Some notes on the Speakership fight

It feels like we're literally back to where we started, but a lot has changed

Oct 23, 2023

I’m writing this on Monday afternoon. As of now, the Republican conference is scheduled for a candidate forum tonight at 6:30pm; and the current plan is to have the conference nomination election beginning at 9:00am tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. The House itself has adjourned until tomorrow (Tuesday) morning at 11am, which is thus the earliest they could go to the floor to hold the fourth ballot for Speaker since the Office was vacated three weeks ago on October 3rd.

Here are eight things I’ve been thinking about.

Things that have already happened

First, in case you missed it, I laid out my general theory of what is going on over at Nate Silver’s excellent Substack site. My view has always been that getting 217 (or, when the house is at full capacity, the normal 218) votes for Speaker isn’t the real task at hand, either in January or now; the core goal is to produce an ongoing durable procedural majority. McCarthy never really had that, as he only won with the acquiescence of the Freedom Caucus (and never did get a majority of the House to vote in favor of him, winning 216-212, with 6 “present” votes), and saw them withdraw their support as soon as he crossed them on the Fiscal Responsibility Act.

But now the tables have turned. What we saw last week was a widespread meltdown of the idea of loyalty to conference decision-making. First the conservatives refused to consent to Scalise’s victory in the conference nomination. But then a second group decided they were going to block things on the floor that a huge percentage of the conference was in favor of, and sunk the Jordan nomination. As I put it in my post:

And this is the upshot to the first roll call vote on Jordan’s Speakership candidacy: a group in the GOP besides the Freedom Caucus decided to play hardball. The longstanding asymmetry and Freedom Caucus monopoly on hardball behavior may be coming to end.

But do go read the whole thing if you have not.

Second, I think people are not quite reading the conference/floor dynamic correctly. After Jordan failed on the floor the second time—by a 194-25 margin among Republicans—the GOP went back into conference, where Jordan lost a secret ballot to remain nominee by an overwhelming vote, 112-86. A lot of people saw this as evidence that a ton of GOP members were willing to vote against Jordan in secret, but not on the floor in public, where they might face the wrath of their constituents or the MAGA media/activist machine that could gin up a primary challenger.

While there’s obviously something to that—the Vote Yes, Hope No caucus was certainly a part of the floor vote, I’d even wager Scalise and McCarthy were in it—there are other dynamics at play. Most importantly, party loyalty. Plenty of members still feel obligated to vote for the party nominee on the floor, even if they didn’t support them in conference. Heck, some of those members might just be personally fine with anybody. McCarthy. Scalise. Jordan. They’re just going to support the nominee. Once back in conference, however, they are free to vote against Jordan again, because conference is the place you hash these things out.

We know this has to be true because of the progression of votes Jordan got. He first got 124 when he beat Austin in a secret ballot (124-84). He then immediately got 152 votes in a secret ballot question about whether Members would support him on the floor (152-55). So that’s 28 votes right there that were floor loyal but not conference loyal. He then got 200, 198, and 194 in public on the floor, adding another 40-50 votes from his conference loyalty vote performance. Those 40-50 votes are the only possible votes that could be scared to vote no in public. And some of them were obviously won over by Jordan between conference and the floor, because some of them were people who were rabidly against Jordan in public after the conference vote, like HASC chair Mike Rogers.

The other dynamic is people who just want to move on. We know they exist because Joran only got 86 votes in a secret ballot to remain as nominee. So at least 38 of his original secret ballot supporters abandoned him. They obviously wanted him to be Speaker at one point. They had just given up. It’s almost certain some of the people who didn’t vote for him the first time around also genuinely supported him on the floor, but then genuinely gave up after the third vote.

Things that are currently happening

Third, the new candidates for Speaker. They include Majority Whip Tom Emmer (MN), GOP Conference Vice Chair Mike Johnson (LA), Republican Study Committee Chair Kevin Hern (OK), Rep. Byron Donalds (FL), Austin Scott (GA), Jack Bergman (MI), Pete Sessions (TX), Gary Palmer (AL), and Dan Meuser (PA). You can read all about them in any number of group profiles that have been published, and their announcement statements are all over twitter.

Here’s a plot of the House GOP conference by NOMINATE score and District PVI, with the candidates labeled in red, the anti-Jordan vote in green, the votes to vacate McCarthy in blue, and the former speaker nominees in yellow.

Fourth, we’re in a new phase of the competition. There’s been some talk that the huge candidate field is a consequence of there being no clear favorite. I think that’s true, but the bigger picture is that we’re done with the phase where well-known leaders with large bases of support are given deference to seek the nomination. McCarthy is out, Scalise is out, and Jordan is out. Plenty of people would love to be Speaker, and this was bound to happen after the big players were defeated on the floor.

It’s now a free-for-all, and it’s really no surprise that everyone-and-their-backbench-brother gave this thing a sniff. In some ways, at this point it’s better to be unknown; now that we have setup the floor vote as a question of getting veto-players to not block you, having few or no enemies is probably worth as much or more as having a deep base of support and a long string of chits you can cash in.

And this isn’t all happening in a vacuum. There’s a tendency to see the last three weeks as an enormous waste of time, since we are no closer to a Speaker than we were on October 3rd at 3pm. But that mistakes a lack of progress for a lack of changing dynamics. We’ve had tens of hours of divisive conference meetings. We’ve brought down multiple nominees on the floor. We’ve had McCarthy and others call this embarrassing. And, of course, policy pressures are growing. The administration has formally requested the Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan/border supplemental aid package, and the clock is ticking on the expiration of the continuing resolution.

Fifth, the conference rules are really not helping. As I wrote last week, the longstanding well-known theoretical disconnect between the conference nomination threshold and the Speakership vote on the floor threshold has finally become an actual problem:

But the January fight over the Speakership had laid bare what everyone had always known was a potential weakness of this arrangement: you only need a majority of the conference (112 currently, including delegates eligible to vote in conference) to secure the nomination, but in the House floor vote you need essentially everybody in the party, since you need a majority of the House (217 right now) and the minority is not going to help you.
This was never much of a problem in the past, because norms of party loyalty— combined with strong threats of punishment from the leadership for defecting on the floor—kept party members in line. Even when the Democratic party was hopelessly divided in the 20th century between northern and southern factions that disagreed ferociously on social issues and particularly civil rights, they rarely had a problem electing a Speaker. Ditto with the Republicans. You vote for who you want in the caucus/conference, and then you support the party nominee on the floor. Simple as that.
Those days are gone.

In some ways, it’s even worse that this right now. As I discussed last week when they were considering changing these rules to require 217 conference votes for the nomination, the current election rules are more problematic than they appear. Far from building consensus in the party, they actively reinforce division.

The election rules for the House GOP are contained in Rule 4 of their conference rules:

In essence, it’s a repeated runoff, with the lowest vote-getter dropping out until someone gets a majority. That’s right: it could go up to 8 ballots. The problem is that unless someone gets a blowout majority early on, the system will tend toward someone winning with a bare majority, leaving an unreconciled opposition that has more than a critical mass to stake its claim on the floor with a patina of legitimacy.

Even worse, the structure of the nomination election can leave you with a single losing candidate with a lot of strength (such as Jordan, who had 99 votes when Scalise won with 113; or Scott, who had 84 votes when Jordan won with 124). This sets up a politics that isn’t just party nominee vs. angry holdouts, but instead party nominee vs. supporters of viable alternative. The worst possible outcome for the GOP tomorrow will be if Emmer wins, but it takes 6 or 7 or 8 ballots, and the finally tally is 120-90-10-8 or whatever, with a Freedom Caucus type candidate sitting across the MAGA-world party divide, with 90 votes. That’s a recipe to lock up the floor.

There’s an effort underway in the GOP to institutionally overcome this problem: Rep. Flood is organizing a bloc that will withhold support from any candidate that doesn’t sign a letter pledging to vote for the party nominee, whoever it is. Most of the candidates have now signed on. The problem is that the candidates probably can’t deliver their backers, and it’s not really the candidates who have been the problem in the past few rounds. But this is better than nothing, and it’s a good effort to try to get the party conference machine back in the business of creating consensus in the absence of norms of party loyalty.

Things that are going to happen later this week

Sixth, exhaustion may be setting in. By my count, the House GOP was in conference meeting for something like 20+ hours between October 10th and 20th. That’s insane. Imagine going to a 3 hour PTA meeting every night for a week, with 10 people you like and 200 you tolerate. Now imagine Matt Gaetz is there. It’s honestly not surprising that Mike Bost almost fought him after a screaming match developed between McCarthy and Gaetz. They must be completely sick of each other. And now they are headed for a candidate forum bound to last at least two hours tonight, and right back at it tomorrow for a process that could go upwards of 3 hours if it takes a lot of ballots to get a majority winner.

I just don’t see them going back to this process for full do-over. This strikes me as the last chance for the ambitious set of Speakership-seekers. If the nominee fails on the floor, and then the obvious alternative second place finisher also fails on the floor (and it’s not hard to imagine a 1-2 failure of Emmer and Hern in this manner), my bet is they don’t reopen the candidate forums and collect hopefuls. Instead, they switch over to electing a Speaker pro tempore for a termed period (perhaps the remainder of the session), and while that would likely be McHenry, I could also see them heading to Tom Cole.

Seventh, I’m not sure the party divisions will be repaired quickly—and maybe not ever—even if someone gets to 217. Representative McClintock—no squishy moderate by any means—sent out the nastiest inter-party letter I’ve ever seen on official Member stationary over the weekend. Most of the party is livid with the anti-McCarthy 8. The Scalise allies are livid at Jordan. The Jordan allies are livid at the moderates. And it may get worse yet before it begins to heal.

Eighth, a lot rests this week with the anti-Jordan faction. Finally, having had enough with the Freedom Caucus after they brought down Scalise, the moderates and the old bull Appropriations types decided to make a stand on the floor against Jordan last week. It was a powerful display and I think it caught a lot of people off guard, including the conservatives. Will it happen again?

I don’t know. It’s very easy to picture a situation where it happens: Emmer gets the nomination and is subsequently blocked by the Freedom Caucus crowd, as they hope to install their candidate (Hern? Donalds?); one Emmer goes down, the anti-Jordan coalition is again white-hot mad, and they band together to sink Hern (or whoever) on the floor.

But it’s also easy to imagine it not going that way. What if Hern wins the nomination first? Do the moderates and Old Bulls have the gall to sink a conservative, HFC-backed candidate preemptively, before the HFC lights them up by sinking someone like Emmer? I don’t know, but my gut is that they do not. And so I think there’s still an important asymmetry within the party: the mods/Bulls have proven themselves capable of hardball retaliation. But do they have the stomach yet for first-mover hardball? It would force them to abandon party loyalty on the floor, without first having the excuse of having their candidate sunk. That’s a big ask for a crowd that is deeply embedded within the existing party power structure.

Stay tuned, we may find out this week.

Matt’s Five Points

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