlier, it’s something many Republicans would like to move past.

nrakich: Right, Sarah, I think it’s that she’s not sticking to the message. Which, as Kaleigh said, isn’t necessarily shouting from the rooftops that the election was stolen, but it’s not publicly criticizing the leader of the party either.

micah: Yeah, ignoring the substance of all this — you know, the health of our democracy and reality — you can see where McCarthy is coming from.

kaleigh: But keep in mind, then, that the “unified front” is “we are going to allow this lie to continue unchallenged.”

sarah: That’s a good point, Kaleigh. Why do Republican lawmakers refuse to cleanly break ties with Trump over the “Big Lie”?

kaleigh: The lie serves Republicans, particularly at the state level. Take a look at the many attempts to restrict voter access in the name of “election security.”

micah: That’s a big part of the answer, for sure. 

People will also say that poll after poll shows most GOP rank-and-file voters believe the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. In a recent CNN survey, for example, Republicans said by 70 percent to 23 percent that Biden didn’t win legitimately. Independents said he did win, by 69-27 percent. Democrats said he did by 97-3 percent.

But that’s a bit circular. Polls clearly show that “the 2020 election was stolen” is a minority position. It’s a belief that’s only really concentrated within the GOP base and nowhere else. But what I don’t know is whether — in terms of electoral effects — spreading the “Big Lie” will dissuade swing voters from voting for Republican candidates. 

The health of our democracy hasn’t exactly been a high-salience issue for many voters.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/census-wrong-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-77474882

nrakich: I agree that it’s circular, Micah. The reason more Republican elites don’t criticize Trump is that they’re afraid of his voters punishing them. But what they don’t seem to realize is that they themselves also have (at least some) power to shape those voters’ opinions! There’s a lot of evidence in political science that elites can shape public opinion.

sarah: Do GOP elites, though? So much of Trump’s story in 2016 and 2020 was about the high voter turnout that he was responsible for driving. And although I think we should question how much turnout helped the GOP in 2020, there does seem to be an unspoken fear among GOP elites that these voters aren’t really Republicans now — that is, they won’t turn out for anyone other than Trump — which is why so many GOP elites are scared to break with Trump’s messaging.

micah: What do you all think would happen public opinion-wise if Republicans in Washington came out hard against the “Big Lie” but Trump and state-level Republicans kept it going?

nrakich: To be clear, it would be a political risk for Republican politicians to come out forcefully against the “Big Lie.” A solid chunk of the party would likely stand by Trump and continue to think the election was stolen. But it could lead to serious infighting within the GOP. At least, though, our democracy would be on a healthier path. 

kaleigh: That’s the thing. There is a potential cost to coming out against the “Big Lie.” But the cost of not doing so is eroding our democracy. One cost seems a lot higher than the other.

But, hey, I’m not staring down midterms.

sarah: Right, part of the calculus in pushing someone like Cheney out has to factor in that Republicans are not exactly in jeopardy of losing Wyoming if Cheney is demoted. It’s a deep red state, and someone to Cheney’s right could easily replace her. In fact, Cheney already faces two primary challenges back home. 

So, to what extent does someone like Cheney still have sway in the GOP? And what does this development mean for other, more moderate GOP members? 

micah: I think they are not long for this world.

I mean, how many are even left?

nrakich: Not many. But I’d be careful about making sweeping pronouncements. I recently wrote an article about the many Republicans who have left Congress since Trump took office (132 of them!). And while it’s true that their replacements have generally been more conservative, there are also some fresh anti-Trump faces, such as Sen. Mitt Romney and Rep. Peter Meijer.

sarah: There seems to be a shift, too, in how GOP activists and elites think of what it means to be conservative. FiveThirtyEight contributor Dan Hopkins and fellow political scientist Hans Noel recently published a paper in which they found that there wasn’t always a relationship between how conservative senators’ voting records were and how conservative the Republican Party’s activists thought they were.

But, OK, to wrap: Where does this leave Cheney? 

House Republicans could hold a vote on Cheney’s leadership position as early as next Wednesday, and Cheney herself has said that she is not challenging the vote on her replacement.

nrakich: Right now, it sure feels as though Cheney will get ousted from leadership. No. 2 House leader Steve Scalise has come out against her, and members of McCarthy’s leadership team are reportedly whipping votes against her.

kaleigh: It seems like the writing is on the wall. If she isn’t ousted, she’s certainly been put on notice.

nrakich: The next question is whether Cheney can win reelection — or whether she even runs again. As you mentioned, Sarah, two Republicans have already announced campaigns against her in next year’s primary. But I think she actually stands a decent chance of winning if the pro-Trump vote is split. 

If, say, four pro-Trump candidates run against her, she could prevail with just a plurality of the vote (say, 40 percent). But also, Trump has promised to pick one of her challengers and endorse him, so that could consolidate her opposition.

There’s also a chance that she forgoes reelection — there are rumors she’s considering a presidential run in 2024. But, of course, that campaign would be DOA unless the GOP does a major reevaluation of Trump’s role.

Just ask Bill Weld! 

sarah: Or John Kasich.

Indeed, though, a lot is riding on Trump as a potential kingmaker in 2022. I know Nathaniel and FiveThirtyEight contributor Meredith Conroy have examined Trump’s role in the primaries previously, and he’s already playing an active role in special elections and in those primary challenge bids that Nathaniel mentioned. 

So, where does ousting Cheney in the GOP leave the GOP then?

It’s hard to think that this episode will be remembered as anything other than the party removing someone from power who wouldn’t endorse Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election was stolen, but maybe that doesn’t really matter for Republican voters at this point?

micah: Yeah, I feel like this is the GOP further refining and crystallizing itself into the purest possible form of a Trumpist party.

It’s like this scene from “Blow” (warning, there’s some foul language, drug use and background nudity). They’re testing the purity of some cocaine obtained by Johnny Depp’s character. The cocaine is very pure, and then they partake.  

In this metaphor, Depp is Trump, the other characters are Republican elites, and the cocaine is Trumpism.

That doesn’t quite work, but you get the idea.

nrakich: Ousting Cheney may be more symbolic than actually influential (given that the House GOP caucus is already solidly in Trump’s corner) … but it is quite a symbol.

The real impact, I think, will be felt in the 2022 primaries, as you allude to, Sarah. Will anti-Trump Republicans go down to defeat? Will they retire? Or will Trump’s crusade against them fizzle?

I am really looking forward to doing the 2022 version of that article with Meredith again.

kaleigh: As of today’s latest statement from Trump, no sign of fizzling.

nrakich: Ah, but Kaleigh, it is often in the execution that Trump fizzles.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/bidens-speech-accomplish-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-77411755

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/majority-americans-climate-change-political-priority-77329705

On the one hand, Portman is right that this is a tough time to be a Republican in Congress. There has been a remarkable amount of turnover among congressional Republicans in the Trump (and post-Trump) era. Of the 293 Republicans who were serving in the Senate or House on Jan. 20, 2017 — the day of Trump’s inauguration — a full 132 (45 percent) are no longer in Congress or have announced their retirement or resignation. 

And many of these Republicans — let’s call them the “Ciao Caucus” — likely did leave due to their disapproval of Trump. Fifty-seven of them retired or are retiring from politics completely — including Trump critics like former Sen. Jeff Flake and former Rep. Will Hurd as well as several members of the moderate Tuesday Group. Most obviously, two — former Reps. Justin Amash and Paul Mitchell — even quit the GOP to become independents before they left Congress. And some representatives — among them former Rep. Mark Sanford, who voted with Trump only 71 percent of the time (one of the lowest rates for a Republican) — lost to a more hardline primary challenger. (On the other hand, one Republican who lost reelection in the primary did so to a less conservative challenger: Former Rep. Steve King so openly supported white nationalism that the party turned its back on him, throwing its support behind the more moderate Rep. Randy Feenstra.)

Plenty more Republicans have left for reasons having nothing to do with Trump, though. For instance, 21 retired or announced they plan to retire to run for a different office, which they probably wouldn’t have done unless they still felt at home in the Republican Party. (Indeed, this list includes some of Trump’s staunchest allies, including now-Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Rep. Doug Collins and Rep. Mo Brooks, who is running for Senate with Trump’s endorsement.) Another 29 Republicans wanted to stay but only left because they lost in the 2018 or 2020 general elections.²⁶ What’s more, the “resignations” category — which you might think would include some of the most defiant anti-Trumpers of all — actually skews toward Trump loyalists because eight of them²⁷ resigned in order to join his administration. And even of the 57 members who retired completely, several probably did so for more mundane reasons than disliking the direction Trump was taking the party in, like being term-limited out of powerful committee chairmanships. 

Overall, the 132 Republicans no longer in Congress are only slightly more moderate than the 161 Republicans who remain. DW-Nominate uses voting records to quantify the ideology of every member of Congress on a scale from 1 (most conservative) to -1 (most liberal). The Ciao Caucus has an average score of 0.482 while those who stayed have an average score of 0.492. (The more liberal Ciao Caucus score appears to be solely due to the Republicans who lost general elections, who skew moderate. Excluding them, the Ciao Caucus has an average DW-Nominate score of 0.495 — more or less as conservative as those who stayed.)

But the question remains: Did those 132 Republican departures open the door for more conservative replacements? In one obvious sense, they did not: Thirty-nine of them were replaced by Democrats,²⁸ allowing Democrats to take control of both the House (in 2019) and Senate (in 2021) and moving the chambers to the left in the process. 

But we’re more interested in the effect these departures had on Republicans internally. And all this Republican turnover has indeed nudged the GOP caucus to the right: first, by culling a few dozen of its members from swing districts and states, who, as we’ve seen, tended to be more moderate; and second, by replacing outgoing Republicans with more conservative models.

We should be careful not to overstate this either, though. There are 81 members of the Ciao Caucus who were replaced by a fellow Republican. Together, they had an average DW-Nominate score of 0.504, while their replacements had an average DW-Nominate score of 0.555 — so, more conservative, but not overwhelmingly.²⁹ And while a majority of the 81 (47, to be precise) were replaced by more conservative Republicans, a good number (33) were actually replaced by more moderate ones.³⁰ The biggest difference, though, is that only five of the replacements were significantly more moderate (a difference of 0.200 points or more) than their predecessors, while 17 were significantly more conservative.

It’s not hard to find examples of seats whose members became more conservative. Former Rep. Scott Tipton, a fairly mainstream Republican (with a DW-Nominate score of 0.451), has been replaced by firebrand Rep. Lauren Boebert (0.798). The late Rep. Walter Jones (a notable maverick, with a DW-Nominate score of 0.244) has been replaced by a reliable Republican vote in Rep. Greg Murphy (0.547). Even Collins, a Trump favorite who was already plenty conservative (0.610), was replaced by someone even further right: Rep. Andrew Clyde (0.879). The biggest shift of all came in New Mexico’s 2nd District, where Rep. Steve Pearce (0.472) was replaced by Rep. Yvette Herrell (0.936), the most conservative politician in Congress. (In case you’re wondering, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene actually didn’t represent a huge rightward shift for her district: She has a 0.807 DW-Nominate score, but her predecessor, former Rep. Tom Graves, was already very conservative, with a 0.716 score of his own. Of course, Greene has certainly brought more rhetorical extremism to Congress.)

There are fewer examples of seats becoming represented by someone noticeably more moderate, but they exist. DeSantis (0.663) was succeeded by Rep. Michael Waltz (0.416); King (0.613) was succeeded by Feenstra (0.413). Ironically, the two biggest swings to the left came as a result of the departure of two of Trump’s loudest critics: Amash and Sanford. (They may have been anti-Trump, but they were still plenty conservative, with DW-Nominate scores of 0.654 and 0.686, respectively.) Their districts — both strongholds of old-school conservatism that have moved left in the era of Trump — are now represented by Reps. Peter Meijer (0.235) and Nancy Mace (0.305), who are already developing maverick reputations of their own. Mace forcefully criticized Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection, and Meijer even voted to impeach Trump over it. 

You could also add the transition from former Sen. Orrin Hatch to Sen. Mitt Romney to this list. Although DW-Nominate doesn’t see this as a big ideological shift (from 0.382 to 0.321), Hatch voted with Trump 96 percent of the time, while Romney has become one of the most vocal anti-Trump Republicans in Congress. So even as the GOP is becoming more conservative overall, fresh anti-Trump voices are still getting added to the mix.

The Republican exodus since Trump took office has gotten plenty of attention — but the coverage too often focuses on incomplete takeaways like what Republican retirements mean for Democrats’ chances. But given that the vast majority of states and congressional districts are safe for one party or the other, turnover has far more impact on the ideology and direction of the party itself. That story is a complicated one for the GOP, with some moderates giving way to conservatives and some conservatives giving way to moderates. But overall, it does seem as if the conservative, pro-Trump side is winning out.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/house-democrats-wont-pass-reparations-77173366

To understand just how much of the president’s agenda is getting through Congress and the extent to which various members of Congress support that agenda, we’re once again tracking how often representatives and senators agree with Biden and how that compares with our expectations, based on Biden’s 2020 vote margin in the member’s state or district. (If this sounds familiar, it’s because we did the same for former President Trump.) We’ve also added a number of new features to help illustrate how members of Congress vote relative to one another and identify the outliers in each party. (Hint: Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona might not be the only thorns in Biden’s side for the next several years.)

A member of Congress’ “Biden score” is just a simple percentage of how often a senator or representative supports the president’s agenda. (We calculate this by adding the member’s “yea” votes on bills that Biden supported and “no” votes on bills Biden opposed, then divide that by the total number of bills on which that member has voted and we know Biden’s position.) As we did during the Trump administration, we’re relying on the Office of Management and Budget’s “statements of administration policy” to determine the administration’s stance on a bill. To read more about what types of measures we’re tracking, check out our detailed methodology post from 2017 — it’s about Trump-era congresses, but the same rules still apply. And, as a reminder, these ratings will update through the 117th Congress.

It’s early yet — we have just 13 votes that aren’t related to the confirmation of Biden’s Cabinet,³¹ but there are two interesting trends we’ve noticed at the margins so far: 

After Biden was elected last year, story after story predicted that Republicans would thwart his agenda as control of the Senate remained in limbo and that Trump retained an ironclad grip on the party. And while the latter is still  at least partially true, it’s also not yet entirely clear the extent to which they’re impacting the GOP’s ability to compromise. Republicans, for instance, haven’t entirely stymied Biden’s agenda. 

Sure, no Republican in the House or Senate voted in favor of Biden’s COVID-19 relief bill. But in the Senate, many have backed his Cabinet picks, and in the House, Republicans and Democrats have found common ground on bills like reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act and allowing farmworkers a pathway to legal immigration status. 

Now, it doesn’t mean these bills featured overwhelming bipartisan majorities, but 140 different House Republicans have voted at least once for something Biden supported. And for some members who fall in this category, the choice appears to be a matter of political caution. Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith and Michigan Rep. Fred Upton — two of whom represent districts Biden either won in 2020 or was competitive in — are so far the GOP members backing Biden’s agenda most frequently.

But not all House Republicans are interested in backing Biden’s agenda. About one-third of members — 72 total — have completely opposed everything on Biden’s agenda so far. This includes Biden’s coronavirus stimulus package, but also things like increasing the waiting period for background checks on gun sales, expanding unionization and collective bargaining rights and an omnibus police reform bill named after George Floyd. (Only a handful of Republican representatives supported these measures.)

One thing we found surprising, though, is that even some of the most pro-Trump House members, according to our tracker of Congress and Trump, have supported at least one item on Biden’s agenda. Take Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, for example, the House’s No. 2 Republican who ended Trump’s term with a 98.2 percent Trump score rating overall. He was among the 121 House Republicans who approved a special waiver to allow retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin as secretary of defense. (Austin’s appointment required this waiver because he had only been retired from the military for four years, instead of the seven years required by law.) Even House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — who supported Trump’s agenda 97.3 percent of the time — supported the same waiver. Granted, this is the only Biden-supported bill that they’ve backed; as such, both Scalise and McCarthy still rank very low in terms of backing Biden’s agenda with a Biden score of 7.7 percent so far.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/policing-happen-77102704

In the Senate, every sitting member has supported Biden at least once (yes, even Sens. Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Mitch McConnell). An important caveat here, though, is almost all of the Senate votes so far — save for the COVID-19 aid package — were on or related to Cabinet confirmations.

However, the top Senate Republicans backing Biden’s nominations so far shouldn’t come as much of a shock, considering many were long seen as potential Senate swing votes or are members of the so-called G-10 — a group of 10 deal-making moderate Republicans who reportedly want to negotiate with Biden and other Democrats. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine leads the pack with a 91.3 percent Biden score. She’s followed by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (90.9 percent), Ohio Sen. Rob Portman (87 percent), Utah Sen. Mitt Romney (87 percent) and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (78.3 percent).

To be sure, a lot of what we’re seeing now among Republicans is pretty small in the grand scheme of things (i.e., supporting Cabinet nominations isn’t that surprising when Republicans don’t have enough votes to block them). Perhaps we’ll get a better sense of which GOP senators want to work with Biden via Democrats’ big infrastructure proposal, but if Democrats move to pass that via budget reconciliation, we still might not have a sense of who those senators are, as Democrats won’t need their votes. At this point, it’s unclear how many real opportunities for bipartisanship there will be, especially if Biden tries to push items forward that are consistent with what Republican voters want, but aren’t necessarily in line with what their GOP representatives want.

Meanwhile, most Democrats support Biden 100 percent of the time. 

In fact, the only time Senate Democrats have bucked the president’s agenda was when 14 of them voted against granting Austin’s waiver. This wasn’t a major flashpoint in the party, as Austin’s confirmation was never really in jeopardy. Instead, it mostly mirrored what happened when Congress approved a similar waiver in 2017, as many of the same Democrats expressed opposition to making a similar exception for Trump’s former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.

At this point, the two senators who have arguably received the most attention as being potential roadblocks to the president’s agenda — Manchin and Sinema — haven’t actually voted against any of the things Biden supports. Now, this is in large part because, again, almost all of the Senate votes so far were on noncontroversial Cabinet confirmations. And any controversial policy proposals both objected to, like raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, have been cut from the final bill. So the two senators are still exerting their power to block legislation in ways that aren’t captured by our data. That’s why we should keep an eye on these two members — and others from the more moderate wing of the party — going forward, especially when it comes to their votes on Biden’s infrastructure and climate proposals.

In the House it’s much of the same: Representatives who don’t vote with Biden 100 percent of the time are the exception, not the rule. Even members from competitive districts that Biden lost — Iowa Rep. Cindy Axne, Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, Pennsylvania Rep. Matt Cartwright and New Jersey Rep. Andy Kim — are completely supportive of the president’s agenda. 

There have been some defectors in the lower chamber, though. And those members fall into two main categories: Progressive Democrats who were against supporting the Austin waiver and lawmakers from competitive districts. 

Let’s examine the latter category first. Maine Rep. Jared Golden, who won one of the most competitive House districts, only has a 53.8 percent Biden score — the lowest among all House Democrats. Why? Well, Biden lost his district by nearly 8 points last year and Golden only barely wrested his seat out of Republicans’ grip in 2018.

So far, Golden has voted against Austin’s waiver, legislation allowing farmworkers to get legal immigration status, increasing the waiting period for federal gun background checks, requiring background checks for all gun sales and the coronavirus stimulus package, among other things. Beyond Golden, other members in competitive districts to watch are Wisconsin Rep. Ron Kind (76.9 percent Biden score), Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar (92.3 percent) and Texas Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (92.3 percent). Biden either lost their districts or won by fewer than 5 points in 2020, so we can likely expect for them to continue to deviate from Biden’s agenda.

Progressive Democrats have long criticized establishment members of their party as too centrist and cautious, but so far the measure that the largest number opposed was also the Austin waiver. Excluding that, the most liberal Democrats — including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley and New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman — have supported Biden 100 percent.

So, to recap: Democrats in both chambers are, so far, largely unified, with some more interesting splinters in the House among members facing competitive reelection bids in 2022. And in the Senate, we’ll likely see more fissures among Democratic members as Biden moves to pass more controversial agenda items. At this point, though, it’s hard to know what the progressive wing will do with Biden’s later proposals since they don’t really have the votes to bring legislation to the floor on their own and their main power will be — similar to Manchin and Sinema — in blocking bills.  

There’s definitely not enough data to make sweeping statements about how senators and representatives are taking to Biden’s presidency. But at this early juncture, it’s fair to say Republicans might not be completely against compromise and most Democrats will be in lockstep with the president. We’ll continue updating our interactive as more votes are recorded along with publishing stories about the most interesting trends we see as the administration gets to work.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/support-gun-control-led-legislation-77033996

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/confidence-interval-andrew-yang-mayor-york-city-77033668

Using data on the results of the presidential election by congressional district from Daily Kos Elections, I calculated how much better — or worse — each candidate for U.S. House did than their party’s presidential nominee. Assuming that President Biden and former President Donald Trump’s vote share represent how a “typical” 2020 Democrat or Republican would have done in each district, this gap gives you a rough measure of candidate quality.  

As it turns out, the vast majority of House candidates performed about as you’d expect based on presidential partisanship. But when you look at the exceptions — the districts where Democratic House candidates most outperformed Biden, and the districts where Republican candidates most outperformed Trump — the strongest candidates tended to be incumbents with moderate voting records and personal brands that differentiate them from the national reputation of their party. 

Let’s start by looking at the 10 congressional districts where the Democratic House candidates outran Biden by the biggest margins (excluding House seats that Republicans did not contest).

Ultimately, former Rep. Collin Peterson lost his seat to Republican Rep. Michelle Fischbach last year, but by our metric, his 14-point loss was still the most impressive Democratic performance in the country given that former President Donald Trump carried the Minnesota 7th District by 29 points. The 15-term incumbent managed to hold onto his reddening district for so long thanks to his leadership on agricultural issues (a big deal in the rural 7th) and centrist reputation: He was a founding member of the Blue Dog Coalition (a caucus of moderate Democrats) and was the only Democrat³² to vote against Trump’s 2019 impeachment on both counts. 

Next on the list is Rep. Henry Cuellar. His anti-abortion, pro-gun views initially looked like they’d hurt him in 2020, as he faced a serious primary challenge from progressive Jessica Cisneros. But it looks like Democrats were wise to renominate Cuellar, as his conservative streak probably helped him in the general election — he won reelection by 19 points in a district Biden carried by just 4. And there are at least three more moderates in the top 10: Rep. Ed Case, the third-strongest Democratic candidate of 2020, is the current co-chair of the Blue Dog Coalition. Fifth-ranking Rep. Jared Golden is, by one common measure of ideology, the most conservative Democrat left in the House (he was recently the only House Democrat to vote against Biden’s COVID-19 stimulus bill and background checks for gun sales). And former Rep. Anthony Brindisi’s moderate voting record is also likely the reason he was so competitive for reelection last year in his Trump+11 district (after a protracted court battle over the razor-close election, he eventually conceded his 109-vote loss).

It wasn’t just Democratic moderates who punched above their weight. Middle-of-the-road incumbents also represent many of the districts where Republican House candidates most improved upon Trump’s margins (excluding House seats that Democrats did not contest):

Near the top of the list are Reps. John Katko and Brian Fitzpatrick, who after the 2018 blue wave were two of only three House Republicans representing districts carried by Hillary Clinton — indicative of significant crossover appeal. And indeed, both won reelection by double digits in 2020 even as Biden carried their districts by 6-9 points. Fitzpatrick likely benefits from his family’s long history of centrist leadership (his late brother Mike preceded him in Congress) in his correspondingly centrist district, and Katko has also set himself apart from the more extreme elements of the national GOP by voting to impeach Trump for his role in the Capitol siege and to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments. Two other pro-impeachment Republicans, Reps. Dan Newhouse and Adam Kinzinger (who has been especially vocal about standing up to Trump), also make the top 10, and a few others (Reps. Anthony Gonzalez, David Valadao, Fred Upton) just missed the cut.³³

But there are two districts on the list that aren’t like the others: the Minnesota 5th and Maryland 7th. That’s because they actually have Democratic incumbents. It’s quite a feat for a challenger with no political experience to be a stronger candidate than several long-time incumbents with established brands, but Lacy Johnson and Kim Klacik achieved it — probably thanks in part to the massive amounts of money they raised and spent. Aided by national Republican antipathy toward his opponent, Rep. Ilhan Omar, Johnson raised a whopping $12.2 million and spent $2.9 million on direct mail, $1.5 million on digital ads and almost $1 million on TV ads after Sept. 1 (by contrast, Omar did not air any TV ads during that time frame). And Klacik outraised her opponent, Democratic Rep. Kweisi Mfume, $8.3 million to $1.0 million — arguably more impressive than Johnson because Mfume does not have the same national profile as Omar. Instead, Klacik made herself a national sensation with a series of viral videos about urban blight in the Maryland 7th that she parlayed into a primetime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention.

But a lot of Klacik’s and Johnson’s apparent strength may be more about their opponents’ weakness. Before his current stint in Congress, Mfume faced allegations of sexual harassment for dating an employee and retaliating against another staffer who had rebuffed his advances. And while Johnson’s vote share was 8 points higher than Trump’s (26 percent of the total vote vs. 18 percent), Omar’s vote share was a whopping 16 points lower than Biden’s (64 percent vs. 80 percent), suggesting the gap in the Minnesota 5th is more about Omar losing votes than Johnson gaining them. 

Once again, this could be ideology at play: One of the most progressive members of Congress, Omar is nationally famous — and notorious — as a member of “the Squad.” (According to a Jan. 31-Feb. 2 YouGov/The Economist poll, 40 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of her, while only 27 percent have a favorable opinion of her.) On the other hand, other notable progressives, such as Reps. Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, did not significantly underperform Biden in their districts, and a lot (although not all) of the votes Omar lost probably went to Legal Marijuana Now candidate Michael Moore, who was plenty progressive himself. But there are other factors that could explain some of her underperformance too. Perhaps scandal: In 2019, Omar was accused of having an affair with her campaign consultant, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars her campaign has paid the consultant’s — who is now her husband — company became the subject of a campaign-finance complaint.³⁴ Perhaps xenophobia: Omar was born in Somalia and is one of only three Muslim members of Congress, and many of Johnson’s attacks on her had racist undertones.

Ideology, in other words, isn’t the only determinant of candidate quality — other factors, such as fundraising ability, scandal and opponent quality, matter too. And there were some more radical candidates who proved to be very strong candidates as well: Rep. Garret Graves, who won by 16 more percentage points than Trump did in the Louisiana 6th District, was one of the 147 Republicans who objected to certifying the results of the 2020 election. Democratic Rep. Sylvia Garcia, whose margin in the Texas 29th District exceeded Biden’s by 11 points, has, by one measure, the most progressive voting record in the House. But overall, the strongest House candidates of 2020 were disproportionately moderate.

These are just some of the criticisms that Republicans have lobbed at the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump after his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. The criticisms haven’t stopped there, either. Trump told attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month to “get rid of them all.” And all but one of these 10 representatives have been publicly rebuked by state or local GOP officials. In total, nine already face a primary challenger in 2022.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/stimulus-bill-boost-democrats-electoral-prospects-76474732

But is this opposition real or … just noise? After all, we’re still a long way from the 2022 primaries, which leaves plenty of time for anger surrounding their votes to impeach Trump to fade.

At first glance, the seriousness of the primary challengers does vary quite a bit, ranging from the very serious — that is, other elected officials, who tend to be stronger candidates — to political newcomers like a conservative activist best known for getting married in a “MAGA” dress. Yet, in most cases, these representatives should all have at least some reason to be concerned about winning renomination in 2022 — especially those who hail from more Republican-leaning districts.³⁵

The Republican in most danger of losing renomination, South Carolina Rep. Tom Rice, ironically has the most conservative voting record among these 10 members, too. But thanks to South Carolina election rules, he faces a tougher road to renomination than the other nine. That’s because he must capture a majority of the votes in a primary or runoff to win — whereas the others only need a plurality. There’s reason to think, too, that Republicans in South Carolina’s 7th Congressional District could be especially receptive to a Trump-motivated primary challenge, as it was Trump’s strongest district in the state’s 2016 presidential primary.

In fact, Rice has already been censured by the South Carolina GOP and attracted two challengers, both of whom hold elected office: Horry County school board Chairman Ken Richardson and state Rep. William Bailey. (Bailey hasn’t officially announced, but he has taken a big first step in forming an exploratory committee.) Others could run, too. And if Rice does lose, he wouldn’t be the first Palmetto State House Republican in recent years to lose a primary after running afoul of conservatives: In 2018, Rep. Mark Sanford lost his primary after being critical of Trump, and in 2010, Rep. Bob Inglis got crushed in a runoff after earning the Tea Party’s ire for being too moderate.

After Rice, the next most endangered Republican may be the most well-known name here: Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. As a part of the House GOP’s leadership, Cheney will have a huge campaign war chest to help with her reelection bid, but Republican fury over her vote to impeach Trump runs deep: The Wyoming state GOP has censured her, as have more than half of the party’s county committees in the state, while her colleagues in D.C. even held a vote on whether to remove her from leadership.

Anger at Cheney could keep burning, too, given her national profile and because Wyoming Republicans, long the dominant force in state politics, have grown a lot more conservative. For instance, in 2020 an influx of right-wing primary challengers defeated more moderate lawmakers in six state Senate and House districts and mounted major challenges in about a dozen other seats.³⁶ Those campaigns were largely backed by conservative groups and Republican leaders who wanted to oust “Republicans in name only,” and the same sentiments could boost Cheney primary challengers like state Sen. Anthony Bouchard and state Rep. Chuck Gray, a pair of right-wing state legislators who have already said they’ll take on Cheney.

Next up are Midwestern Reps. Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who each have a noteworthy challenger with Trump ties: former Trump aide Max Miller will take on Gonzalez, while former Trump Commerce Department adviser Catalina Lauf is running against Kinzinger. It’s not just their votes on impeachment that make Gonzalez and Kinzinger vulnerable. According to Voteview.com, their voting records are among the least conservative of all House Republicans despite representing seats Trump carried by 14 to 16 percentage points. Kinzinger in particular has earned a reputation as a Trump critic and was one of eight Republicans to recently support expanding background checks for gun sales.

The six remaining Republicans aren’t as vulnerable, but at least a couple of them could still run into primary danger.

For instance, for the three members from California and Washington, the top-two primary format should help them weather their primary challenges, as no House incumbent has failed to advance to the general election in those states under this system.³⁷ But the Washington pair — Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler and Rep. Dan Newhouse — have more to worry about, having received criticism from the state party, censure from local groups and calls for their resignation. Herrera Beutler might benefit from a crowded primary field, though. Three GOP opponents have already said they’ll run against her, but they’re all relatively unknown and could split up the anti-incumbent GOP vote. Newhouse, meanwhile, has to deal with GOP state Rep. Brad Klippert, and other Republicans are eyeing the race, too. Still, Newhouse’s district is Republican enough that it sometimes sends two GOP candidates to the general election, and in that case, Newhouse might win over some Democratic voters because of his impeachment vote. As for the other representative facing a top-two primary, Rep. David Valadao of California seems in considerably less hot water; he’s only earned a letter of condemnation and a GOP challenger who last ran for Congress in New Mexico, finishing third in a three-person Republican primary field.

Likewise, western Michigan Reps. Pete Meijer and Fred Upton also have fewer primary concerns. Some local party officials have censured Meijer, but his district committee deadlocked on a censure motion and GOP officials from the largest county in the district didn’t rebuke him either. His primary opponents also aren’t all that serious (yet), as one finished well behind him in 2020 and the other is that activist I mentioned earlier who is most famous for her “MAGA” wedding dress. Meanwhile, Upton has been censured by local party committees but so far he has attracted only one primary opponent, who received a microscopic share of the vote (0.15 percent) as a write-in candidate in the 2020 general election.

Lastly, New York Rep. John Katko might not have that much to worry about in the primary, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be smooth sailing in the general election. Katko is the one member without a primary challenger so far and he’s also avoided an official rebuke from state and local county Republicans, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t angered some of his base. Katko won just over 21,000 votes from Conservative Party voters in 2020 — about two-thirds of his 35,000-vote margin of victory — but his impeachment vote has already prompted a no confidence vote by one Conservative Party county committee in the district and could lose him the party’s endorsement in 2022, which could hurt Katko’s reelection chances, especially if he faces a strong Democratic challenger.

It’s early yet, so it’s possible these 10 Republicans curry favor with the party faithful in the coming months, but no matter what they do, their House impeachment vote could still cut their political careers short in the 2022 GOP primaries.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/cpac-broader-republican-party-agree-trumps-party-now-76190882

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/joe-biden-lucky-2020-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-76397986

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/republican-party-extremists-ranks-75692233

As a sign of where things are headed: Just five Senate Republicans agreed that the trial was constitutional in an earlier procedural vote in January, suggesting that it is extremely unlikely Democrats garner the 17 Republican votes necessary to convict Trump.

[Related: The GOP Might Still Be Trump’s Party. But That Doesn’t Mean There’s Room For Him.]

Public opinion, though, does show a majority supported Trump’s impeachment — 53 percent, on average, said they supported Trump being removed from office before he left the White House on Jan. 20.

That’s more support than in 2019, when only around 48 percent said the same when Trump was acquitted by the Senate on both articles of impeachment: charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after pressuring Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate now-President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

However, as was true in 2019, there is a slight difference between support for Trump’s impeachment, which takes place in the House of Representatives, and support for his conviction in the Senate — the step that would have removed him from office, were he still there, and could lead to him being barred from running for federal office again. Right now, recent polls show that support for conviction sits at about 50 percent; that 3-percentage-point difference in support is similar to the difference in 2019, when support for removal hovered just marginally below support for impeachment throughout the process.

[In America’s ‘Uncivil War,’ Republicans Are The Aggressors]

Interestingly, though, while support for conviction is lower than support for Trump’s impeachment, there is some evidence more Americans support barring Trump from holding future political office: 55 percent overall back this, according to a FiveThirtyEight average of 13 polls. And as you can see in the table below, this is true among both Democrats (88 percent support barring Trump from office, compared to 85 percent who support conviction) and Republicans (where those numbers are 20 and 13 percent, respectively).

But despite public support for it, barring Trump from office probably isn’t an option. Trump would likely need to be convicted first before senators could vote on barring him from running for federal office. And since 45 Senate Republicans have already voted that the trial is unconstitutional, 67 senators voting to convict Trump seems like a long shot.

And as the last impeachment process taught us, opinions on something this politically polarized don’t easily shift. The initial response to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol may have briefly given the impression that things could be different, but with Republican senators now largely refusing to entertain the possibility of impeachment, and House members like Rep. Liz Cheney under fire for their vote in support of impeachment, any potential momentum from that event seems to be well and truly quashed.

Mary Radcliffe and Aaron Bycoffe contributed research.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/partisans-disagree-hate-fivethirtyeight-75477021

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/bidens-response-pandemic-trumps-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-75622204