Paul Kane is one of the smarter political analysts. Yesterday, though he got something wrong by downplaying the importance of debt ceiling votes in the collective mind of the electorate. If everything goes well, it won’t matter. Careers will end if the Republicans push the country into recession, something some of them want to do. Members of Congress up for reelection this cycle— so every House member and third of the Senate, including hard-core Austerity senators like Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rick Scott (R-FL), Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) and soft-core, or closeted Austerity backers like Angus King (I-ME), Jon Tester (D-MT), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Tom Carper (D-DE), Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Jack Rosen (D-NV). Generally, the Democrats who vote pro-Austerity— the Republican position— won’t have an opponent demonizing them, because the Democratic primary system is a paper tiger. Romney will, at least in his primary (State House Speaker Brad Wilson is already running as are a couple of MAGAts— and Romney hasn’t announced his intention yet).
Kane wrote that “The debt ceiling boogeyman doesn’t really exist,” based on the fact that 3 Democrats hadn’t been targeted in GOPO advertising for their votes torahs the debt ceiling. “In reality,” he wrote, “it’s an almost perfunctory vote every 18 months or so that carries very little political risk but could also lead to incredibly horrible consequences if Congress lets the nation default on its debt. In recent years, Republicans have craved the role of hostage taker, believing they can extort a Democratic president into giving into their demands to rein in spending and address the long-term issue of debt. And Democrats have inexplicably cowered at the social-media-cable-news-driven fear that the public cares about the debt ceiling vote. Yet despite repeated examples that neither of those outcomes ever happens— it’s almost impossible to find a congressional career that ended over the debt limit, and these negotiations rarely reduce spending— Congress keeps wrapping itself in knots.”
Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) isn’t up for reelection— and has one of the safest seats in the Senate. He’s safe AND correct: “Letting people know that you voted to make sure that the economy did not tank and that Uncle Sam paid his bills on time is more than defensible, in any debate or at the ballot box. But that’s my perception and I don’t know if that’s the perception of 50 or 51 Democrats.” Van Hollen, noted Kane, “is a leading voice to abolish the debt ceiling law, the first version of which was created during World War I as a means to make it easier for the Treasury to pay debts. The current debt ceiling has been in place since roughly 1940.”
I agree with Kane that Democrats who worry about voting on what voters see as an obscure, procedural issue are naive. But I don’t agree that “Republican fears of facing conservative primary challenges based on this vote are unfounded.” The GOP primary system is robust and voting against the MAGA position is a real danger.
AdImpact, which tracks and analyzes campaign spending, searched all of the ads run in House and Senate races during 2021 and 2022 for the terms “debt,” “debt ceiling” or “debt limit.” The independent firm found less than $9 million in ads mentioning those terms.
This is a tiny fraction of the advertising in last year’s campaigns. The 25th most mentioned issue— voting rights— had almost $50 million in ads backing it. Taxes, abortion, crime, inflation and character were the five biggest topics, all with more than $250 million worth of ads mentioning them, AdImpact found.
Most of those debt ads didn’t actually mention the supposedly controversial vote. Sen. Michael F. Bennet (CO) was the only incumbent Democrat to face ads mentioning the issue, according to AdImpact. It came in fleeting, split-second mentions of how his opponent would “cut the debt” or how Bennet had allowed “trillions in debt.”
Bennet won by almost 15 percentage points, his biggest victory ever.
On the GOP side, no one should have been a riper target then Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), who took the contorted path of voting to allow Democrats to pass the $2.5 trillion hike in debt in December 2021 without having to clear the filibuster. She then opposed the actual vote to lift the debt limit.
She faced a conservative challenger on her right flank, who never ran an ad critiquing her vote to allow Democrats to raise the debt. Murkowski won her fourth full term by a comfortable seven percentage points.
In 2014, a dozen Republicans voted to clear a filibuster so that Senate Democrats could then pass a debt ceiling lift, including seven GOP senators who faced primary voters within the next two years.
All seven won their primary. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) cast that vote nine years ago knowing he already faced a wealthy conservative in the 2014 GOP primary.
“Mitch McConnell betrayed conservatives,” an announcer said in an ad quickly produced after that vote.
The issue quickly faded, and McConnell won his party’s nomination by more than 25 percentage points.
In late April, a conservative group allied with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) launched a six-figure ad campaign running on websites in 11 Democratic districts, criticizing them for voting against the GOP plan to try cut spending by $4.8 trillion in exchange for a brief lift of the debt ceiling.
That amount on an ad buy is a pittance for what will be campaigns that all cost in excess of $10 million next year, and that same group, American Action Network, moved off the debt limit vote this week and launched new digital ads focusing on energy production.
Democrats who ran in 2022 have a lesson for those facing reelection next year: go on offense, accuse Republicans of threatening to tank the global economy.
“They don’t understand what that means,” Cortez Masto said of voters views on the debt ceiling. “What they do understand, though, is a default, and they do understand— whether you’re a business owner or you’re a family— you have to pay your bills— that when you incur obligations, you got to pay those obligations. And if you don’t, there’s consequences, sometimes devastating.”
Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), running next year in a deep-red state, wants Congress to look at reining in costs, but he’s also ready to jettison the debt ceiling as that vehicle.
“I think it’s important that we take a look at the debt and deficit,” Tester told reporters, “but if it means putting our country into turmoil every time it comes up, we got to figure out a better way to do it.”
In fact, of the last seven debt showdowns, just one produced a real plan to cut costs, the 2011 Budget Control Act. Yet eight years later, in a debt ceiling deal negotiated by the Trump administration, Congress broke the BCA’s spending caps by about $320 billion, ending the 10-year law without nearly as much savings as its original plan.
Boyle feels as if almost every Democrat finally realizes this issue only allows Republicans to hold Democratic presidents hostage. But he still laments that Democrats didn’t act on their own two years ago and at least lift the debt ceiling so high that it wouldn’t be an issue the rest of Biden’s presidency.
Instead, Democrats did the piecemeal approach. Less than 17 months after that last vote, Congress is back in the same debt limit box, unsure how to avert fiscal catastrophe.
“It’s no gain and all potential pain,” Boyle said Friday, “and for an issue that never ends up being part of our political campaigns.”
2014 is different from 2024. And it isn’t the Democrats who have to worry; it’s the Republicans— like Romney— who have MAGA primary opponents who need to worry if they decide to vote for a compromise. This cycle, that would mean… well, just Romney. I guess Independents Sinema and King are also going to be in a bit of a box because whichever way they go, they’re going to be attacked in the general.
And in the House... there area couple dozen swing district Republicans who have a similar problem that Sinema and King have to confront. They could face a MAGAt in the primary if they vote to compromise or a Democrat in the general if they refuse to compromise. I would say these are a dozen who have to be very careful and take this very extremely seriously, although some can count on the DCCC giving them unelectable opponents. The number next to their name is the 2020 margin by which Biden beat Trump:
Anthony D'Esposito, NY-04 (14.6%)
David Valadao, CA-22 (13.0%)
Mike Garcia, CA-27 (12.4%)
John Duarte, CA-13 (10.9%)
Mike Lawler, NY 17 (10.1%)
Lori Chavez-DeRemer, OR-05 (8.8%)
George Santos, NY-03 (8.2%)
Brandon Williams, NY-22 (7.4%)
Don Bacon, NE-02 (6.4%)
Michelle Steel, CA-45 (6.1%)
Marc Molinaro, NY-19 (4.6%)
Brian Fitzpatrick, PA-01 (4.6%)
And in terms of the Freedom Caucus crackpots, most are in safely gerrymandered seats and their votes to push the economy over the cliff won't matter, the only exceptions would be Lauren Boebert (CO) and Scott Perry (PA) and possibly Bob Good (VA) and Anna Paulina Luna (FL) if the DCCC really decided to go all out (unlikely).
And in terms of which party to blame-- according to the Washington Post poll with ABC News right after the last shutdown, 53% of voters said Republicans were mainly responsible for the shutdown, 29% said Obama and 15% said both sides were equally responsible— similar numbers to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted during the shutdown. A USA Today/Princeton Survey Research found that 39% of adults said Republicans deserved more blame, 19% said Democrats and 36% faulted both parties equally.
Nathaniel Rakich reported in February that "House Republicans have already made it clear that they will demand spending cuts, as they did in 2011, before raising the debt ceiling. And if history is any indication, Americans will see that as a reason to blame them for any ensuing chaos. But Americans may not penalize the GOP at the ballot box for it. That’s because the political effects of these crises are short-lived; there’s always another news cycle that replaces it. Ergo, events, dear reader, events will probably put the memory of 2023’s fiscal turbulence in the rearview mirror by the time of the 2024 election. But that doesn’t make public opinion surrounding the debate irrelevant— far from it. Impasses like 2013’s and 2019’s were likely broken because Republicans felt intense public pressure to give in. So while Republicans probably don’t need to worry about losing an election due to their hard line on spending, they still ought to fret about losing public support: It will make it harder for them to stand firm in the showdown to come."
