FIVE POINTS: Make DACA Great Again
1. Trump's new DACA stance is both popular and problematic for him. The president's apparent new position on DACA may cost him some points of approval (see below), but I don't think that's the big impact of this. It might even make him more popular with the public. The big impact is the further fraying of his ties to the congressional GOP and, to a lesser extent, the Republican Party in general.
The really odd thing here is that Trump's probable position on DACA (something like "allow them to stay in exchange for some beefed up border security that is negotiated across both parties in Congress") is almost certainly the position of the GOP leadership in the House and Senate and probably the position of the median Republican in the House and Senate. So it's not like the substance of Trump's ultimate position is a party dealbreaker here. Instead, I think the GOP anger comes in four flavors:
Partisan optics. There are lots of ways to get to the same policy result. That Trump is taking a route that includes high profile friendly meetings with Democratic leaders and *not* Republican leaders will really rub some partisans the wrong way. If the same outcome was negotiated and proposed by the House leadership, I suspect you'd have a lot less screaming. It also probably scares Republicans that Trump appears ready and willing to easily work with Democrats in general in order to secure wins. Will the next Supreme Court vacancy really be filled by a conservative? That probably has more than a few Republicans up at night.
Right-wing hysterics. There is, of course, a sizable faction of Republicans who simply want DACA repealed, the beneficiaries deported, and a comprehensive set of immigration restrictions, including a physical wall. Such people are obviously going to be enraged by this deal, and see it as a complete betrayal of Trump's campaign promises and consistently-expressed views. They have an intensity advantage within the party, and are going to make themselves heard as a faction.
Leadership struggle. Trump's move to cut deals with the Democrats without even consulting the GOP leadership is obviously going to cause friction, even when the deal itself is acceptable to the GOP leadership. Part of politics is the substance of policy outcomes, and part of politics is the fight over who gets to negotiate the outcomes. If the GOP leaders allow Trump to make this deal on his own, they have to worry that he will start making deals on other issues too, perhaps in places they don't agree with the underlying policy position.
Tactical incompetence. Even if you aren't worried about all of the above, many Republicans must be wondering if Trump gave away the game here, squandering his bargaining position and accepting a deal that will end up much further to the left than they could have gotten through more standard negotiating. I think it's quite likely this deal ends up further to left than most of the GOP wants it to be, even among those who want a deal and had no intention of letting DACA recipients be deported. The GOP is just not going to get as many goodies out of this now.
I expect a fair amount of this to continue with Trump. I expect Trump to take some policy positions out of the GOP mainstream, and I also expect him to take some positions, like DACA, and either frame them or conduct negotiations about them in ways that enrage Republicans much the same. Dave Hopkins wrote an excellent piece last night about Republican presidents and liberal policies. It's relevant and I highly recommend it.
2. Taking a popular position can actually hurt your approval / election chances. There is a very common fallacy about issue opinion polling. It goes something like this:
FACT: a sizable majority (76%) opposes deporting immigrants currently here under DACA.
CONCLUSION: siding with that sizable majority cannot possibly hurt POTUS's approval rating.
Unfortunately, this is simply flawed logic. The conclusion does not follow from the fact. And it's a good example of the more general problem of extrapolating approval/electoral effects from policy polling.
If we get 100 random Americans together, what can we say about them? Well, we can guess that about 76 of them oppose deporting DACA immigrants, about 15 of them support deportation, and 9 have no opinion. What else can we say about them in regard to the president's approval rating or his electoral fortunes?
Not much. We are missing some key information. What were the approval opinions of the 76 who oppose deportation prior to the current (apparent) decision of POTUS? What are the approval opinions of that group now? And ditto with the 15 who support deportation?
In other words, what effect does the president's new position have on his approval rating?
The reason this is so important is that approval ratings (and elections) are not about repeatedly winning majoritarian support for individual policy decisions; they are about winning aggregate approval and winning indivisible votes. At the micro-level, the relationship is a simple equation: how much net approval did a particular policy decisions gain or cost you? If it gained you aggregate approval, then from a pure rating point of view, it's a good thing. If it didn't, it's not.
The problem is that we don't know how much the DACA position of POTUS gained or lost in actual total approval rating. For example, if all 76 who agree with his new position aren't going to change their position on approval (regardless of whether they approve or not), but 10 of the 15 who disagree with him now *are* going to change their opinion from approval to disapproval, POTUS just lost 10 points on his approval rating. By adopting a position that is favored by 3/4 of Americans! The opposite situation---where a POTUS takes a very unpopular position but manages to gain aggregate support---is also possible. The point is that the aggregate level of support of the policy is theoretically irrelevant in regard to its effect on approval rating (or electoral gain/loss).
And that's the key here: the level of support for a policy choice may be correlated with approval or electoral support and/or net change in approval or electoral support, but it doesn't have to be. The only way the issue polling data could be definitive in its effect is if all Americans were single-issue votes/approvers. But they aren't, so we need more information. Ask yourself which is a bigger number: the number of Trump supporters who might turn against him over this DACA position, or the number of opponents who might become supporters over this DACA decision. Those two numbers combine to the net approval effect, and that's the number we're interested in. My guess is that there are many more supporters who will desert than opponents who will join up.
Lurking behind this is the issue of intensity of preference. Ask 100 people how they feel about a policy issue, and you'll find that some oppose it and others support it. But only a small portion of those people will consider it relevant to their vote choice on election day or their general approval of a politician, and an even smaller fraction will be single-issue voters/approvers on the topic. When those intensities are not evenly distributed among the opinion, that's a good recipe for the electoral/approval effects to be strongly skewed in reference to the policy opinion numbers. Seventy-six of our 100 oppose deportation, and 15 support it. But what if only 5% of the opposed see it as a key approval issue, and 50% of the pro-deportation crowd do. I have no idea if those numbers are correct, but it's not insane. And at those numbers, it's a net loser for POTUS on his approval rating.
3. Two good reads. I highly recommend this Jonathan Bernstein piece on the relationship between ideas and parties, and this Danielle Thomsen piece on why moderates are disappearing from Congress.
4. Is the House Freedom Caucus a new phenomenon or an old one? I've been thinking a lot about the House Freedom Caucus, the group of 40 or so conservative House Republicans who organized themselves into a loose voting bloc in 2015 and have been actively working outside the regular party channels to influence the agenda and outcomes on the House floor. Specifically, I'm trying to figure out whether the Freedom Caucus is just a contemporary version of something we've seen throughout American history, or if it's something quite new, a consequence of some particular features of modern politics. I'm still not sure.
The case that it's not new is pretty simple. Members who are not in sync with their party are always going to look for ways to exert power independent from the leadership. A well-known political science finding is that when the majority party in the House is ideologically diverse or otherwise fractured, they will tend to decentralize power away from the leaders and toward the committee system. This allows factions to be gatekeepers on particular issues and prevents the median view of the caucus from dominating any of the disparate ideological views. A prime example is the Rayburn-era Democrats. Neither the northern or southern wing of the party trusted each other, so a rock-solid seniority system and strong committee gatekeepers were adopted to prevent the pro-civil rights majority from setting policy.
Likewise, an ideologically homogeneous majority party will tend to alter House and party rules to centralize power in the leadership, such that the shared goals of the vast majority of the caucus can be efficiently achieved and not risk an outlier committee chairman from holding things up. This is exemplified by the Gingrich-era GOP. They had a uniform ideological mission and changed the rules to centralize power. They weakened their seniority system, put term-limits on committee chairs, reduced committee funding, and empowered the leadership to write policy and circumvent committee gatekeepers.
The trouble comes when the rules don't reflect the caucus. Right now, power is still mostly centralized in the House leadership, reflective of the homogeneous Gingrich coalition of Republicans. But the Freedom Caucus has become a large outlier to median GOP policy positions. Without the committee system to protect them, such Members had to find a way to express their preferences and fight to move policy their direction. And this is why they have taken to exerting themselves on the floor: they have no other option. So they threaten to vote against the party on substance, they make symbolic votes against the party on key procedural votes like the election of the Speaker, and they bargain by threatening to use their control of the balance of power to shut down the government and depose the leadership.
All of this is quite jarring to observers. The procedural coalition of the majority party is not something we ever expect to be tested in the House. We didn't see this behavior under the centralized Gingrich House, and we didn't see it in the long decentralized Democratic era from the 50s to the 90s. But now we've seen it in both the Democratic party (with the Blue Dogs, albeit a more mild version) and the Republican party in the last 10-15 years. But, in this view of centralization/party mismatch, it's quite in line historically. There's an easy analogy to the progressive Republicans under Cannon in the early 20th century, who got fed up with his tight-fisted grip on the House and started a revolt, ultimately running him from office and decentralizing the rules of the House. We may not be used to factional floor politics within the majority party, but it has plenty of historical precedent.
But I'm skeptical that this is the only thing going on here. My sense is that there's also a modern component to this, related to both the nationalization of congressional politics in the last 20 years, as well as the advent of real-time information between Members and constituent groups. It has been well-documented that Members in both the House and Senate are willing to play hardball---seeking to use all procedural tools available to them under the rules---where there once existed informal norms that limited such behavior and greased the skids for compromise and accommodation. Many observers also believe such hardball is being egged on by constituents and interests who are more informed about process than ever, and activists who have gained control of party nominations and fundraising schemes from the old-style political professionals.
This, in theory, creates a climate where the bonds of partisan loyalty to the leadership are drawn much more taut than in the past when faced with ideological disagreement. The threshold of ideological disagreement that results in factional floor behavior will be smaller, and the threshold for using extreme tactics (like voting against the party candidate for Speaker) will be lower. And thus we should expect to see this behavior continue, not only with the Freedom Caucus but with other groups as well. One question is why the Freedom Caucus doesn't seek to change the rules to weaken the leadership and decentralize power. Well, they've tried. But they haven't tried that hard. Maybe they can't win those changes. Or maybe they like the optics of themselves as a block operating on the floor. I'm not sure. But I'm becoming open to the idea that we are in a genuinely new situation in the House and, regardless of which party controls power, not likely to revert back to what we think of as normal majority party behavior.
5. What's the greatest Side 1, Track 1 on a debut album in rock history? I posed this question on Twitter yesterday and got some interesting answers. My answer going in was sort of boring and conventional: Good Times, Bad Times. I didn't really hear anything that particularly changed my mind, but I did hear a lot of answers that made me think it's closer than I originally thought.
Many people mentioned Welcome to the Jungle, and I agree that's a strong contender, but there's the thorny problem of Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide, the GnR EP. The same goes for Radio Free Europe (although I wouldn't consider that a contender even if there was no R.E.M. EP.) I guess I'm ok if people want to say Appetite for Destruction is GnR's first album, but it's close. Foxy Lady is another good contender, but suffers from the odd problem that on the original North American release, it's not the first song (Purple Haze is).
The best pure classic rock contender that doesn't have any flaws was probably Break on Through. A few people argued for Let The Good Times Roll, which I think is a ridiculous answer, mostly because it's not even in the first, second, third, or fourth best song on The Cars. And there was a lot of virtue signaling and Favorite Band'ing in the mix, with people promoting Blinded by the Light and Blitzkreig Bop and I Saw Her Standing There and I Will Follow and Holiday in the Sun. Fine songs, but hardly contenders in my mind.
There were many calls for I Wanna Be Adored. For the life of me, I will never get the Stone Roses. Maybe I'm just too mainstream classic rock, but I like The Replacements and the New York Dolls (Personality Crisis isn't a bad answer here!) and the Stooges and the Pixies, so I'm not convinced it's that. Ditto with the Summer Babe crowd. Pavement just never interested me.
Finally, I'm a firm believer that musical tastes are almost 100% subjective, but the people backing Solitary Man and Surfin' Safari need to take a hard look at their record collections.
See you next time (probably end of next week). Thanks for reading!