Debt Ceiling

Who Gave Up More In The Debt Ceiling Negotiations: Biden Or Republicans?

A FiveThirtyEight Chat

Jun. 2, 2023, at 8:45 AM

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior reporter): On Wednesday night, the House voted to approve a debt ceiling deal, pulling the country back from a catastrophic potential default. And on Thursday night, the Senate passed the bill too. The deal will suspend the debt limit until the first quarter of 2025, with some cuts to government spending and new work requirements for some recipients of government benefits. There were some dramatic moments — including a last-minute rebellion from far-right Republicans — but ultimately the 314-117 vote in favor of the bill was decisive and bipartisan.

Of course, both houses of Congress had to agree on the deal But the Republican-controlled House was always going to be the bigger hurdle for both President Biden and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who had a very slim majority to work with. So let’s talk about the political ramifications of the deal-making process and the vote in the House. How did the vote break down among Democrats and Republicans, and were you surprised by anything that happened over the course of the day on Wednesday?

kaleigh (Kaleigh Rogers, technology and politics reporter): Well, as expected, the outer fringes of both parties were not super stoked about this compromise, since it didn’t fully meet either side’s ideal. That meant it was up to members in the center to get it over the finish line, which they did without too much drama.

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, senior elections analyst): No doubt about that, Kaleigh. If we look at a breakdown of the vote, it turns out that Republicans with more conservative voting records — and from redder districts — were somewhat more likely to vote against the bill than other Republicans. The same was true (although to a lesser extent) for more liberal Democrats from bluer seats, compared with other Democrats.

Monica Potts (Monica Potts, senior politics reporter): I was a bit surprised to see how much of the support for the deal came from Democrats: 165 Democrats voted for it, while only 149 Republicans did, and 71 Republicans opposed it (compared to 46 Democrats). It’s hard to see how it would have passed without Democratic support, and Kevin McCarthy’s leadership was already shaky. I wonder what this will mean within McCarthy’s own caucus, that he couldn’t get enough support from his own party to pass it without Democratic help. 

geoffrey.skelley: The spin from all directions was interesting yesterday. You had a fair amount of press coverage — and many Republicans — casting the vote as proof that McCarthy can successfully lead a narrow House majority after he struggled to become speaker back in January. But then you had other right-wing voices suggesting the vote was proof that McCarthy is weak because the legislation passed with even more Democratic votes. I suspect it is too early to know for sure! A final judgment on this episode may rest on whether the party’s right flank attempts to force McCarthy out via a motion to vacate the chair, and if such an action receives significant support among the broader GOP caucus.

But at the end of the day, McCarthy did get roughly two-thirds of his caucus to back a debt ceiling hike, which is an accomplishment given the rhetoric from some in the party who opposed the agreement. (Although that kind of talk is sometimes bluster.) Really, though, McCarthy was always going to need some Democratic votes to get this over the line. That’s frustrating to members on the far right, but an actual bipartisan deal was never going to get their unabashed approval. 

ameliatd: So is this a win for McCarthy? Or not?

geoffrey.skelley: Based on what I laid out above, I guess my early view is that it’s a win for McCarthy. But the size of the win is yet to be determined.

kaleigh: It’s a modest win for McCarthy. A modest but perhaps slightly larger win for Biden.

Monica Potts: The deal is pretty far from the Republican version the House passed in April. I would say it’s a bigger win for Biden than for Republicans, but it was sort of a forced crisis in that raising the debt ceiling is just about paying for things already approved by Congress. 

ameliatd: And Biden said he wouldn’t negotiate at all! There are definitely some concessions in the deal to Republicans. Let’s talk a bit about what each side gave up. What made this deal a compromise, and who gave the most?

kaleigh: That’s the thing, right? Biden was able to get this deal together without conceding a ton to the GOP. But his original position was that this shouldn’t even be a discussion. He started by saying that raising the debt ceiling should be entirely divorced from spending talks, and obviously that didn’t happen. There could be some strategy there — stake out an extreme position so that any minor concession feels like a compromise — but it also sets a precedent for debt ceiling talks down the line as an opportunity for Republicans to squeeze spending cuts out of Democrats in order to do what ought to be a pretty standard bureaucratic function.

Monica Potts: On some of the things the sides had to give up: House Republicans really wanted to add work requirements to Medicaid for some adults, and they had to drop that demand, although they did get an expansion to work requirements in the food stamp program. This has been a Republican goal for a while: Arkansas tried a work-requirement program for Medicaid in 2018 before it was halted by the courts, arguing that the requirements would help people find work and move off coverage. That program — and work requirements in general — are opposed by progressives. It’s worth saying that most studies show that work requirements don’t increase work participation; instead they actually decrease participation in safety net programs. A Kaiser Health study of the Arkansas program found that 18,000 people were kicked off Medicaid in Arkansas while it lasted, many of whom were either not required to work or were already working but had problems meeting the reporting requirements. 

geoffrey.skelley: Eh, it probably was untenable for Biden to not give up something without making this more of a crisis. If he had been more strident — or if McCarthy gave less ground — there’d have been a higher chance of the country ending up in default, rather than getting a hard-fought negotiation that, while going down to the last minute, wasn’t necessarily a hair’s breadth from failing. Moreover, McCarthy would have had a very difficult time selling a clean debt ceiling hike to most of his membership, which was necessary for the legislation to reach the floor barring a miracle discharge petition — and it was in Biden’s interest to avoid a calamity just as much as it was for McCarthy. 

So yeah, the strategy seems to be: Stake out an early position of “we’re not negotiating,” but in reality negotiate.

Monica Potts: I agree with Kaleigh and Geoffrey that in some ways the negotiation itself is a win for Republicans. The idea that the debt ceiling is a tool for negotiating spending cuts has become more normal.

ameliatd: So … is it fair to say the real winner here was bipartisanship? (I didn’t think bipartisanship was allowed to win anymore!)

kaleigh: Call me Pollyanna but, honestly, yes. And it’s not a bad look for Biden, who has long made his ability to reach across the aisle and find compromise key to his brand.

geoffrey.skelley: There’s not a ton of bipartisanship available these days, but this is a pretty good example of getting a bipartisan result! Despite the closely-divided House, more than two-thirds of each party backed the agreement!

Monica Potts: Maybe I am cynical but I am seeing everyone as a bit of a loser. Plenty of economists have called for an end to the debt ceiling in general: It doesn’t govern future spending, and the U.S. is obligated to meet its financial obligations. Not reaching a deal could have caused a disaster, and I’m not sure anyone got enough of what they wanted to make that flirtation with disaster worth it.

geoffrey.skelley: Yes, in the long run, the debt ceiling — a thing most other developed countries do not have — should probably go the way of the dodo so we stop doing this every one or two years.

ameliatd: What’s it going to take for that to happen, though? The danger of default is such an effective bargaining chip.

geoffrey.skelley: It’ll take some sort of one-party action when that party has complete control of the government. But I think the biggest hang-up is the perceived risk of voting for getting rid of the debt ceiling or raising it so high as to be irrelevant.

kaleigh: It’s a bit like the filibuster in that way. Everyone likes it when they get to wield it, and hates it when it’s wielded against them.

ameliatd: But are everyday Americans really going to care if the debt ceiling goes bye-bye? As you wrote earlier this week, Kaleigh, their views on it are pretty muddled.

geoffrey.skelley: I think members in competitive seats, or deep-red seats, are afraid of the ads that would ensue during the next election season. Imagine: “[insert representative] voted to run up debt in this country” with some small type at the bottom of the screen noting the vote. 

kaleigh: It’s definitely a subject the average American says they don’t understand well or follow closely. If Congress were to eliminate the debt ceiling, there would of course be ways to spin it during campaign season to point out how members voted, as you note, Geoffrey, but that’s also true of this vote on the deal.

ameliatd: Now we’re talking about our bread and butter: elections. Biden has just launched his reelection campaign. What — if anything — does the deal mean for his chances in 2024?

geoffrey.skelley: Biden can sell this deal as proof of his bipartisan bona fides and commitment to responsible government vs. the chaos associated with Trump. So in that way, it may well be useful for his overall profile with voters who helped elect him in 2020 but aren’t solidly in the Democrats’ camp.

At the same time, we’re so far from the true 2024 general election campaign that it may not matter a great deal. Avoiding a debt default crisis almost certainly won’t matter as much as an actual crisis would have.

Monica Potts: I agree with Geoffrey that Biden can sell this as an example of bipartisanship. I don’t know if voters will remember this particular fight, but I think a lot will depend on the overall economy and how people are feeling about their financial situation when they vote. Americans care about how they’re doing financially, so that will matter more than this deal I think.

kaleigh: I’d agree with Geoffrey’s last point. This is almost a non-contributing factor to 2024, whereas defaulting on the debt would have been a huge blow to Biden’s campaign. But default would have been a crisis for everybody who is currently in office, so the only way through this was always going to be a compromise.

2024 Election

Why Trump Is Polling Much Better Among Very Conservative Primary Voters Than In 2016

By Michael Tesler

Jun. 1, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Shortly before the 2016 presidential primaries began, the influential conservative outlet the National Review devoted an entire edition of its biweekly magazine to making the ideological case “against Trump.”

The issue featured essays from over 20 prominent conservatives explaining why Donald Trump’s campaign was “a menace to conservatism.” It also included a scathing editorial from the National Review’s editors, which disparaged the Republican Party’s then-presidential frontrunner as “a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.” 

With Trump’s campaign rhetoric rejecting the party’s “broad conservative ideological consensus” in favor of heterodox positions on issues from government spending to restricting free markets to isolationist foreign policies, it’s not surprising that he performed relatively poorly with “very conservative” voters in the 2016 Republican primaries. 

But that prior pattern has now completely reversed itself in early polling on the 2024 Republican primaries. 

In a February 2016 poll from Quinnipiac University, Trump received only 27 percent support among Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters who described themselves as “very conservative” — 18 percentage points worse than he did with “somewhat conservative” GOP primary voters. Quinnipiac’s March 2023 poll, however, suggests that Trump now has the support of 61 percent of “very conservative” Republican primary voters — 18 points higher than his support among the “somewhat conservatives.”¹

Trump’s strong showing among the most conservative voters shows up in other early polling on the 2024 primaries as well. A late April SurveyUSA Poll of likely primary voters in North Carolina had him winning 72 percent of “very conservative” Republicans, compared with less than half of other Republican voters. Likewise, another late April survey from Echelon Insights showed Trump polling 27 percentage points better among “very conservative” Republicans in head-to-head nationwide primary matchups against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis than he did with “somewhat conservative” Republicans (77 percent to 50 percent).

These results raise the question of why the ideology of Trump’s base has changed so dramatically from 2016 to 2023.

There are undoubtedly multiple factors at play here, but perhaps the biggest are the profound ways in which Trump’s presidency shifted the meaning of conservatism in U.S. politics. As political scientists Dan Hopkins and Hans Noel documented in a previous piece for FiveThirtyEight, Trump has come to define who and what Republican Party activists — that is, people who volunteer for political campaigns, donate money, work for politicians, etc. — think of as conservative. Their research, for instance, found that GOP activists viewed Trump critics like former Sens. Ben Sasse and Patrick Toomey as much less conservative than their voting records in Congress indicated. Meanwhile, GOP activists viewed Trump boosters as the most reliably conservative politicians. 

But Trump has also powerfully redefined what constitutes conservatism for rank-and-file Republican voters, according to my analyses of data from the Cooperative Election Survey — a massive academic survey administered by YouGov that asks over 50,000 respondents every two years to, among other things, rate politicians’ ideologies on a seven-point scale from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” 

According to CES data, Republicans nationwide now view Trump as more conservative than they did immediately before the 2016 general election. On the other hand, Utah Republicans perceived Sen. Mitt Romney as a lot less conservative after his February 2020 vote to convict Trump during his first impeachment trial. But that decline pales in comparison to the utter evaporation of former Rep. Liz Cheney’s conservative credentials. Wyoming Republicans repeatedly rated Cheney as a solid conservative in 2016, 2018 and 2020. Yet her reputation as a stalwart conservative vanished entirely after she voted to impeach Trump in January 2021 and subsequently became one of the former president’s most vocal critics in Congress as vice chair of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection — so much so, that Wyoming Republicans placed her all the way on the liberal side of the ideological spectrum in the 2022 CES.

Romney and Cheney are not the only politicians whose conservative bona fides have been questioned after criticizing Trump. The seven Republican senators who voted to convict the former president during his second impeachment trial were all rated as much less conservative than we would otherwise expect from their Senate voting records, as measured by the first dimension of DW-NOMINATE — a political science metric that scores congressional voting records from -1 (most liberal) to 1 (most conservative). Even after we control for those voting records, Republican CES respondents, on average, rated the GOP senators who convicted Trump a full category (i.e., “middle of the road” instead of “somewhat conservative” or “conservative” instead of “very conservative”) more liberal than the senators who acquitted him on the CES’s seven-point ideological scale.²

It certainly seems from these results, then, that Trump has not only reshaped the Republican Party in his own image; he has also redefined what it means to be a conservative. So, while an awful lot can change over the course of the primary campaign, it appears that Trump will garner disproportionate support from self-described “very conservative” Republicans in the 2024 primaries. Conservatism, after all, is becoming increasingly synonymous with Trumpism in the minds of GOP voters.

2024 Election

Are Black And Hispanic Americans Abandoning Biden?

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

May 31, 2023, at 6:00 AM

President Biden has an enthusiasm problem — again. Since he kicked off his reelection bid in late April, asking Americans for another four years to “finish this job,” there’s been plenty of attention to his potential weaknesses among key voting blocs, particularly Black voters. New data from the 2022 midterm elections also reinforces earlier election analysis suggesting that turnout was down among Black and Hispanic Americans compared to the 2018 midterms, underscoring concerns that support for Biden could be slipping among voters of color.

We took a look at the numbers and found that yes, Biden’s approval has dropped dramatically among Black Americans since he took office in January 2021. But the biggest decline wasn’t among Black Americans: It was among Hispanic Americans. 

These approval trends, and other recent polls, suggest that while Biden does have reasons to be concerned about tepid interest among Black voters, his problems aren’t confined to this group. During the 2020 election, the Biden campaign was criticized for its flawed outreach to Hispanic voters, and key segments of this group, including Hispanic voters living in Miami and the Rio Grande Valley, went on to support former President Donald Trump in surprisingly high numbers. Hispanic Americans now may be even less supportive of Biden than Black Americans, exposing another vulnerability for the president as he heads into his reelection campaign. Biden’s approval has recently recovered slightly among Black Americans, though, rising from an average of about 60 percent approval in July 2022 to an average of around 70 percent in April 2023. That improvement coincided with growing optimism among Black Americans about the state of the economy, suggesting that Biden may be able to repair some damage among this key group — particularly if views on the economy continue to improve.

Biden’s overall approval rating has been underwater since the summer of 2021, falling during the botched withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and remaining low as inflation surged. Voters of color, in particular, seem disappointed with Biden’s performance, with favorability ratings falling more than 13 percentage points among Black and Hispanic Americans between the spring of 2021 and the spring of 2023.

Apart from the sour economy, voters of color have plenty of reasons to be frustrated with Biden’s first term. He came into office with a string of lofty promises — comprehensive federal voting rights legislation, police reform, clear pathways to citizenship for immigrants — none of which were enacted during his first two years in office, when Democrats controlled Congress. Now, with Republicans in charge of the House of Representatives, there’s little chance that these policies will pass, leaving Biden with broken promises to answer for. A recent Ipsos/Washington Post poll found that only 34 percent of Black Americans say that Biden’s policies have helped Black people, while 14 percent say they’ve hurt Black people and nearly half (49 percent) say they haven’t made a difference.

And there’s evidence from recent polls that some voters of color are less likely than Democrats overall to want Biden to run for reelection. For example, a YouGov/Economist poll conducted April 29 to May 2 found that less than half (46 percent) of Black respondents and only 37 percent of Hispanic respondents want Biden to run for a second term, compared to 54 percent of Democrats overall. Add that to the fact that Black turnout does seem to have fallen overall in the 2022 midterms, while Republicans maintained their 2020 levels of support among Latinos — plus a recent slew of anecdotal reporting about Black voters’ frustration with Biden — and it looks like a fairly bleak picture for the president. After all, Black voters were key to Biden’s primary victory back in 2020, and Trump’s inroads among Hispanic voters narrowed Democrats’ margins during the general election, prompting anxiety on the left about the future of the party’s diverse coalition if the trend continues. 

There are two separate worries here. One is that if voters of color are uninspired by Biden, they simply won’t turn out to vote. Democratic activists have long complained that mainstream candidates like Biden take voters of color for granted, assuming they will continue to vote for Democrats because the Republican Party ignores them at best and is openly hostile to them at worst. But of course, that’s not a fair assumption: People always have the option to simply not vote. And then there’s the possibility that some voters of color could actually flip to Republicans. That’s particularly true of Latinos, a complex constituency with plenty of reasons to consider Republican candidates.

But the situation isn’t as dreary for Biden as it appears — at least, when it comes to Black voters. For one thing, even if Black voters aren’t especially enthusiastic about the idea of a second Biden term, they haven’t soured on him personally. A YouGov/CBS News poll conducted from April 21-24 found that Black respondents are much likelier (at 76 percent) than Hispanic (55 percent) or white (42 percent) respondents to say they like how Biden handles himself personally. The same poll found that Black respondents (73 percent) are much likelier than white (52 percent) or Hispanic (48 percent) respondents to say they would feel “accepting” about Biden running for reelection, and less likely (13 percent) than white (22 percent) or Hispanic (23 percent) respondents to say they would be “disappointed.” 

Meanwhile, that YouGov/Economist poll suggests that Black voters continue to see Biden as the Democrats’ strongest candidate: The poll found that 50 percent of Black Americans believe that Biden is the strongest candidate Democrats could nominate for president in 2024, compared to 32 percent of Hispanic respondents and 22 percent of white respondents. And the bottom line from 2022 might not be as bad for Democrats as it seems, at least among Black voters — a recent analysis from the Democratic-leaning firm Catalist found that while Black turnout did fall, levels of Black support for Democrats increased in highly contested races in the South, where Black candidates were running for major offices and Democratic campaigns and organizations focused a significant amount of resources on getting out the vote. (On the other hand, a lack of investment among Black voters in other places may have hurt Democrats in at least one state — in the Wisconsin U.S. Senate election, only 84 percent of Black voters went for the Democrat, down from 90 percent in 2020.)

Part of Biden’s challenge is that perceptions of the success of his presidency are closely tied to how the economy is doing, which is something that’s very hard for the president to control directly. There are some signs that Black and Hispanic Americans’ outlook on the economy is improving — although it’s still far from rosy. A recent tracking poll from Civiqs shows that less than half (44 percent) of Black Americans say the current condition of the national economy is fairly bad or worse, down from around 57 percent in late June 2022. Hispanic Americans’ view of the economy is more negative, but it’s also improved since last summer.

So a lot could depend on what happens to the economy over the next year — especially whether inflation continues to slow, whether the country is able to avoid a recession caused by the federal government’s attempts to curb inflation and whether a debt ceiling deal goes through. If the economy improves, Biden will be in a stronger position overall, and voters of color may be less skeptical about whether he deserves a second term. But whatever happens, it’s clear that the Biden campaign will need to actively engage with Black and Hispanic voters if the president wants to maintain the Democratic Party’s diverse coalition in 2024.

Additional contributions from Ryan Best, Cooper Burton and Holly Fuong.

Over the weekend the White House and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced an agreement to suspend the debt ceiling and make cuts to discretionary spending. The bill is expected to be taken up in the House on Wednesday. According to the Treasury Department the US will run out of cash to pay its bills on June 5th, meaning the clock is ticking for the bill to pass the House, Senate and be signed by President Biden.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew talks about what’s in the agreement, why polls on the debt ceiling have been straight up contradictory and what could happen if the legislation isn’t passed by next Monday. They also discuss the significant increase in laws addressing sexuality and gender in Republican-led states and what Americans think about them. And Galen Speaks with Monica Potts about her new book, “The Forgotten Girls.”

Over the weekend, the White House and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced an agreement to suspend the debt ceiling and make cuts to discretionary spending. According to the Treasury Department, the U.S. will run out of cash to pay its bills on June 5, meaning the clock is ticking for the bill to pass the House, Senate and be signed by President Biden. The bill is expected to be taken up in the House on Wednesday.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew talks about what’s in the agreement, why polls on the debt ceiling have been straight-up contradictory and what could happen if the legislation isn’t passed by next Monday. They also discuss the significant increase in laws involving sexuality and gender in Republican-led states and what Americans think about them. And Galen speaks with senior writer Monica Potts about her new book, “The Forgotten Girls.”

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.

Pollapalooza

Why Debt Ceiling Polls Keep Giving Us Conflicting Results

By Kaleigh Rogers

May 30, 2023, at 10:21 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly-ish polling roundup.

The White House and Speaker of the House have come to a tentative — though as yet unpassed — agreement for raising the debt ceiling. But does this agreement match what Americans have been hoping for in this crisis? Yes, it does. Also, no, it does not. 

If you think Congress and the White House have been divided on how to resolve the debt ceiling crisis, wait until you see what the American people think about it. Over the past few weeks, pollsters have attempted to capture where Americans stand on this contentious economic battle, and the results are as clear as mud.

This was illustrated quite dramatically last Tuesday, when two polls on the debt ceiling were released with wildly different results. In one, from SSRS/CNN, 60 percent of Americans said Congress shouldn’t raise the debt ceiling unless it cuts spending at the same time. In the other, from Marist/NPR/PBS NewsHour, 52 percent of Americans said Congress should raise the debt ceiling first and worry about spending cuts separately. The headline takeaways were in direct opposition: A majority of Americans say the debt ceiling should be raised with spending cuts … and also a majority of Americans say the debt ceiling should be raised without spending cuts.

These two polls are just the tip of the iceberg. For every recent poll finding on Americans’ views of the debt ceiling debate, there seemed to be a poll showing just the opposite. In a Data For Progress poll from May 3-4, a majority of likely voters (58 percent) said Congress should act as soon as possible to raise the debt ceiling and not “waste time” negotiating on spending. But in a TIPP/Issues & Insights poll from May 3-5, a plurality of Americans (46 percent) said Congress should raise the debt ceiling in exchange for spending cuts. Meanwhile, 58 percent of U.S. adults said debt payments and federal spending should be handled as separate issues, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted April 28-May 3. But then, 60 percent of registered voters said Congress should only raise the debt ceiling with spending restraints, according to a May 17-18 poll from Harris/Harvard CAPS.

OK, so Americans’ views on whether raising the debt ceiling should be tied to spending caps vary a lot by poll. But the one thing they can all agree on is that, one way or the other, the debt ceiling needs to be raised, right? Er … about that …

In a YouGov/Yahoo News survey from early May, 40 percent of Americans said they were in favor of raising the debt limit, while 35 percent were opposed and 25 percent were unsure. An Ipsos/Reuters poll conducted May 5-7 Uno-reverso’d those results — 43 percent of Americans supported raising the ceiling, while 54 percent opposed it. And when YouGov, in early May, tried presenting respondents with a more detailed explanation of what raising the debt ceiling entails before asking them if they supported or opposed it, Americans were evenly divided: 39 percent for raising the debt ceiling, 40 percent against it. 

Whew! OK, so — what the heck is going on?

First of all, this isn’t anything new: Congress has had debt limit fights in the past, and public opinion polling was just as conflicted then as it is now. Second, many of the discrepancies can be explained by simple differences in question wording. 

The wording of questions on the debt ceiling, even when ostensibly measuring the same sentiments, varied widely from poll to poll. In the ABC News/Washington Post poll, for example, the question about whether to raise the debt ceiling with or without spending cuts opened with a brief synopsis of the situation: “Congress typically passes legislation on a regular basis to allow the government to pay its debts. Without this step, the government could default on its debts.” That might have primed most respondents to say that the issues of debt payment and federal spending should be handled separately. Meanwhile, in the Harris/Harvard CAPS poll, the question led with, “The current size of the national debt is $31 trillion.” That might have steered respondents toward saying that Congress should raise the debt ceiling only with restraints on future spending.

The polls’ different samples may also have contributed to the different results. Some populations may be more engaged on the topic than others. For example, likely voters (like the ones queried by Data for Progress) might be likelier than all adults (like the ones queried by TIPP) to be aware of the consequences of a default. 

But perhaps the biggest factor is how complex of an issue the debt limit fight is — and how poorly many Americans understand it. Let’s go back to that YouGov poll from early May. The pollster quizzed respondents on the correct definition of the debt ceiling: Is it a limit on government spending or a limit on the government’s borrowing to finance spending that already has been approved? While about half of Americans (52 percent) correctly chose the latter definition, a quarter chose the incorrect one, and another 18 percent said they weren’t sure.

Furthermore, in a Monmouth University poll conducted May 18-23 — just last week! — fewer than half of Americans (45 percent) said they had heard “a lot” about the debt ceiling debate, while 40 percent had heard “a little” and 15 percent had heard “nothing at all.” And in an Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted May 11-15, just 21 percent of U.S. adults said they were following the negotiations over the debt ceiling “extremely closely” or “very closely,” and 20 percent said they understood the situation “extremely well” or “very well.” 

Instead, partisan breakdowns of the polling results show many Americans’ views line up with their party’s perspective. Given how volatile the results are, and the fact that few Americans say they are following the topic closely or understand it well, this suggests Americans don’t have strong, fixed opinions on this issue, making them even more susceptible to partisan messaging. 

Other polling bites

• Amid recent reporting that has raised questions (and prompted a Senate inquiry) about ethical standards on the Supreme Court, just-released polling results from last year show public confidence in the high court reached an all-time low in 2022. Just 18 percent of U.S. adults said they had a “great deal” of confidence in the Supreme Court, while 46 percent said they had “some” and 36 percent said “hardly any,” according to the General Social Survey by the Associated Press/NORC. This is the lowest confidence level since the GSS began tracking confidence in the court in 1973. Justice Clarence Thomas (who is at the center of the ethics scandals), in particular, is unpopular. A recent Marquette Law School poll found Thomas had a net favorability of -11 percentage points, making him the least popular justice on the court.
• Despite inflation slowing for the 10th month in a row in April, more Americans say they’re feeling the pinch of rising prices. Sixty-one percent of Americans said recent price increases have caused a financial hardship for their household, according to a Gallup poll conducted April 3-17. This is up 6 points since the last time Gallup surveyed on this question in November 2022 and is the highest since the pollster started asking in November 2021. Lower-income Americans were more likely than middle- and upper-income Americans to report that price increases have caused a hardship, and they were also more likely to report that the hardship is severe enough to affect their ability to maintain their standard of living. 
• Former President Donald Trump’s supporters have an image problem, according to a TIPP/Issues & Insights poll from May 3-5. When asked whether they “agree or disagree with describing Trump supporters as MAGA extremists,” 50 percent of U.S. adults agreed, including 24 percent of Republicans. 
• The majority of Americans say they’ve never taken any psychedelics … but those who have tried magic mushrooms say they had a pretty good time. A YouGov survey conducted May 16-19 asked U.S. adults if they had ever tried LSD (acid), psilocybin (magic mushrooms), MDMA, DMT, mescaline (peyote), Ketamine, or Salvia. Sixty-eight percent said they hadn’t tried any of the psychedelics, while 12 percent had tried acid, 12 percent had tried ’shrooms and 10 percent had taken MDMA. But among those who had tried psilocybin, 83 percent said they had a somewhat or very positive experience. As more states consider legalizing or decriminalizing certain psychedelics such as psilocybin, perhaps these numbers will shift. (Or if you’re currently on a psychedelic, they might be shifting all over the room right now.) 

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,¹ 41.5 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 54.8 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -13.3 points). At this time last week, 42.1 percent approved and 53.5 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -11.3 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 43.0 percent and a disapproval rating of 52.5 percent, for a net approval rating of -9.5 points.

Debt Ceiling

How Bad Could A Government Default Get?

Hint: Ordinary Americans will be hurt almost immediately.

By Monica Potts

May 26, 2023, at 6:00 AM

With less than a week until the U.S. runs out of cash, economists and policymakers are using words like “cataclysmic event” and “calamity” to describe what will happen if Congress doesn’t raise the debt limit. 

It seems bad. Economists are predicting that if the government is unable to pay its bills, it could bring much of the global financial system to a halt. But everyday people will be affected too. So who would a failure to raise the debt limit hurt first — and who would be hurt the most?

You can think of the impact of the default as a sinkhole, pulling down the people closest to the epicenter first but spreading out to more and more people until (depending on how long it lasts) it finally engulfs the U.S. economy. The first people who are likely to be affected are those who get money directly from the government, including government employees and recipients of government direct payments, like retirees, veterans and disabled Americans who rely on social security income. Soon, though, the government’s inability to pay its bills might hit health care providers who are reimbursed through Medicare and Medicaid. Homebuyers, too, could get hit by higher interest rates, making it even more difficult for them to purchase houses in an already-competitive market. All of this adds up to a potential economic slowdown that could cause a severe recession if the crisis drags on.

People and organizations who get paid by the government

The looming crisis is simple: If the Treasury were to hit the debt limit, it would no longer be able to borrow money — even to make good on debts Congress has already incurred. That means it wouldn’t bring in enough money to meet all of its obligations, forcing the government to make decisions about where available cash should go. If a default happens, the government is likely to prioritize monthly Treasury interest payments that preserve its ability to borrow in the future and minimize chaos in the financial markets, according to a Moody’s Analytics report published earlier this month. When making tradeoffs about which of its financial obligations to fulfill, direct payments to people and institutions who rely on government money could be affected. (An additional complication is that prioritizing some payments over others may not be legal, so the government could face a raft of lawsuits.) 

A lot of people rely on the government to pay its bills on time. There are almost 2 million federal government employees whose direct income could be affected. That doesn’t include the roughly 1.3 million active-duty military personnel, as of last count, and an additional 3.9 million veterans who receive disability support. The government could furlough or lay off workers in an effort to save money during a debt-ceiling crisis, leaving many of these people without an income. These tradeoffs could start to happen immediately, since one of the first bills that’s coming due is $12 billion in promised veterans’ benefits on June 1, and an additional $5 billion in federal salaries and insurance is scheduled to be paid out on June 9, according to an analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Additionally, just about 66 million Americans received some form of social security benefit, like retirement or disability income, as of the end of 2022. That number included 7.6 million disabled workers who receive Social Security Disability Insurance. Federal policy already limits the ability of recipients to save, because of asset limits, and the amount of additional income allowed, so going without any one check could pose a severe hardship, said Kimberly Knackstedt, director of the Disability Economic Justice Team at the left-leaning The Century Foundation. “That sort of insecurity of, ‘Is this check that’s already not enough to get housing and food going to come this month, or is it not,’ is causing serious concern for us and for people around the country,” Knackstedt said.

Almost 6 million people are receiving unemployment payments, too. While unemployment insurance is administered by the states, it relies on federal money that could also be disrupted, according to Bernard Yaros, an economist at Moody’s Analytics who focuses on federal fiscal policy. The government has multiple Social Security payments set throughout the month of June, according to the BPC analysis, which could be delayed.

And it’s not just individuals who rely on government payments. Industries that contract with the federal government, like the aerospace industry and defense contractors, are vulnerable, according to Moody’s. Health care institutions could also suffer, especially small and rural hospitals, because they rely on Medicaid and Medicare payments for much of their revenue. States heavily reliant on these industries, like Virginia, could see hits to their local economy that might be bigger than the impact on the country as a whole. 

Homebuyers

Homebuyers would also be hard hit. The housing market, walloped by dramatic ups and downs during the COVID-19 pandemic, is just reaching a tenuous stability. Mortgage interest rates remain high, which has kept some buyers out of the market, but there are just enough buyers and sellers to see some activity. That could all change with a crash, which is what might happen if large numbers of people are suddenly pushed out of the market by higher rates. Jeff Tucker, a senior economist at the real-estate marketplace Zillow, estimated that rates could go up by an additional 2 percentage points. If that happened, he said, “the housing market would get pushed down further 23 percent from … the pace we were expecting for this summer.”

Moreover, homebuying remains an important wealth-building tool, and it’s already been a market where those looking for affordable options have struggled to gain a foothold. A longer default could mean that rates remain high for a while, making it even more difficult for non-wealthy people to buy. “I think the longer term impact there will be to widen inequality from a wealth-building perspective,” Tucker said. White adults are already much more likely to be able to afford a home, and the median age of first-time homebuyers is rising. A debt default crisis would make that problem worse just as a diverse generation of millennials enters prime home-buying years, he said.

The entire economy

Then there’s the threat to the broader economy, which isn’t as direct, but is still very serious. Think about it this way: In addition to the tumult that’s likely to ensue in the financial markets, if all of the people who rely on the government for payments are suddenly struggling, then those effects will ripple out to the economy, because they and the other recipients of government payments won’t be buying goods and services to the same degree. That’s part of the reason economists warn that a debt default could create a recession, even if the crisis is short. A prolonged crisis could have severe consequences, especially because the economy is already fragile. 

Moody’s calculated the result of a short debt-ceiling breach as a 0.7 percent decline in real GDP, 1.5 million jobs lost and an unemployment rate that nears 5 percent. But a debt-ceiling breach that lasts through July would cause “economic carnage.” The Moody’s report forecasts real GDP would fall by 4.6 percent in the second half of this year, and an unemployment rate that rises to 8 percent. The downturn could have lasting effects in the form of higher interest rates and reduced growth throughout the next decade.

In all, though, the financial credibility of the American government itself could be seriously harmed — which could have long-term economic impacts on ordinary people too. In 2011, a similar debt-ceiling fight led S&P to downgrade the U.S.’s credit rating, and something like that could happen again, costing taxpayers money. (Indeed, Fitch, a major credit-rating agency, has already issued a warning.) Once it defaults on its debts, even for a short while, a message about the faith the world can have in the U.S.’s political and financial systems will already have been sent. “You would be forgiven if you looked at all the data right now and said, ‘Oh, the consumer is resilient. The economy is resilient. We can, it can withstand this brinksmanship,’” Yaros said. But inflation is still high, and risk of a recession is just under the surface, which means the economy could already be headed toward a downturn in the year to come. “The debt limit would just accelerate that, or it would just pour kerosene on,” he said. 

Transcript

Nathaniel Rakich: In real estate, it’s usually a good thing for houses to have high ceilings. But one House doesn’t seem to want one.

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are refusing to raise the nation’s debt ceiling unless President Biden agrees to their demands. The standoff has consumed political news coverage and ground work in Congress to a halt — but why is it so important? What’s the deal with the debt ceiling?

The debt ceiling is the statutory limit on how much money the federal government can borrow in order to pay its existing financial obligations. There’s a common misconception that raising the debt limit is the same as authorizing new spending, but that’s not true: It just allows the government to pay debts it has already incurred. Think of it as paying off your credit card, not using it to buy a new fighter jet.

Currently, the debt limit is $31.4 trillion — and we’re dangerously close to hitting it. Actually, we already technically hit it back in January, but the Treasury Department has been taking so-called “extraordinary measures” — essentially, creative accounting maneuvers — to avoid defaulting on our debt. But those measures are expected to run out soon. No one knows exactly when that “X-date” is, but the Congressional Budget Office has calculated it will be in the first two weeks of June.

If the debt ceiling isn’t raised by then, the U.S. won’t have the legal authority to pay for spending it has already committed to, like Medicare and Social Security payments. In other words, the U.S. would be forced to default on its debt — which would have a catastrophic impact on the economy. The stock market could crash, and millions of people could lose their jobs.

The only thing that needs to happen to prevent this is for Biden and congressional Republicans to enact a bill raising the debt limit — but of course, that’s easier said than done. Republicans have insisted that any bill that raises the debt limit also include dramatic spending cuts and work requirements for recipients of government assistance. Meanwhile, Biden favors a “clean” bill to raise the debt ceiling with no conditions. The two sides have been furiously negotiating for weeks, but they seem to have made little progress toward a deal. Essentially, they’re playing a game of chicken with the national economy — each side is betting that the other one would rather cave than cause an economic disaster.

If worse comes to worse, though, the U.S. has options. Some progressives want to invoke the 14th Amendment, which states that “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” Essentially, they think Biden could just quote “Mean Girls” and declare, “The [debt] limit does not exist.” But Republicans would certainly challenge this in court, making it a risky strategy.

So the fate of the national economy boils down to a staring contest between Biden and Republicans. The only question is who blinks first. [stares at camera for uncomfortably long period of time, then blinks] Dammit.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has officially entered the Twitter space … er, presidential race. He kicked off his campaign in a conversation on a glitchy Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks on Wednesday. In his opening remarks, he stressed his electability and the ability to implement a policy platform that may not look all that different from that of former President Donald Trump.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses what DeSantis’s presidential bid will look like. In FiveThirtyEight’s national GOP primary polling averages, Trump currently leads at around 54 percent with DeSantis at around 20 percent, although these things can change quickly in a primary environment. In fact, they already have: Just a couple months ago, Trump’s lead over DeSantis was half of what it is today.

State Legislatures

Over 100 Anti-LGBTQ+ Laws Passed In The Last Five Years — Half Of Them This Year

By Kaleigh Rogers and Mary Radcliffe and Kaleigh Rogers and Mary Radcliffe

Graphics by Humera Lodhi

May 25, 2023, at 2:25 PM

By the time students go back to school this fall in North Dakota, two new bills will be in effect restricting some transgender athletes from playing on school sports teams. Gov. Doug Burgum signed these bills into law last month — yet just two years ago, when a similar ban passed the North Dakota Legislative Assembly, Burgum vetoed the bill. He noted at the time that the state had no record of any trans girls competing in girls’ sports and that the state had “a level playing field and fairness in girls’ sports.”

This is still true — he made the same comments when signing the bills last month — so what changed? The state legislature had finally built the momentum and support needed to send these bills to Burgum’s desk with a veto-proof majority, the result of a multiyear effort by state Republicans to get these bills signed into law.

It’s a familiar trend for those who track legislation that restricts LGBTQ+ rights. Over the last five years, the number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills both introduced and passed into law at the state level has exploded, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis of data provided by the American Civil Liberties Union and The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ+ youth. Unsurprisingly, these bills are almost exclusively introduced and supported by Republican lawmakers, and the data reveals they aren’t coming up with new restrictions at random. Instead, these bills tend to follow cyclical patterns, with certain types of restrictions (such as school sports bans for trans athletes, prohibitions on gender-affirming care for minors and bathroom bills) gradually increasing in popularity for a year or two, then peaking with a huge wave of legislation in multiple states. Once laws have been passed, lawmakers move on and a new trend emerges.¹ According to Cait Smith, the manager of state legislative strategy and rapid response for The Trevor Project, these cycles often include a few years of trial and error, in which bills are proposed and die before eventually passing after momentum and support has built — like in North Dakota.

“It’s a pretty common trajectory — they’ll see what sticks in committees, they’ll see what sticks on messaging, and what is motivating, and what works legally,” Smith said. 

And while the vast majority of these bills (like most bills) don’t become laws, as the total number of bills has risen, the small percentage that are signed into law amounts to a growing number, too. Heading into 2024, it’s become clear many Republicans view anti-LGBTQ+ policies as a winning position, and state lawmakers have spent the past few years letting those views guide their legislative agenda, leading to a surge in restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights across the country. 

In 2018, 38 bills were introduced at the state level that targeted LGBTQ+ rights in one way or another. So far this year,² 411 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced, representing an almost 11-fold increase in just five years.

The majority (53 percent) of the 2018 bills were religious exemptions, which are bills that allow people or businesses to discriminate against others based on sexual orientation or gender identity if those characteristics violate their religious beliefs. For example, a bill in Oklahoma would have allowed individuals to deny services or goods that would have been used to “promote, advertise, endorse or advocate for a specific marriage, lifestyle or behavior,” if that marriage/lifestyle/behavior went against their religious beliefs. 

In recent years, though, state lawmakers have expanded their ambitions, introducing a wider variety of anti-LGBTQ+ bills. There have been bills to ban books, bills to repeal bans on conversion therapy and bills to create a religious-based legal category of marriage that excludes same-sex couples. The most common types of legislation this year have been school restrictions (which include things like limiting classroom discussions of sexuality and gender), which account for 33 percent of anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in 2023, and health care restrictions (such as prohibiting trans kids from receiving gender-affirming care), which account for 27 percent. By contrast, religious exemptions were down to 8 percent of the bills introduced this year.

Smith said these trends in types of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation tend to occur in waves. “The first sports ban that … passed, a couple years ago, was not the first sports ban to be introduced,” Smith explained. “Those youth sports bans were introduced multiple times before we saw one pass, and we saw iterations, building off of what messaging they thought was working, what legal strategies they thought were working.” In 2018, there were no sports bans introduced. The next year, there were two. By 2021, 42 percent of anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced were sports bans. So far this year, though, sports bans represent just 12 percent of proposed anti-LGBTQ+ legislation: After passing 28 sports bans into law across 19 states over the last four years, the wave has crested, and different trends (specifically, school and health care restrictions) are starting to surge in its place.

The vast majority of these bills don’t become law. Between 2018 and today, 88 to 97 percent of anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced did not become law. And of those that did, many have been challenged in and even overturned by the courts. But as the raw number of these bills has increased, so too has the number becoming law: In 2018, just two anti-LGBTQ+ bills were ultimately signed into law. So far this year, 51 have become law. And Smith said that even just proposing these restrictions sends a hostile message to the LGBTQ+ community — particularly youth, who are often the specific targets of these bills.

As waves of legislation have crested and receded, what’s left in their wake are red states with a new arsenal of restrictions on LGBTQ+ people — from where they can go to the bathroom, to whether they can play sports and seek the health care they need. 

But not all red states have taken aim at LGBTQ+ rights with the same zeal. While Missouri has introduced more anti-LGBTQ+ bills than any other state (at least 99 between 2018 and 2023), it has yet to enact a single one (however, a handful of these bills were passed this legislative session and are expected to be signed by Gov. Mike Parson). But in Tennessee, where Republicans have enjoyed an ever-expanding majority in the state legislature for a decade, lawmakers have enacted 18 anti-LGBTQ+ laws over the past five years, more than any other state. Similarly, Arkansas — a state with a GOP supermajority in the legislature — has enacted 12 anti-LGBTQ+ laws since 2018. However, lawmakers in Nebraska, one of the most reliably Republican states in the nation, have been less preoccupied with restricting LGBTQ+ rights: In five years, the state legislature has seen just six anti-LGBTQ+ bills proposed, and only one — a law that prohibits gender-affirming care for minors — has been enacted, just this month.

The increase in anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced and enacted over the last five years shows how the GOP has made LGBTQ+ issues central to its party agenda. And while many of these restrictions are unpopular at the national level, polling shows that specific anti-LGBTQ+ policies often have support from Republican voters in these states, encouraging lawmakers to keep continuing down this road. 

But while the GOP’s focus on culture wars may be playing well in red states, it will face a renewed test on the national stage as the 2024 election ramps up. Many Republican presidential hopefuls are gambling on this strategy heading into the primary. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who launched a presidential run this week, has spent the past few weeks making a spectacle of his signing of multiple pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. It demonstrates how these bills and laws are not just a Republican response to evolving social trends, but a résumé builder for GOP candidates heading into the election. 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has officially entered the Twitter space … er, presidential race. He kicked off his campaign in a conversation on a glitchy Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks on Wednesday. In his opening remarks, he stressed his electability and the ability to implement a policy platform that may not look all that different from that of former President Donald Trump.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses what DeSantis’s presidential bid will look like. In FiveThirtyEight’s national GOP primary polling averages, Trump currently leads at around 54 percent with DeSantis at around 20 percent, although these things can change quickly in a primary environment. In fact, they already have: Just a couple months ago, Trump’s lead over DeSantis was half of what it is today.

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.

Transcript

Kaleigh Rogers: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis just announced he’s running for president. He’s probably former President Donald Trump’s most significant opponent for the Republican Party nomination. Now that he’s officially announced, I spoke to FiveThirtyEight senior elections analyst Geoffrey Skelley to find out more about the campaign and whether or not he actually has a shot at winning the GOP nomination.

OK Geoffrey, so we’ve been waiting for Ron DeSantis to announce for a while now. A lot of people expected him to run. What has made him such a big figure within the Republican Party over the last couple years?

Geoffrey Skelley: Right, so tracing Ron DeSantis’s background, like how he got here, it starts with 2018: He wins the Florida governorship. It’s the third biggest state in the country so that’s going to get you some attention right off the bat. He then really started to garner attention in 2020 and 2021 with a host of headline-making moves on mostly culture-war issues. For instance, he moved to reopen the state quickly after the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2022 he provoked controversy by putting migrants on a plane to liberal Martha’s Vineyard.

And then over the past couple of years, I think he’s particularly leaned into what he has called:

Ron DeSantis: Florida is where woke goes to die.

Skelley: Last year, for instance, he signed what’s often referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which banned discussions of sexuality and gender identity in kindergarten through 3rd grade — a rule that has since been expanded to cover all the way through high school. All of this has made him a darling of conservative media, which especially played him up as the candidate of the future in 2022, both before and after he won reelection.

Rogers: So he’s obviously a significant opponent for Trump, but does he actually have a shot at beating Trump for the nomination?

Skelley: It’s still early and I think it’s important to stress that, but DeSantis may be the only Republican who can defeat Trump in the 2024 GOP primary. Currently, in FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average for the Republican primary, DeSantis is at about 21 percent. Trump is at 53 percent, so that may not sound too great for DeSantis. However, historically, someone polling at DeSantis’s level would have roughly a 1-in-3 shot of winning the party’s nomination, although usually that sort of candidate isn’t facing someone else polling around 50 percent.

However, DeSantis has experienced a slide over the past few months. Back around New Years, he actually led Trump in some head-to-head polls and wasn’t far behind Trump in surveys testing most potential candidates. So you might ask, what happened? Well, Trump is definitely part of the story. Trump declared his candidacy back in November and from sort of the getgo has sought to define DeSantis early on while DeSantis hasn’t actively been in the race. Trump has labeled him “DeSanctimonious,” in classic Trump form, and has also attacked DeSantis for having backed cuts to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare while he was a congressman.

A stream of negative stories has likely hurt DeSantis, too. Media scrutiny has raised questions about DeSantis’s personal appeal, either face-to-face with voters or with his fellow Republican officeholders. For instance, Trump managed to get most Republican members of Congress from Florida to endorse him instead of DeSantis. All this has prompted some GOP donors and strategists to fret about his strength as a candidate. So all this has sort of worked together, I think, to cause a downshift in DeSantis’s stature just as he’s declaring his candidacy.

Rogers: Right yeah, one of Trump’s more creative nicknames — “Ron DeSanctimonious.” Maybe not as catchy as “Sleepy Joe Biden.” We’ll see. It seems like DeSantis is starting his campaign off a little bit on his backfoot. Is it possible to recover, though?

Skelley: I think Trump is the favorite. There’s no question. But DeSantis still has a lot going for him as the Republican race really ramps up now that he’s in it officially. For one thing, he has all those conservative policy accomplishments in Florida to sell to the party base as evidence that he can “make America Florida,” as he put it in his recent book.

And while he has lost ground in the polls, he is in better shape than basically any other Republican candidate — no one else is clearing 6 percent in our national polling average. And as he showed in his 2022 reelection race, DeSantis can raise gobs of money. So assuming that he can do that again for his presidential campaign, you can see he’d have the ability to raise the high levels of financial support needed to really run a big-time campaign.

And so besides his resume and fundraising prowess, I also think that another thing that can help DeSantis here is that the media is already itching to write a DeSantis comeback story. And if you’re going to struggle, let it happen before you’re officially in the race, you know? Now the situation is that any positive story for DeSantis, whether he’s hitting back at Trump or maybe getting a new endorsement from someone significant in the party, can contribute to a revival narrative. To borrow a nickname Bill Clinton gave himself back in 1992, perhaps DeSantis will even be the “comeback kid” in the 2024 Republican primary.

2024 Election

The Rise, Fall And Potential Resurrection Of Ron DeSantis

By Geoffrey Skelley

Graphics by Humera Lodhi

May 24, 2023, at 6:04 PM

After signaling a campaign for months — even years — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis formally announced on Wednesday that he’s running for president. As a result, the two leading Republican candidates in the primary polls, former President Donald Trump and DeSantis, are now both officially in the race.

In the leadup to his announcement, DeSantis’s pre-campaign experience demonstrated how quickly political winds can shift. Coming off of a resounding reelection victory in November 2022, DeSantis seemingly had the Republican world at his fingertips. Conservative media fêted his potential 2024 presidential candidacy, and polls of the nascent primary found him not far behind — and sometimes even ahead of — Trump. 

Fast forward six months, however, and Trump has a larger lead over DeSantis in FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average than at any point since March 1. DeSantis has struggled in the face of media scrutiny and Trump’s early efforts to define him, prompting questions about the Florida governor’s personal appeal and raising concerns among prospective donors that DeSantis might not be up to the task of taking on Trump.

But before anyone mistakes this piece for a campaign obituary, DeSantis remains better positioned to win the 2024 Republican nomination than any other declared or prospective candidate besides Trump. His conservative track record in Florida, firmly “anti-woke” agenda and fundraising prowess could turn around his flagging campaign. Still, to win he must coalesce support from pro-Trump voters while also pulling in Trump-skeptical forces, a challenging needle to thread. With all this in mind, let’s take a look at DeSantis’s ascent, slide and what he needs to do to enjoy a balloon drop at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

The chosen one

Before 2023, DeSantis solidified his position as the leading non-Trump candidate in Republican circles, thanks to his conservative leadership in Florida and positive coverage from right-leaning media outlets.

After winning the governorship in a squeaker in 2018, DeSantis made a host of headline-making moves on mostly culture-war issues. In 2020, he moved to reopen the state quickly after the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, while embracing conservative skepticism toward pandemic restrictions and, eventually, vaccines. In 2022, DeSantis provoked controversy by putting migrants on a plane to Massachusetts, part of a wider Republican effort to highlight opposition to the Biden administration’s immigration policies. He also faced a test of his crisis leadership skills when Hurricane Ian, the third-costliest natural disaster in the U.S. since 1980, struck Florida that September.

In 2022, DeSantis leaned even further into making Florida, in his words, “the place where woke goes to die.” Perhaps best illustrating this ambition was the episode surrounding DeSantis’s signing of the oft-labeled “Don’t Say Gay” law, which banned discussions of sexuality and gender identity in kindergarten through 3rd grade. Pushback to the law followed, including from Disney,¹ a major Florida employer. DeSantis subsequently sought to revoke Disney’s special tax status around Walt Disney World, a conflict that has continued over the past year as one battle in the right’s larger war against what it views as “woke” corporations.

Throughout this period, conservative media outlets helped DeSantis as he rose to national prominence. He gained a solid foothold in the “Fox News primary”: The cable news giant routinely featured DeSantis on its programs and worked with the governor’s team to portray him in a positive light. DeSantis’s stature only grew after he easily won reelection in November 2022, contrasting with Trump, who some Republicans accused of harming the party’s fortunes by endorsing mediocre GOP candidates who went on to lose key Senate and House races. Fox News and other parts of Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media empire, such as the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, trumpeted DeSantis as a future leader in the GOP.

As 2023 approached, these forces — DeSantis’s conservative governance, positive media coverage and strong 2022 performance vis-à-vis Trump — helped precipitate a notable swing toward DeSantis in early polling of the 2024 Republican primary.

Although DeSantis rarely led in surveys that measured the large field of potential GOP candidates, he did move ahead of Trump in many head-to-head polls. As a whole, the polls suggested that Trump could benefit from a crowded field — much as he did in the 2016 primary — but that DeSantis might gain the upper hand if the 2024 race quickly became a two-man contest.

Too good to last

But like many would-be White House contenders before him, DeSantis’s burgeoning profile prompted both his opponents and the media to take a closer look at his record, background and personal style. DeSantis has lost ground in the polls as he’s faced attacks from Trump and the former president’s allies, as well as less-glowing stories about DeSantis’s personality and campaign prospects.

In hindsight, DeSantis’s decision to wait until the end of Florida’s legislative session to declare his candidacy may have handed Trump an opportunity to set the tone for the 2024 GOP primary. Trump announced his candidacy only a week after the 2022 midterms, pretty early by historical standards. In the ensuing six months, Trump and his allies have hit DeSantis on multiple fronts. Trump has used DeSantis’s record in Congress — DeSantis co-founded the House Freedom Caucus — against him by criticizing DeSantis’s support for legislation that would’ve cut entitlement spending, which DeSantis has since distanced himself from. Yet Trump has also portrayed DeSantis as a creature of the GOP establishment.

Now, DeSantis had reason to wait on a campaign announcement. Doing so made certain he didn’t have to resign the governorship to run for president under Florida law, which the legislature abrogated with a new law passed this spring. And he gave himself the chance to sign his agenda into law to further bolster his conservative credentials.

But even as an unofficial candidate, DeSantis found himself losing ground in the polls and bested by Trump on the early endorsement front.² Trump’s polling edge over DeSantis began to rebound in January, and his indictment in New York on charges of falsifying business records in early April boosted his fundraising — and his support. In addition to garnering endorsements from 61 GOP senators and representatives ahead of DeSantis’s announcement, Trump persuaded half of Florida’s congressional Republicans to back him over the Florida governor, raising questions about DeSantis’s relationships with fellow GOP officeholders.

The media’s closer examination of DeSantis’s past and personality also caused him problems. Stories surfaced about DeSantis’s aloofness toward officeholders, donors and at campaign events, a concern amplified by Trump’s growing endorsement advantage. Even developments that could help DeSantis in the primary, like him signing a six-week abortion ban in Florida that could appeal to conservatives, generated negative stories: Republican megadonors worried DeSantis had moved too far to the right, especially since the electorate’s concerns about abortion rights had arguably diminished GOP gains in the 2022 midterms.

DeSantis’s pre-campaign trajectory fits roughly into the “discovery, scrutiny and decline” model of media influence on electoral politics proposed by political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck in their autopsy of the 2012 Republican primary. Media attention plays a pivotal role in primaries, as coverage informs voters about lesser-known contenders and/or influences undecideds to move toward a candidate. When a shiny new object comes around, they argue, the often-positive media coverage helps voters “discover” more about the candidate, which leads to support in the polls. DeSantis experienced something of a discovery period last fall: According to the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive, the three major cable-news networks (CNN, Fox News and MSNBC) mentioned DeSantis much more frequently in the last months of 2022 than they had previously, even during his first election or during the COVID-19 pandemic. Awash in glowing reelection coverage, DeSantis hit his strongest run of polling during and right after this period.

However, DeSantis then had to weather the ensuing “scrutiny” phase, as his rise prompted journalists to more closely vet DeSantis while his opponents — mainly Trump — pushed negative narratives about DeSantis that also received media attention. Additionally, amid this period of more intense examination, DeSantis made a “gaffe” — a favorite word of political reporters — about Ukraine that attracted ample coverage and raised red flags for some in his party: In March, DeSantis called the conflict between Ukraine and Russia “a territorial dispute,” but he quickly walked that back after receiving criticism from more hawkish elements in the GOP, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Now, the GOP’s base has become less supportive of giving military support to Ukraine — moving in Trump’s direction — but DeSantis’s uncertain footing played into larger concerns among more pro-Ukraine party elites about the governor’s foreign policy views.

Why DeSantis still has a real shot

Despite the scrutiny and declining poll numbers, DeSantis may be the only Republican who can defeat Trump in the 2024 GOP primary. The Florida governor is still held in high regard by Republicans, and his conservative accomplishments and fundraising ability could provide the means to a recovery — or even victory. Still, he will have to knit together somewhat disparate factions by attracting Trump supporters while retaining support from Trump-skeptical Republicans. Moreover, DeSantis must contend with Trump’s highly unusual candidacy: Trump is the first former president of the modern era to seek the presidency again after leaving office, which has given him the stature of a quasi-incumbent. 

As things stand, though, only DeSantis is close to Trump in net favorability among the high-profile Republicans running or expected to run for president. His profile as a Trump-like figure — but one presenting himself as more electable — has made him almost as well-liked as Trump among Republicans, despite not being as well known. In an average of national polls since April 1, DeSantis had a favorable rating of 72 percent and an unfavorable rating of about 15 percent, putting his net favorability at +57 among Republicans. By comparison, Trump’s net favorability was at +60, but nearly all Republicans had an opinion about him, whereas 87 percent, on average, had an opinion of DeSantis. As such, DeSantis has an opportunity to win over some of the remaining Republicans who don’t know him well.

That high favorability rating could translate to future support for DeSantis, especially in combination with his election pitch, which is essentially “MAGA without the mess.” We can see this in Morning Consult’s Republican primary tracker: Although DeSantis has lost ground to Trump in first-choice support, about half of Trump voters listed DeSantis as their second choice in a poll conducted May 19-21, putting him miles ahead of former Vice President Mike Pence (14 percent). If Trump falters as the primary race plays out, DeSantis could be well-positioned to capitalize and gain ground in the polls.

For all the coverage of Trump’s early endorsement edge, DeSantis also has support from GOP officeholders that could signal important on-the-ground backing in key states. For instance, more than one-third of Iowa’s Republican state legislators have endorsed DeSantis, a positive sign in the traditional lead-off state in presidential nomination contests. In December, about a quarter of the GOP membership in Michigan’s state legislature signed a letter asking DeSantis to run; while not a formal endorsement, it showed potential support for DeSantis in a pivotal battleground state. And while Trump has garnered backing from many Floridians in Congress, DeSantis has the overwhelming support of members in the state legislature, indicating that DeSantis doesn’t lack home-base support.

To top it all off, DeSantis has a sterling fundraising record, and despite the concerns of some big donors, he could enjoy ample outside support, too. During his 2022 reelection campaign, DeSantis raised more than $200 million, which OpenSecrets found was the largest ever haul by a candidate in a gubernatorial contest (not adjusted for inflation). And more than $80 million left over from that campaign could aid his presidential bid, too, albeit by transferring it to Never Back Down, the main pro-DeSantis super PAC — a move that some watchdog groups say flouts campaign finance law.

Although these forces are working in DeSantis’s favor, he still faces the challenge of weaving together a coalition of Trump fans and skeptics. On the one hand, DeSantis needs to win over more moderate or at least somewhat conservative Republicans, who aren’t as pro-Trump as more conservative voters. In fact, while Trump won the 2016 nomination thanks especially to support among somewhat conservative and moderate primary voters, he is polling better among more conservative voters this time around, though he usually holds big leads among conservatives as a whole. But DeSantis has raced to the right on some issues, like abortion, in a way that could actually alienate some less conservative Republicans. Meanwhile, Trump’s positioning as the more moderate choice by attacking DeSantis on entitlements could coax less Trumpy voters to view DeSantis as too extreme.

At the same time however, DeSantis may have an opportunity to get to Trump’s right on abortion and win over very conservative voters. Trump criticized DeSantis’s decision to sign a six-week abortion ban into law in Florida, calling it too “harsh” while resisting committing to a 15-week national ban. However, a Fabrizio Lee/Impact Research survey for the Wall Street Journal last month showed that around two-thirds of Republican primary voters back a six-week ban, and national anti-abortion leaders have signaled they may end up opposing Trump if he won’t express support for a nationwide ban. DeSantis responded to Trump, saying he “was proud” to have signed Florida’s legislation and hitting Trump for not saying whether he would have.

However DeSantis navigates his coalition challenges, he has a résumé full of conservative accomplishments to sell to primary voters and will likely have the resources to stay in the race for a long time against Trump. And, despite DeSantis’s antipathy toward mainstream media outlets, he could also benefit from the media’s desire for a competitive primary. A “DeSantis resurrection” narrative will be an extremely tempting story to tell, so any positive signs for DeSantis — a few stronger polls after his announcement, a rush of endorsements — could tee up a series of sunny stories after months of stormy headlines. Who knows? Perhaps DeSantis will even get a chance to adopt the nickname former President Bill Clinton gave himself in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary: the “Comeback Kid.”

2024 Election

The 2024 Republican Primary Is Heating Up. Time For Another FiveThirtyEight Primary Draft!

A FiveThirtyEight Chat

May 24, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): It feels like this is the week the 2024 Republican presidential primary really started in earnest! On Monday, Sen. Tim Scott announced he was running for president, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to formally jump into the race on Wednesday night as well. So we figured it was high time for another 2024 Republican presidential primary draft! The last time we did this was last December, when DeSantis was riding high on the polls and no major candidates other than former President Donald Trump were in the race. Things have changed a lot since then, so this should be interesting!

Here are the rules: We’ll go four rounds, and we’ll use a snake draft (i.e., the person who picks last in one round picks first in the next round) to keep things as fair as possible. Let me just pick some names out of a hat to see who goes first …

1. Geoffrey Skelley
2. Meredith Conroy
3. Nathaniel Rakich

Dammit. OK, Geoffrey, you’re up!

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, senior elections analyst): Well, tough luck for you all. I’ll take Trump with the first overall pick. This is about as chalky as it gets, and with good reason: Trump is polling just north of 50 percent in FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average, he’s a pseudo-incumbent (especially because a solid majority of Republicans don’t think he lost fairly in 2020) and he is the undeniable front-runner for the nomination. He’s in this situation despite facing felony charges in New York, other potential legal woes and his efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election. Some of those things may actually be helping him.

Putting Trump’s position in a broader context, a candidate polling around where he is in the first half of the year before the primary has historically had a better than 3-in-4 shot of winning a party’s nomination.

meredithconroy (Meredith Conroy, political science professor at California State University, San Bernardino, and FiveThirtyEight contributor): He’s also leading the endorsement primary and his general favorability is inching upward, despite the indictment and recently being found liable for sexual abuse, so I think you made the right pick, Geoff.

nrakich: Yeah, Trump has been steadily rising in the polls ever since that DeSantis boomlet over the winter. He has gone from 45 percent in our polling average on March 6 to 54 percent on May 22. Why do we think that is?

meredithconroy: I think Trump is rising in the polls because DeSantis has been a little awkward on the campaign trail, and it doesn’t take much to shake people’s confidence in a newcomer. For example, according to interviews with folks in Florida politics, he doesn’t like talking to people and can be robotic. It’s not enough to sink a candidacy, but it’s also not a great start. DeSantis had an opportunity, and he squandered it. Polls showed Republicans were open to an alternative, but I think they’re spooked, so they went back home to Trump. 

geoffrey.skelley: Trump may have gained ground thanks to his various problems, ironically. For instance, his campaign claims it experienced a major fundraising boom following his indictment in New York in early April on charges of falsifying business records, and his poll numbers have only gone up since then.

meredithconroy: The indictment was interesting because it was another opportunity for Trump’s rivals to argue that Trump has too much baggage. But they didn’t — they slowly came out and defended him. I guess that makes some sense, because the indictment plays into the “prosecutorial overreach” narrative that motivates the conspiratorial wing of his supporters, and also fuels the grievance politics that have come to define the modern GOP.  But it was a missed opportunity.

geoffrey.skelley: Simply put, Trump is quite popular with the GOP base, and so his opponents are caught between needing to attack him to take him down and not angering the party base in the process. No one has found the Goldilocks approach to that yet, and I’m a bit skeptical anyone will.

nrakich: OK, Meredith, you said DeSantis had some flaws as a candidate. But are you still going to choose him with your first pick, or are you going to go rogue?

meredithconroy: Ha! I am going with … DeSantis.

Even though his star has fallen, DeSantis is still Trump’s closest rival. He’s still the main non-Trump candidate that non-Trump supporters could rally behind. That said, some of those folks seem to be looking for alternatives after DeSantis hasn’t shown himself to be adept at the retail politics necessary in a presidential primary. New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie calls it “the juice” and says DeSantis doesn’t have it. I saw someone else call it “sparkle.” We can also think of it as charisma or likability. All of these terms are loaded, and “likability” in particular usually just means “regular guy (usually white) you can have a beer with.” DeSantis is a white guy, but he’s not acting very regular, and if the media keeps repeating this, and clips of his awkward interactions continue to go viral, his campaign will have their work cut out for them.

Despite all that, he’s my pick because a good chunk of the GOP donor class still supports him, and he’s doing OK in the FiveThirtyEight polling average. Also, according to a recent YouGov/CBS News poll, while 73 percent of respondents say they are considering Trump, 51 percent are considering DeSantis; the remaining candidates don’t even break 20 percent. Plus, according to that same poll, DeSantis does particularly well among college-educated Republicans (they still break for Trump, but it’s more even than among Republicans without a college degree), and they are more likely to vote in primaries and caucuses, even though they are a smaller share of the GOP than they used to be.

nrakich: Yeah, I think DeSantis is as underrated now as he was overrated in December and January. Basically, he has a decent but not likely chance of beating Trump. Trump could always stumble, whether because his legal problems start to weigh him down or because voters start to worry he’s not electable or for some other reason. And DeSantis has been the natural heir to Trumpism for a while now. Although he is averaging just 21 percent in national polls right now, that’s far better than former Vice President Mike Pence, who’s in third place with 6 percent. And according to Morning Consult, 48 percent of Trump voters say DeSantis is their second choice, so he has room to grow. 

geoffrey.skelley: That all makes sense to me, Meredith. Despite losing ground in the polls over the past few months, DeSantis is still far above any of the other prospective Republican candidates. That could change, but candidates polling around his level in the first half of the year before the primary have historically won a party’s nomination roughly one-third of the time. That’s still pretty good, all things considered. Moreover, you just know the media is itching to write a comeback narrative about DeSantis, so his campaign could play into that pretty easily.

meredithconroy: I do think there are new strategies he could take that he hasn’t tried yet. For example, DeSantis could take a page from Trump’s playbook and talk about stamina and strength. According to a CNN poll from March, the vast majority (87 percent) of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents saw it as essential that the party’s nominee demonstrate the sharpness and stamina to serve effectively in office. These sorts of tactics often hurt female candidates, but they could help a candidate like DeSantis. 

geoffrey.skelley: And however much Trump can work against it with his appearances on the campaign trail, he’s in his mid-70s, whereas DeSantis is in his mid-40s. There’s talk of how that could play in the general election if it’s DeSantis versus Biden (who is even older than Trump), but it’s not impossible to imagine it mattering in the GOP primary context, too.

nrakich: OK, now things get hard, haha. For the third pick, I’m going to go with the most recent candidate to enter the race: Scott. 

To be clear, I think anyone other than Trump or DeSantis has a real uphill climb to win the nomination. But I thought David Byler of The Washington Post made a good case for why Scott is the third-best positioned: He has managed to remain popular with both the pro-Trump and anti-Trump wings of the party. He’s gotten a fair amount of media attention as the only Black Republican in the Senate. (I think there’s also a not-insignificant part of the GOP electorate that would like to nominate a Black man to prove that they aren’t racist.) And he has a ton of money at his disposal: $22 million in his campaign account. And he’s not afraid to spend it: He’s already announced a $6 million ad buy in Iowa and New Hampshire. 

meredithconroy: I would’ve gone with Scott too, Nathaniel. After all, he got the coveted Sen. John Thune endorsement! But jokes aside, for all the reasons you mention, Scott will be ready to step up if Trump’s legal troubles become too much or if DeSantis never regains the ground he’s lost.

geoffrey.skelley: Yep, agreed: I too had him positioned third on my board. That’s partly due to Scott’s high ceiling: With Trump and DeSantis pulling in roughly 75 percent of the vote in polls right now and no one else north of 6 percent, you’re looking for someone who could put together a campaign and a message that could gain traction with at least a good chunk of those voters. As Nathaniel laid out, Scott has the potential and early resources to do that! 

nrakich: And then for my first pick of the second round (thanks, snake draft), I will choose Pence. Yeah, I know he may have burned his bridges with Trump’s die-hard supporters after Jan. 6, but I still think he’s in a better position than most other contenders we haven’t mentioned yet. A former vice president is going to have a good amount of institutional support, and his social conservatism makes him a good fit for evangelicals, a key part of the Republican base. And as Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Dan Cox recently wrote, that group is in Trump’s corner right now, but they’re not sold on him. 

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, making a good pick is really hard at this point. Scott has potential, whereas Pence seems … washed up. But he’s also a former vice president! That’s traditionally a good position to run from. It’s just that this time, the former vice president would be running against the president he served under, and Trump has also made Pence out to be a villain in his 2020 defeat because Pence didn’t disobey the law and try to intercede in the certification of Electoral College votes.

meredithconroy: I think the only political career left for Pence is whatever former Rep. Liz Cheney is doing. As Philip Bump wrote recently for The Washington Post, “Trump reshaped the party around himself and pushed demand for a pre-Trump-style Republican even lower.” Pence’s popularity among his party really took a hit after Jan. 6 and hasn’t recovered. According to Civiqs polling, only 41 percent of Republicans view him favorably, and 39 percent view him unfavorably. 

nrakich: OK, Meredith, who’s your next pick?

meredithconroy: I think I am passing up a semi-good pick in [REDACTED], but I’m going to say Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

nrakich: Ooh, spicy!

geoffrey.skelley:

meredithconroy: I know he’s said he will focus on Virginia’s state legislative elections this year, but he recently tweeted a video that screams, “I would be a better alternative to Trump than DeSantis,” so I think he could still jump in and fill in that not-Trump lane. Like DeSantis, people assume he can champion Trump’s issues without the baggage. 

nrakich: I’m down on Youngkin simply for logistical reasons. According to a recent report from Axios, he might not jump into the race until November. That would make it pretty much impossible to wage a serious presidential campaign. You can’t jump into the race in November and expect to perform respectably in the first contests just a few months later. Other candidates will just have too much of a head start when it comes to resources, talking to voters, etc.

geoffrey.skelley: Youngkin certainly seems to be keeping his options open. However, it’s very hard to run for president as the sitting governor of Virginia. You get elected the November after the presidential election, take office in January of the midterm year, and then bam — it’s only a year until candidates start jumping into the race. That means you have to be planning a campaign or actively running for president for almost your entire tenure. (Virginia is the only state that doesn’t allow incumbent governors to seek immediate reelection.)

Still, in a world where Trump wasn’t running, I think Youngkin would probably run. So he might in a world where Trump is running, too.

nrakich: Who’s your next pick, then, Geoffrey?

geoffrey.skelley: Yeesh. At this point, I’m just going for upside, so I’ll stick with wealthy governors like Youngkin: I will pick Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota. It looks like he may very well run, and he certainly could come off as an outsider with his business background. In theory, he could spend lots of his own money on his campaign, too. 

nrakich: Yeah, he’s been one of the odder names to surface in the rumor mill lately. But you’re right — his $1.1 billion net worth means he could potentially pull a Michael Bloomberg and spend his way into contention. Look out, American Samoa!

He’s also already won one primary he wasn’t supposed to win — for North Dakota governor in 2016. He defeated Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, who started the race as the heavy favorite.

meredithconroy: But the era of outsiders is over! According to the YouGov/CBS News poll I mentioned earlier, only 48 percent of Republicans said they wanted an outsider as the next president (compare that to the 79 percent who said they wanted a “peacemaker”). I am really curious about what’s going on there (I’m guessing they like Trump, and Trump isn’t an outsider anymore, but it’s interesting nonetheless). 

geoffrey.skelley: I just think Burgum is more intriguing than some of the other options left on the table. He’s conservative, although he may have also opened himself up to criticism on the right by vetoing recent Republican-backed legislation prohibiting public school employees from acknowledging transgender students’ pronouns and screening explicit materials from children at public libraries. 

meredithconroy: I couldn’t pick Burgum out of a lineup, and I can identify Steve Bullock, so that’s saying something.

geoffrey.skelley: And with my other pick, I guess I’ll take former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. I am very skeptical of Haley’s path to victory: She embraced Trump after initially pushing back against him during the 2016 campaign, but more recently she has tried to sort of have it both ways by critiquing Trump obliquely while not going after him hard enough to really hit home. I’m also of a mind that Haley could be hindered by her gender, as women candidates tend to be viewed as more liberal by GOP primary voters. However, we are running out of options, and I think she’s got a better — if still slim — chance than some other would-be candidates left on the big board.  

meredithconroy: Haley is whom I was going to pick instead of Youngkin. She is doing OK in her home state, which is an early primary state and isn’t winner-take-all in terms of delegates.

Plus, as FiveThirtyEight contributor and political scientist Hakeem Jefferson has explained, the GOP would be happy to have her (this applies to Scott too) as messengers of racial progress, even if none actually exists. Nathaniel mentioned this earlier, but I think it is worth repeating. 

nrakich: Yeah, I think it’s pretty notable that no one took Haley until now. After all, she was the only candidate in the race other than Trump for months! But I think it speaks to the challenges that women face in the Republican Party today. And despite months of campaigning, Haley is still polling at just 4 percent nationally.

meredithconroy: I think she would be a strong candidate if the GOP weren’t the party of Trumpism. But it is.

geoffrey.skelley: It is true that Haley could use primary debates as an opportunity to break through. Carly Fiorina, who was the only woman on the debate stage in 2016, successfully used the debates to increase her support, and she was starting from a worse position than Haley is in.

meredithconroy: Ya, maybe she’ll shine in the debates. We’ll have to see!

OK, I have the next pick. I am going with former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson. Hutchinson is the most anti-Trump candidate in the field so far, so maybe he can consolidate that small share of primary voters. Yes, I know it’s very unlikely — but I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

nrakich: Haha. Yes, you are. I just think Hutchinson is too moderate and bipartisan to click with today’s GOP.

My turn again … Gosh, who’s left? I guess for my third pick, I’ll go with businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. He’s already managed to go from a total unknown to someone who’s considered a viable third-tier candidate thanks to his youthful charisma and aggressive media strategy. And his culture-warrior persona (he has been dubbed “the CEO of Anti-Woke, Inc.”) could be an asset in the unlikely event that both Trump and DeSantis collapse.

geoffrey.skelley: Trump certainly seems happy that Ramaswamy is running: He said earlier this month that, “The thing I like about Vivek is that he only has good things to say about ‘President Trump.’”

nrakich: OK, dear readers, I’m afraid we’re out of time and Geoffrey and I have a podcast to record. So let’s go rapid-fire for this last round. I’ll pick New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu. Meredith?

meredithconroy: Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Because why not!

geoffrey.skelley: If Christie runs, it will almost certainly be with the goal of going scorched-earth on Trump. Christie is not going to win the GOP nomination.

As for the last pick, there aren’t any Latino candidates in the field yet, so I’ll take the one who has been mooted: Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. He’s been considering a run and would be an outside-the-box nominee given his background as a mayor. Obviously he’s a long, long shot, though. 

nrakich: OK! Here are everyone’s picks. Let us know on Twitter or in the comments who you think has the best team!

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast gets ready for a big week in politics!

For starters, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott officially kicked off his presidential campaign in North Charleston on Monday morning. He’s starting the race in the low single digits in national polls, but he has a lot of campaign cash and plenty of goodwill amongst Republican lawmakers, donors and media. So will he be able to convert that potential energy into something more kinetic in the polls?

We also expect the long-teased Ron DeSantis presidential campaign to become a reality this week. According to reports, he could make it official as soon as Wednesday. Trump’s lead over the Florida governor, according to our polling averages, has doubled from 15 to 30 percentage points over the past few months. So will making it official give DeSantis the momentum to turn it around?

And according to the Treasury Department, we are just a week or so away from a possible default on the nation’s debt. President Biden is back from the G7 summit in Japan and he and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy kicked off new negotiations on Monday. So what are the sticking points and what do Americans want?

Meg Kinnard, a national politics reporter at the Associated Press, and David Byler, data columnist at the Washington Post, join the crew to weigh in.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast gets ready for a big week in politics!

For starters, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott officially kicked off his presidential campaign in North Charleston Monday morning. He’s starting the race in the low single digits in national polls, but he has a lot of campaign cash and plenty of goodwill amongst Republican lawmakers, donors and media. So will he be able to convert that potential energy into something more kinetic in the polls?

We also expect the long-teased Ron DeSantis presidential campaign to become a reality this week. According to reports, he could make it official as soon as Wednesday. Trump’s lead over the Florida governor, according to our polling averages, has doubled from 15 points to 30 points over the past few months. So will making it all official give DeSantis the momentum to turn that around?

And, according to the Treasury Department we are just a week or so away from a possible default on the nation’s debt. President Biden is back from the G7 summit in Japan and he and House Speaker McCarthy kicked off new negotiations on Monday. So what are the sticking points and what do Americans want?

National politics reporter at the AP Meg Kinnard and Data Columnist at the Washington Post join the crew to weigh in.

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.

2024 Election

Tim Scott’s Uphill Battle To Win The Republican Nomination

By Alex Samuels

May 22, 2023, at 11:45 AM

A decisive Election Day win last year. A prime speaking slot at a national Republican convention. That elusive “fresh face” that a plurality of GOP voters have told pollsters they want going into next year’s election. 

If you think I’m talking about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, you’re mistaken. Yes, he checks these boxes, too. And yes, these are objectively good résumé boosters to have if you want to seek — let alone win — the Republican nomination for president. But there’s another name to watch who embodies these same traits: South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, now the fifth major Republican candidate (after former President Donald Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson) to announce their candidacy for president.

Though it’s not particularly common for two candidates from the same state to seek the presidency, there are plenty of reasons for Scott to run. He’s a rising star within the party — given both a marquee speaking slot at the 2020 Republican National Convention and the opportunity to deliver the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union in 2021 — who enjoys relative popularity in his own state and is sitting on a campaign war chest of over $21 million. And if Republicans want to build a more diverse voting base, Scott could have broader appeal to voters as a Black man. 

Going into this piece, though, I wrestled with the question of why Scott, the lone Black Senate Republican, first appointed (by Haley) to the chamber in 2012, doesn’t share DeSantis’s presumed front-runner status. He’s got a lot going for him, at least on paper: He’s an unapologetic and unceasingly affable conservative whose Christian faith has informed his politics and personal journey. His vision is relentlessly optimistic, an implicit rebuke of the grievance politics that have taken over the Republican Party — though it’s unclear if the party wants to pivot in his direction. And, unlike DeSantis, Scott has managed the impressive feat of staying on the good side of both the Trumpist and non-Trumpist wings of the party. Scott’s advisers argue that his middle-of-the road disposition makes him more electable — specifically in a general election.

So why isn’t Scott entering the race with the same stature as DeSantis despite his conservative record and political resume? One reason for this dynamic could be because DeSantis has had a chance to pursue an “anti-woke” agenda as Florida’s governor with actual outcomes, whereas it’s harder to make the same kind of name for yourself in the Senate minority. Republican voters might also just want a Trumpian-type candidate that’s not Trump himself, or may rebuke the possibility of a Black party leader. 

These factors could help explain why Scott is just barely on the map as a presidential candidate while DeSantis is largely viewed as Trump’s top opponent. Indeed, not all polls ask about Scott, and when he is discussed, particularly in regards to 2024, Republican voters usually rank him far behind Trump and DeSantis — among a handful of others. In fact, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis of multi-candidate ballot tests that include Trump, Scott has never netted more than 4 percent of the vote share. In multicandidate ballot tests not including Trump, Scott has never received more than 7 percent of the vote share. And in the past month, he’s been overtaken in polls by Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur with no prior political experience.¹

“People just don’t know who he is yet,” Seth Masket, a professor of political science at the University of Denver and director of the Center on American Politics, said of Scott. “I don’t know that he’s necessarily doing anything wrong yet, but someone like DeSantis just has a lot more name recognition right now.” 

Even though it’s still early in the presidential nominating cycle, a lack of notoriety among GOP voters isn’t the only hurdle Scott will need to overcome. And even though his role as a Black candidate in a party that struggles with diversity will certainly set him apart (which I’ll discuss more below), race is also going to be a perennial issue for him. As I’ve written previously, Black Republicans often struggle with acceptance within the party and face challenges in trying to prove their conservative ideological bona fides. And even though Scott has helped downplay racism broadly, he’s also experienced it first-hand and will likely experience it tenfold on a larger, national scale as past Black Republican presidential candidates have. 

That racial contrast might be sharpened, too, against a candidate like Trump, who has long used racial animus to animate the GOP base. Of course, we don’t know how Trump will contend with having at least two rival candidates of color in the race (his attacks so far have focused squarely on DeSantis), but if the former president does lob racist attacks against Scott, it’ll be harder for the senator to respond because Black candidates — and Black Republicans especially — have to walk a tightrope, said Hakeem Jefferson, a FiveThirtyEight contributor and professor of political science at Stanford University. “Scott can’t make white people feel too bad and he can’t go out there talking about how structural racism is baked into the fabric of who we are as a country,” Jefferson said. “He just can’t do that without being blackened in a way that won’t be good for both his candidacy and the Republican Party.”

It’s also not clear whether voters will buy Scott’s message of unity and forgiveness at a time of hyper-political polarization. Indeed, his message of optimism could prove to be an impediment in today’s Republican primary environment, where voters have denounced what they view as unjust favoritism toward people of color and seem more interested in being angry. Those issues aside, Scott has the added hurdle of facing off against another candidate from his home state that’s pitching a similar message of unity. That means the two of them might be fishing in the same pond for Republican voters who want a less confrontational standard-bearer. 

“Scott and Haley are fighting for the same constituency: They both come from the same state, they both represent racial minorities and they have similar stories,” said Henry Olsen, a conservative columnist and political analyst for The Washington Post and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “They’re also fighting to be king or queen of the non-MAGA helm — and might have more competition there soon in [Mike] Pence.”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that, yes, both DeSantis and Trump have ties to Florida, too, and are arguably campaigning the same way and for the same base of voters — so the GOP primary electorate could fracture in a number of ways. 

Even so, there are a number of reasons why we shouldn’t pooh-pooh Scott’s candidacy even if he does enter as one of the lesser-known candidates. (There’s a reason, reader, why my colleagues and I predicted last year that Scott might enter the race.) 

But what would it take for him to reach the same level of popularity and fame as his biggest opponents (or soon-to-be opponents)? 

Arguably the best way for Scott to make a name for himself is to simply get in front of GOP audiences in the same way DeSantis has. During his 2018 gubernatorial campaign, DeSantis made the intentional decision to go on conservative media outlets which helped him land Trump’s endorsement and win the GOP primary. But Fox News isn’t the only way for Scott to boost his name recognition; his visits to politically important states like Iowa should help, too, as will participating in the primary debates that’ll begin this summer. 

“Having name recognition is important, certainly when it comes around the time that people start voting, but that’s still very far away,” Masket said. “Right now, it’s more important for him to just be talking to people who are active in the primaries and caucuses and the people who donate money so he can impress on them that he’s serious about this race and a potentially good candidate.”

And polling suggests that Scott is in a decent spot — especially considering how early it is. At least compared with his competitors, he’s not particularly well-known. But the surveys that include him suggest that he is well-liked. Morning Consult’s senator rankings showed that Scott was in the top echelon for the most-highly approved Republican senators with a 53 percent approval rating and a 31 percent disapproval rating as of this winter. Moreover, an average of polls conducted over the course of 2023 found that less than half (48 percent) of Republicans have a clear opinion of Scott, but among that group, he’s fairly popular. That means he has the potential to grow into a well-known and well-liked candidate — unlike some of his competitors.

Scott will also be able to differentiate himself from the rest of the field by continuing the GOP’s crusade against advancing issues of racial justice. During his response to President Biden’s 2021 State of the Union, Scott made waves by boldly declaring that “America is not a racist country.” That’s a message that’ll likely resonate with Republican voters. A December 2021 UMass-Amherst survey, for example, found that while over half of Americans (53 percent) believed that white people in the U.S. have certain advantages and 69 percent were angry that racism exists, the number of Republicans who agreed with these sentiments was decidedly lower. Among Republicans, only 19 percent said that white people enjoy certain benefits due to their race and a little more than half (56 percent) expressed anger about racism’s existence. Indeed, continued attacks on so-called “wokeness” are a surefire way to win over socially conservative voters — and it’s clear that other Republicans in the race see the benefits of this, too. As a Black man, though, Scott might be uniquely equipped to talk about these issues in ways that his opponents are not.

“Some white people are looking for a kind of racial assurance for our nation’s past to make them feel more comfortable,” Jefferson told me. “And who better to deliver that message to them than a person of color who seems empathetic to that? This is a moment that’s uniquely designed for Scott’s candidacy because he can do the kind of race work that white candidates can’t do.” 

Of course, while Scott isn’t the first Black Republican to seek the presidential nomination, his run is still historic given that Black Republicans are few and far between. Scott acknowledged this in his announcement video on Monday, saying that his family’s journey “from cotton to Congress” in one lifetime represented the promise of what America could be. But even before his official entrance into the presidential contest, it’s clear from Scott’s own Senate record that he understands how important race is as a political issue. He helped pass legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime and endorsed a major push for police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s murder (both of which were widely popular among fellow lawmakers). That could help him on the campaign trail since he’ll be able to approach the issue from both sides: through quietly co-signing some of the red meat culture war issues (like attacks on so-called “wokeness”) that other Republicans like Trump and DeSantis will surely bring to the fore, in addition to highlighting his own resume on issues dealing with race.

“Only time will tell, but there’s a large segment of the Republican Party who would like to have an articulate Black conservative as their standard bearer and Tim Scott could be that person,” Olsen said. “At the very least, he could be viewed as that person if he executes well in the next six months.” (Olsen’s use of the word “articulate” to describe a Black candidate is a fairly telling sign of how narrow a tightrope Scott will have to walk in the coming months.)

Of course, none of this makes Scott even close to the favorite for the nomination at this point. But if the party is heading for a crowded primary field next year, he could bring a lot to the table — and there are some baked-in advantages to his candidacy. Even if he doesn’t manage to pick up a ton of steam, though, his nod for the presidency is still historic and could set him up for another run in a few years’ time. 

Mary Radcliffe contributed research.

Transcript

Anna Rothschild: South Carolina politician Tim Scott just announced that he’s running for president. Scott is currently the only Black Republican in the U.S. Senate, and he has a long history of both fighting for racial equality and criticizing “woke” culture in America.

To learn more about him, I spoke with FiveThirtyEight politics reporter Alex Samuels.

Rothschild: What is Tim Scott’s background? Where did he grow up?

Alex Samuels: So Tim Scott has long talked about his personal story and honestly has turned it into this extended metaphor for both racial progress and triumph over adversity. He was born in North Charleston, South Carolina, and his parents divorced when he was pretty young. Scott often talks about how his family struggled to make ends meet and that he struggled in school. But the turning point for him came actually when he was a teenager. He met a manager at a local Chick-fil-A, who he said pushed him toward business and helped lay the foundation for Scott’s later embrace of the Republican Party.

Scott later went into business himself and ran for a seat on the Charleston County Council.

Rothschild: After rising to chairman of the council, Scott served in the state legislature. In 2010, he decided to run for Congress, and he served in the U.S. House for two years. That is, until a South Carolina senator retired, and then-Gov. Nikki Haley tapped Scott to fill the seat. Now, Scott will be running against Haley in the Republican primary for president.

How does Tim Scott fit into the fabric of today’s Republican Party? How conservative is he? Who are his allies?

Samuels: So Tim Scott is a conservative through and through. He’s long been seen as a rising star within the party. What differentiates him from, say, Trump or maybe even DeSantis is that Scott’s message so far has been one that is relentlessly optimistic, which is kind of an implicit rebuke of the grievance politics that have really taken over much of the Republican Party. He made waves in his response to Biden’s State of the Union for saying …

Tim Scott: America is not a racist country.

Samuels: … and that was something that got a lot of blowback from Democrats in particular. But then at the same time, he has this pretty strong record on pushing legislation that quite clearly addresses race. He helped pass legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime. And he was the Republican senator who was really pushing for major police reform following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

Scott: The George Floyd incident certainly accelerated this conversation, and we find ourselves at a place with a package that I think speaks to the families that I spoke with yesterday who lost loved ones.

Samuels: That deal eventually fell apart, but he was kind of the main broker in the Senate really trying to negotiate these bipartisan negotiations to get something passed.

Rothschild: Scott has been a pretty popular senator. But compared to some of the big names who are expected to enter the race, he’s trailing considerably so far.

Samuels: The good news for Scott is that since he is well-liked among people in South Carolina, there is room for him to grow to be well-liked by the nation as well. But in order to do that he has to get in front of people, in front of cameras, and maybe that’ll help when he’s, you know, on the debate stage come August. But right now, he’s really just not super known to voters nationally.

Rothschild: Tim Scott will be running against another South Carolina politician, Nikki Haley. What do you think that will mean for his campaign?

Samuels: What’s also interesting beyond the fact that they come from the same state is that they kind of have the same message. They’re essentially fighting to be either king or queen of this non-MAGA helm of the party. And they might face competition, too, if Mike Pence decides to enter the race. So, if he really wants to tout this message of, you know, positivity and optimism, he’s going to really have to fight not only with someone in his home state, but probably others too, to be the one saying that.

Florida

Florida Started A Race To Reshape Conservatism. Now It Has Some Catching Up To Do.

By Geoffrey Skelley and Mary Radcliffe and Geoffrey Skelley and Mary Radcliffe

Graphics by Humera Lodhi

May 19, 2023, at 3:22 PM

The vanguard of American conservatism is Florida — at least, according to its governor.

The state is on “the front lines in the battle for freedom,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said to the Florida legislature in March, telling lawmakers that “we have the opportunity and indeed the responsibility to swing for the fences so that we can ensure Florida remains number one.”

For the second-term governor, swinging for the fences has been a higher-stakes proposition: DeSantis is widely expected to announce a campaign for president in the coming days. He will enter the race with a legislative record that looks quite different than it did a year ago. Since gaveling into session in March, the Florida legislature has moved quickly on DeSantis’s priorities, passing bills on topics ranging from school vouchers to gun control to tort reform. So, before his four-country international “trade mission,” before his jaunt up to Washington, D.C., to rally support among the Florida congressional delegation and before his visit to Iowa for a weekend of meet-and-greets, DeSantis spent weeks in Tallahassee signing his agenda into law. 

But the extent to which DeSantis’s agenda has truly been “groundbreaking and nation-leading” is less clear. FiveThirtyEight dug into the state’s recent legislative changes and compared a sample of its new laws to those of other GOP-dominated states. This is not an effort to evaluate the impact of Florida’s recent spate of legislation; it is simply an examination of when that legislation passed relative to comparable laws in fellow red states enacting Republican priorities. We found that, in some areas, Florida is indeed leading the pack. For example, DeSantis and his allies have been at the forefront of implementing conservative education-related and anti-LGBTQ policies, even as polls have suggested some of those policies may have limited appeal. But when it comes to other conservative priorities, like gun policy and abortion, Florida Republicans have largely moved with — or even lagged behind — a larger group of red states. 

Leading on conservative education and anti-trans policies

Florida has arguably been ground zero for conservative efforts to reshape education in the United States. In addition to passing — and expanding on — some of the strictest legislation regulating how sexuality and gender identity are taught in classrooms, which has served as the model for legislation in other states, Florida has also moved to make school board elections partisan and expand school vouchers. 

Last year, the Florida legislature passed House Bill 1557 into law, which banned classroom instruction and discussion of sexuality and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade. In keeping with his “anti-woke” rhetoric, DeSantis said the law would ensure “parents can send their kids to school to get an education, not an indoctrination.” Critics dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law, arguing it would marginalize LGBTQ+ children and complicate teachers’ ability to help vulnerable students. Despite the public’s ambivalence toward the initial law — a September 2022 poll from Siena College/Spectrum News found Florida likely voters split fairly evenly — the law’s reach has only grown. In April, the state Board of Education expanded the restrictions to 4th through 12th grade. And new legislation passed earlier this month builds on the 2022 law by stipulating that school employees cannot ask students about their preferred pronouns nor share their own pronouns with students if they “do not correspond” with the employee’s sex. 

Other Republican-led states have jumped to implement similar measures. Alabama passed a law with similar provisions in 2022; Arkansas, Indiana and Kentucky have done so in 2023; and states like Iowa and Louisiana may be about to join them.¹

Florida Republicans have also moved to expand conservative influence in setting local education policy by passing a constitutional amendment that would mandate partisan school board elections. Should voters approve the amendment in 2024 — a late February-early March poll from the University of North Florida Public Opinion Research Lab found 65 percent of voters opposed it — school board candidates will be listed on the ballot with their party affiliation. Should this take effect, Florida could be at the forefront of efforts to heighten partisanship in school board contests. At present, just four states require partisan school board elections, according to Ballotpedia, and five others allow localities to use them. Yet only one of those states — Tennessee — has recently amended its rules, and it made partisan races optional, not mandatory. There’s little doubt Florida Republicans expect this to benefit them, too, as perceptions about who benefits often drive support or opposition to changes in election law. And they’re probably right: Most localities in Florida are GOP-leaning — Democrats are mostly concentrated in urban areas — so it’s likely that Republicans would gain explicit control of more school boards. Yet this would mark a reversal from a quarter century ago, when Florida voters approved a 1998 constitutional amendment that included a provision mandating nonpartisan school board elections. 

Florida was also among a small group of states that passed laws in 2022 aimed at restricting school reading materials for students. House Bill 1467 required school media specialists to make sure reading materials were age appropriate and contained no “pornographic” content, and expanded the state’s role in formal parental objections to material by publishing a list of objected-to content from schools around the state. The law’s potential chilling effect played out earlier this year, when many Florida schools had empty classroom libraries. And with a statewide list, schools could choose to withdraw remotely controversial material, including texts dealing with issues of race and sexuality. Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi and Montana passed similar laws this year, while Iowa’s governor has like-minded legislation awaiting her signature. (Florida was also among the first batch of states to recently pass legislation labeled as a “parent’s bill of rights,” and ranks among the many red states that have implemented laws banning the teaching of “critical race theory” or related topics.)

Similarly, Florida joined a wave of red states in broadening access to school voucher systems this year, part of a national campaign to expand “school choice” but also potentially weaken public schools. Unlike earlier voucher programs, these new laws — including Florida’s — create education savings accounts that have few limitations on participation. Parents can spend state funds — which would’ve otherwise gone to the public school system — on traditional private schools, religious schools, online schools and even home-schooling. Unlike Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill or partisan school board election measures, however, the voucher legislation has more public support: A slight majority of Florida voters told the University of North Florida earlier this year that they backed the measure.

Beyond the classroom, DeSantis and Florida Republicans have also been ahead of or in step with other red steps in passing anti-LGBTQ legislation, especially anti-trans measures. Along with roughly a dozen other states, Florida outlawed access to gender-affirming care for minors. That legislation also required any adult seeking such treatment to receive it from a doctor and to sign consent forms. Florida also joined four other red states by implementing a “bathroom bill” in 2023, as the state’s new law makes it a misdemeanor to use a restroom that doesn’t align with the person’s birth sex in public buildings. Additionally, recently passed legislation targets drag shows by barring venues from admitting minors to “adult live performances” and prohibits local governments from issuing public permits for any event that could expose children to such activities, which critics say could also restrict Pride events for the LGBTQ+ community.

Keeping step with other red states on gun policy

Shortly before DeSantis was first elected governor in 2018, a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida left 17 people dead. As is often the case after such tragedies, there were calls across the country to enact tighter gun control measures. Then-Gov. Rick Scott responded by enacting new regulations, including waiting periods for the purchase of long guns and raising the minimum age to purchase most long guns to 21, among other measures. The 2018 legislation also allowed some public and private school employees to carry firearms in schools, but it excluded classroom teachers, in part due to Scott’s reticence to enact such a policy. 

DeSantis, however, had no such qualms, and in his first year as governor, he expanded the program. In May 2019, he signed a law that would allow teachers to carry weapons in the classroom, provided that they undergo training and drug screening (as well as meeting some other conditions). This made Florida the 12th GOP-led state to enact policies allowing teachers to carry guns in the classroom, under certain conditions. At least five more would follow. In the years since, Florida voters have indicated mixed views on the policy, but perhaps importantly for DeSantis, Republicans and independents seem to accept it: In the Siena College/Spectrum News poll, arming teachers in schools had the support of 44 percent of Florida voters, including 48 percent of independents and 71 percent of Republicans.

In addition to arming teachers, we analyzed four other major gun policies to determine how Florida compared to other states with GOP trifectas or split government. In most cases, Florida seems to be keeping pace with the Republican party writ large. Florida was the first state to pass a modern version of what’s known as a “Stand Your Ground” law in 2005, which allows a more expansive interpretation of self-defense statutes, though within five years at least 14 more states would follow.² There are now 29 states where Stand Your Ground has been passed into law, as well as eight more where it has been established as law by legal precedent.

In 1987, Florida enacted a law that prevents municipal and local governments from enacting stricter gun laws than those of the state (commonly known as “preemption”), a policy that at least 20 other red or split states also enacted in the 1980s and 90s. This policy was strengthened in 2011, adding fines for local officials who attempted to enact restrictive statutes, a comparatively severe penalty upheld by the Florida Supreme Court in January. This was around the same time when at least three other states (Indiana, Alabama and Kentucky) were passing new preemption laws of their own.

Most recently, DeSantis signed a bill into law allowing permitless concealed carry of handguns, joining 24 other red or split states, most of which passed the legislation within the last 10 years. However, the law stopped short at allowing citizens to openly carry firearms in public, a practice currently allowed in at least 40 other states, including at least 12 states with Democratic trifecta governments. While DeSantis himself has indicated support for open carry, some Republican leaders in Florida are wary of the policy. Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, for example, said in March that she would not support any constitutional carry bill that was not endorsed by the Florida Sheriffs Association, a group that endorsed the permitless carry bill but stopped short at a recommendation for open carry legislation.

Playing catchup on abortion policy

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in the summer of 2022, many Republican-controlled states were ready. Nineteen states had already passed laws that would ban abortion outright or after six weeks of pregnancy (though some of these were tied up in court at the time). Three more states with split control of state government had preexisting bans in place. 

The six Republican-led states³ without restrictive abortion bans in place were Indiana, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Florida. Indiana quickly moved to pass a total abortion ban, calling a special session to pass legislation that was signed into law less than two months after the Dobbs ruling. Montana and Kansas were both prevented from issuing bans due to constitutional restrictions; each attempted to pass constitutional amendments by referendum last year (both failed). The Nebraska state legislature has been trying to pass a six-week abortion ban, which failed by just one vote, though they are still trying to pass a 12-week ban before the legislative session ends later this month. New Hampshire is just barely under Republican control, and the moderate Republican Gov. Chris Sununu has indicated he does not intend to further restrict abortion access in the state.

That leaves Florida.

In early 2022, when states around the country were preparing for the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned, Florida did move to restrict abortion rights in the state – but not to such an extreme as other GOP-led states. Florida passed a law banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a move that was framed by Republicans as a compromise, rather than the total bans or six-week bans being proposed by other states. And polling suggests that they might have been right: Nationally, Americans are split when it comes to banning abortion after fifteen weeks, with some polls showing slight support for such a ban and others showing slight opposition. In Florida, the Siena College/Spectrum News poll from September 2022 found that only 16 percent of likely voters thought the 15-week ban should be made more restrictive. (Forty-one percent thought it should remain as is and 37 percent thought it should be made less restrictive.)

While every other nearby Southern state was trying to further restrict abortion access, Florida seemed to be testing out a new policy that could have changed the nature of the abortion debate in the state, and maybe across the country; one Florida lawmaker even referred to the law as a “trial balloon.” According to the polls, the 15-week ban appears to be no more polarizing than most other major issues, whereas a six-week abortion ban is unpopular with the American public: We have been unable to find any national polls showing majority support for a six-week abortion ban in the last two years. Only one poll in that time frame showed the policy above water nationally; most polls, like this recent Fabrizio, Lee & Associates/Impact Research/Wall Street Journal poll, show a six-week abortion ban underwater by double digits.

But just a year later, Florida lawmakers decided to bring state policy in line with other red states. They passed a six-week abortion ban, which DeSantis signed in April, despite just 22 percent of Floridians indicating support for the policy in the University of North Florida poll, including only 34 percent of Republicans.⁴ 

This move finally brings Florida in line with other Republican-led states on abortion, despite having previously been one of the few states in the region that was able to provide abortions to nearby patients. If South Carolina and Florida’s six-week bans both survive their court challenges, abortion will not be legal after six weeks of pregnancy in any state in the Southeast.

Bucking conservative orthodoxy on environmental protection

One area where Florida is — and has been — blazing its own path is on environmental protection and capital spending. This is less a product of politics and more of circumstance: About 30 percent of Florida is wetlands, according to the most recent government estimates available, and the state is historically the most hurricane prone in the country. In the latest Florida Climate Resilience Survey, conducted in March, almost half of Floridians said they had been impacted by flooding in the last 12 months and two-thirds said they had been impacted by strong winds caused by hurricanes or tornadoes.

As a result, the state has invested billions of dollars in protecting, restoring and improving its natural resources. In DeSantis’s first term, the state spent more than $3.3 billion on restoring the Everglades and protecting water resources; at the beginning of his second, he signed an executive order that proposed an additional $3.5 billion for environmental protection over the next four years.  

While the figures themselves are strikingly high, it’s not inconsistent with Florida’s spending over the past few decades. Since 1991, an average of 13 percent of Florida’s overall capital expenditures have been from environmental capital funds — the third-highest figure in that time period, according to data from the National Association of State Budget Officers.⁵

Florida’s legislature tackled other issues this session that we have not discussed, like banning the investment of public money into funds that promote environmental, social and governance goals; reforming insurance markets; and defunding DEI initiatives at public universities. But a sampling of policies shows Florida isn’t the consistent vanguard of modern conservatism it presents as, only in some areas. 

DeSantis intends to use his track record in Florida to appeal to Republican primary voters. Yet Florida’s shift to the right won’t necessarily be an unalloyed positive for DeSantis’s presidential hopes. Take abortion: Were he to win the GOP nomination, DeSantis could face trouble in the general election for promoting a six-week abortion ban that more Americans oppose than support — despite multiple Republican-led states passing and enacting such bans before Florida. Interestingly, former President Donald Trump criticized DeSantis over the law, which may suggest that Trump feels some Republican primary voters looking to beat President Biden in 2024 could be scared off by DeSantis’s hard push to the right on an issue that probably reduced GOP gains in the 2022 midterms. Prominent Republican donors have expressed similar concerns. 

Nevertheless, DeSantis’s conservative leadership in Florida made him the leading alternative to Trump from the start in this election cycle. And even as DeSantis’s poll numbers have fallen in recent weeks, his desire to “make America Florida” could be the pitch to win over many Republicans who currently support Trump — a must if he is to win his party’s nomination.

Since 1956, European countries have been gathering each year to compete in the Eurovision song contest — a competition of largely pop and techno artists that can often feel like a parody of European tastes in music. There have long been accusations of bias in the voting process and last Saturday’s competition — which Sweden won — was no exception. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen speaks with statistics and health economics professor Gianluca Baio, who created a model to determine whether there really are biases advantaging or disadvantaging certain nations.

Galen also speaks with Courtney Kennedy, vice president of methods and innovation at the Pew Research Center, who recently published a study showing that the polling industry of today bares little semblance to the polling industry at the start of the century. The days of real human beings randomly dialing landline phones are gone, but what does that mean for the accuracy of public opinion research?