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So Galen, the rule held true, right? You went on vacation and big news happened. It did. I was going to resist even making jokes about it this time. No, this time it's merited. Sometimes you exaggerate the effect of your vacations on the national news, but this time clearly you caused this vote. Wait, wait, wait. Hold on, hold on.
Last year, I took a vacation twice. And the two times I took a vacation, the queen died and Russia invaded Ukraine. Yeah, that's pretty big. How am I exaggerating anything? I feel like one time you took a vacation and it was like, I don't know, the house released some report on some C-list level scandal. Wait, no, no, no, no. Also remember, the last time I took a vacation before COVID-19,
I took a vacation and that week the house started its impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump. Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Droop. Droop? I don't even know my own name. Okay, sorry. As it's really been, I've been away. I'm jet lagged. I've truly been on vacation for two weeks. Okay, let's try that again.
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. Happy New Year. I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays. From what I hear, the holiday season came to an abrupt end with some high-pitched drama in Washington last week. I will admit, I was out of the country the past two weeks and wasn't really following it. So here, I'd usually make a joke about how news is always breaking when I'm on vacation, but I think you're tired of those jokes and I don't want my bosses to catch on and make me stop taking vacation.
In any case, luckily, we have some top-notch professionals here to make sense of what happened for both you, dear listeners, and myself. Joining me today, our editor-in-chief, Nate Silver. Hey, Nate, how's it going?
Hey, how are you? You know, doing pretty well. Trying to get over some jet lag. I don't know if we'll keep it in or not, but I just botched my own name when I was introducing the podcast. So that's how it's going for me this morning. All day with us is elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Hey, Nathaniel, how are you? Hey, Galen. I'm great. Happy New Year. I love that enthusiasm. You have learned it is 2023. We're off on the right foot. I love to hear it.
All today with us today for the first time is ABC News investigative reporter on Capitol Hill, Catherine Falders. Catherine, welcome to the podcast. It's so good to have you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So today we are going to begin by talking about the drawn out House speakers vote last week.
Why did it take 15 votes to get Kevin McCarthy elected? What does that process tell us about the two years ahead and the Republican Party more broadly? Then we're going to talk about scandals. As you well know, we've tried to quantify the effects of scandals on elections over the years.
But one new congressman avoided his scandals, meaningfully affecting his career, until after the election was over. So what is going on with George Santos? And will he stay in office now that it seems that he's lied about almost every aspect of his biography? Let's begin, though, with McCarthy. So...
I'll say I kept getting alerts on my phone every time the House failed to elect a speaker. But really, other than that, I haven't been following too much of the ins and outs while I was being a tourist last week. Catherine, however, you were on the Hill for all of it. So thank you for being there, doing the diligent work. Can you give us your best sort of like plot summary for somebody who was really not paying any attention to the ins and outs of it?
Okay. So, yes, I was there for literally every second of it. I should have taken vacation like you into the wee hours of the morning on, I guess, Saturday, right? So if you look at this from a 30,000-foot view, electing a speaker, this isn't something we're normally on the air and special coverage about talking about for days and hours. It's usually ceremonial, you remember, with –
with Nancy Pelosi that took one vote. Usually this happens with one vote. You swear in the speaker, you swear in the new members, and then it's done. It's not really talked about. That wasn't the case for McCarthy. This took 15 votes. He knew going into it, actually we talked to him a little bit going into this, and he said, you know, I'm prepared to stay on the floor for as long as it takes. But the reality was he, this vote
came to the floor and he knew he didn't have the votes. There were these holdouts. There were these Republican holdouts that you could count on one hand. There were about five of them to start with. And then the votes kept happening and happening and happening. And you ended up with about 20 people that he
needed to convince to vote for him or at least, you know, vote in some form. You could vote present. The vote doesn't count. There was all this math involved in it. Right. But the reality was this was a four day drawn out fight. Essentially, he kept losing the vote. It was unclear who was going to be the speaker. The other question is, who's the alternative here?
Is there anybody else who's going to get the votes? No. They put some members of the Freedom Caucus. They nominated some of them. Byron Donalds, he was getting 20. But there was never anybody who was going to actually get the votes that McCarthy needs and was getting, frankly. So we'll get into this more. But the reality was that there were all these backdoor meetings, backroom deals. And there's a question, of course, over whether
Is he going to be the weakest speaker, right? There was only 20 of these guys. And it was interesting being on the Hill. I got to tell you, like they would vote. It would fail. It was the same thing. It was like wash, rinse, repeat. You go find the people who voted against him. You go find Byron Donalds. You go ask Jim Jordan whether he was going to be able to whip these votes.
And nobody of those 20 could really agree on what exactly they wanted from McCarthy. There was no unified leader, which I think being up there, McCarthy was frustrated by. So again, all that's to say that we do now have a Speaker of the House. And the question is,
What can he get done? Is he going to have to make even more concessions to a small number of people in his conference? I think that's the big question going forward. So after 15 votes, and it was about like 1.30 in the morning, he was finally elected.
So what concessions did he actually have to make in order to become a speaker? So there's like this kind of archaic sounding phrase, if you will, in Congress called vacating the chair. Like, what does that mean? That's essentially the ability to remove a speaker of the House. It's always been there, but the threshold hasn't been the same. So at first, it's
In order for this to happen, McCarthy was like, OK, OK, OK, I'll concede to allowing five members of the House to essentially force a vote, you know, put it on the floor for the full House of Representatives to actually remove the speaker. And they were like, that's not good enough. So now he's agreed to cancel.
have one member force a vote to then remove him. So that's down to one member. And there were all sorts of other concessions, whether it had to do with the budget, whether it was committee concessions. He said, by the way, McCarthy said publicly that he didn't make any promises for people on committees. But the reality is there
There are some concessions behind closed doors on what they're going to investigate. You've already seen this happening, the whole investigate the investigators thing. They're upset about the Democrats doing all these January 6th investigations. So that's just some of them. But other concessions just aren't public. We don't know. And we probably won't know those for a while. You saw that at
crazy video from C-SPAN of Mike Rogers, who's the incoming chair of the House Armed Services Committee, kind of going after, lunging at gates. He had to be held back by another representative, Richard Hudson from North Carolina. There was also talk that
Matt Gaetz wants the gavel of one of the subcommittees on Mike Rogers' House Armed Services Committee. Was that given to him? Did McCarthy promise that to him to finally push this over the finish line? There's all sorts of things that are going to trickle out as this Congress gets going.
Okay, so I think a big question here is going to be, as you already posed, like, was this just a preview for absolutely every piece of business that the current house has to take care of in the upcoming session? Nathaniel, Nate, what's your take on this? Like, I may have missed this one, but am I promised to get 10 more of these by the time the year is over?
So I did one of my weekly or semi-weekly segments for ABC about this thing several weeks ago and kind of, I guess then, kind of predicted the outcome correctly, right? Because of what Catherine said earlier. Oh, look at you, Mr. Nate Silver, predicting correct outcomes left and right. I'm not going to demean myself for subsequent changes of heart, right? Because as Catherine and you were talking about, there wasn't really a clear...
alternative. You were never going to have majority support for a Freedom Caucus member for being speaker, right? So I kind of, in that segment, I thought, yeah, he'll be speaker, but it might get messy and take several ballots, right? Subsequently to that, though, I kind of came to believe that the Freedom Caucus wanted a scalp and that, okay, this is going to be dorky, but like,
As a poker player, I try to think about what's like the equilibrium outcome given everyone's kind of bargaining position, right? And I thought they would kind of off Kevin McCarthy because there's nothing particularly remarkable about or interesting about Kevin McCarthy, right? So replace him with someone else and they can say, we're flexing our power. But at the same time, the more establishment members of the Republican Party aren't really conceding anything. And instead –
There were concessions, and it kind of surprises me in the sense that I thought like maybe the, maybe I'm going to call them moderates. People on Twitter will get very mad at you if you call any Republican a moderate. But let's say there's a group of
Let me use a different term, although I think I would defend the use of moderates in some instances for them. But you have like purple seat Republicans who are vulnerable for reelection, right? Like a lot of the ones who won in this mini red wave we had in New York are going to have a tough time maintaining reelection. The GOP lost a lot of close races, but won some, right? So you probably have like, you know, one or two dozen who were vulnerable to a general election loss, and they probably don't want
crazy and wacky Freedom Caucus members running the show in the House. But they didn't really apparently, at least publicly, flex their muscle very much, right? I think it was Don Bacon of Omaha, Nebraska, was one exception, talked explicitly about like kind of partnering with Democrats potentially. But, you know, what I thought might happen is that they would –
hold the reins a little bit more on McCarthy. Maybe one of them would have voted present on some vote, right, to say you can't concede everything to these Freedom Caucus people. But that didn't happen, right? So you're going to have, I think, a
tumultuous, almost anything the House would try to do. I mean, granted, with such a narrow majority, you're going to have that anyway. But I think this seems like kind of a slam dunk that we're in for more chaos over budgetary fights and over how to go after Joe Biden, over the debt ceiling I'm sure we'll talk about later.
but all of the above. And do you think that because you didn't see centrists or moderates or purple seat Republicans, whatever you want to call them, flexing their muscles this time, that you don't think they will in the future? Because ultimately, they kind of got the speaker that they wanted, right?
Right. I mean, so the problem for the GOP is it's kind of like there are three groups. Right. There's like these 20 members roughly who are anti-establishment. Right. And then you have the kind of purple seat ones I referred to earlier. Right.
dozen or two some of whom are moderate some of whom are not particularly moderate but are electorally interested in not making the house look like a total show, right and then you have whichever is left right, which is the majority of the caucus but not enough on its own to To get anything done. And so the dynamics are pretty interesting, right? You need you know
two of those groups, or actually you need all three of those groups to agree on something to get a majority, or you need some combination of those groups and Democrats, which makes it very interesting. I don't want to overdo this because this was a more significant time in American history, but you do have the time when you had the Northern Democrats and the Southern Democrats and the Republicans. That makes things more complicated when there's no intrinsic majority group for many things.
And I also think to your point about this, too, with the moderates and why he didn't lose more of them. You know, while McCarthy and his whip team were trying to secure these votes in back rooms with those 20, they were also making deals with moderates. Right. They couldn't afford to lose them. So I think this is what you'll see when in the upcoming Congress, like,
oh, the Freedom, someone from the Freedom Caucus or one of these 20, if you want to say, is going to do X, Y and Z. You might also see, you know, McCarthy saying and he was behind closed doors to some of these moderates like, look, I can't afford to lose your vote. But if if they let's just call them the rebels, right, do that, then like, you know, we have the power to essentially allow that not to happen. Yeah. And that's a great point. Right. Because like, uh,
what you negotiate behind closed doors is not, is by definition, you're preaching about kind of what the public knows about that and what they don't, right? Reporters may catch on, but for sure, yeah. And, you know, it is worth noting that like neither Congress nor financial markets seem to have acted all that concerned about a debt default, whether that's naive or where they have inside information, I don't know, right? Right, I mean, that would be the potential area where we...
Let's see. Maybe they start getting Democrats involved. I have no idea. But Nathaniel, I know you've been focused on the specific, you know, the 20 rebels, as Catherine called them. Who are they? Where do they come from? What are they motivated by? Like what sort of divide? OK, we've used the term anti-establishment, but what do they represent within the Republican Party?
Yeah. So to boil it down to a phrase, they basically represent the old Tea Party wing of the Republican Party. I think that people forget about the Tea Party, or at least they kind of like memory hole it since kind of Trump came on the scene. But I think that kind of divide...
really explains what we saw in congress last week more so than anything having to do with trump these are kind of some old grievances against mccarthy um some old kind of conservative dogma um coming kind of bubbling up to the top so if you look at dw nominate which is a metric that political scientists use to measure politicians ideology based on their congressional voting records
DW Nominate has two different dimensions. It has kind of a classic left-right dimension, and then it also has a second dimension, which has kind of changed over time in its meaning, but kind of roughly correlates to pro versus anti-establishment. And if you, in my article over the weekend, in which I kind of recapped the speaker battle, I plotted all the Republicans in the 118th Congress by their DW Nominate score and the
two dimensions. And you can see all of the McCarthy rebels were really clustered in this lower right corner, which represented very conservative on the left-right spectrum, but also very anti-establishment, right? There were a lot of people who are, you know, ideologically very conservative, but who aren't kind of this, you know, insurgent, you know, like
non-compromising wing, Tea Party wing of the party who, and those conservative but establishment people supported McCarthy. And so, so yeah, so yeah,
This is particularly interesting, too. Another aspect is they came from predominantly very red districts. So this isn't a type of situation like you had with the kind of mini Democratic revolt against Nancy Pelosi in 2019, which, of course, she she quelled before it got to the House floor. But those members were all kind of.
moderate Democrats from swing districts who were almost certainly kind of distancing themselves from Pelosi because she was a very kind of unpopular figure on the campaign trail. Kevin McCarthy, his polling numbers are not as bad as Pelosi's, but they're also just a lot of people don't really care about him or aren't familiar with him. Nancy Pelosi, as people probably know, has been held up as this boogie woman in Republican ads for over a decade. Um,
And Kevin McCarthy is just a little more anonymous. And so it's not about him being kind of electoral poison, at least in general elections. It seems to be really about a kind of disagreement with his conservative and or his not. I mean, he's plenty conservative kind of to Nate's earlier point about moderate and conservative being a difficult label these days. But
He's not seen as like sufficiently pure in that regard, I think, by these tea partiers. And he's certainly seen as kind of too much of a creature of the Washington establishment for their tastes.
Why wasn't McCarthy able to navigate these divides before it ever got to the point of a week-long sort of battle on the House floor, right? I mean, this was somewhat unique in American history in terms of the party's inability to, I think, as I saw a quote in the New York Times, go something like, suffer the party's indignities behind closed doors as opposed to on the floor of the House chamber, right?
What was it about this fight that it had to be had in public, even though McCarthy would end up becoming speaker regardless? I think he ultimately knew, though, that, you know, to your point, that it just had to be a public fight. Pelosi, for example, would never bring anything to the floor without having the votes, right? We just witnessed 14 failed votes. I think part of it, and again, I think there's a lot of factors here, but talking to the
you know, originally some of the five holdouts, right? McCarthy thought that they were going to pick up a lot more seats than they did, right? He thought to himself, I don't, you know, they're going to be the way they are. I can lose them. It doesn't matter, right? So he never really worked to get these guys on board in the first place. Of course, he didn't think he'd have 20. And that was a whole, you know, more came out. And then they started, then 10 started voting for him. And there was all this,
You know, they all wanted different things, right? But he knew going into it that he would at least lose four or five, which he couldn't lose. So I think the other interesting thing here, and just by standing outside of McCarthy's office, which, of course, now he's in the Speaker's office, but his old office is just right off the House floor. So you...
can see members going in and out of there. You know who he's meeting with. And from the early stages, well, and by early, I mean once he had realized how thin the margin was, he was bringing Marjorie Taylor Greene into his office. And there's a lot of factors behind that, but...
And a lot of reasons why. But, you know, having her kind of almost spearhead this effort, you would never really think this, right? That, I think, he was just like, I need her help with these guys, with the Freedom Caucuses of the world. She's kind of close with Matt Gaetz. Maybe that helped. So, yeah.
You know, I think it was a lot of... He just didn't think that he needed the votes. And then when it turned out that he was going to have a lot more people voting against him, it's just bring it to the floor and try and tire people out. We kept asking him...
What's your strategy here? He's just like, well, I'm willing to vote as many times as we can. Well, that's not really going to change anything. But it did. I guess it did. I guess. I guess. But then, you know, they had to. This is so funny. Nobody from covering Congress. You kind of know the rules of Congress and there's no rules. Right. Because they don't have a rules package. They're actually voting on the rules package themselves.
today on Monday, but we were talking to all these members as they were sitting in their seats and coming out. We're like, how do you even adjourn the House? How do you adjourn? Who makes a motion to adjourn? How do we leave the floor? And the members were just like, well, we don't actually know. They figured it out and they worked with the clerk, but it was really kind of interesting because to your point, when McCarthy was losing all these votes, they wanted to go negotiate with
But then they had to vote and it wasn't clear that they would even get the votes to leave the floor. So, you know, at the end of the day, because the Democrats were like, oh, this is this slow rolling show. Like we want to, you know, keep the cameras on. Like, let's not adjourn. Exactly. Let's not adjourn. Let them figure out all of this like in public. It's embarrassing for them. Anyway, they got the votes, but just barely. Right. I mean, that's crazy. Just a motion to adjourn so they could leave the House floor.
Um, so yeah, they had to figure this all out, like over the course of four days and, you know, who knows whether those promises will be kept or broken or whatever it is, but hey, I guess it worked out in some way. Let's talk a little bit more about what this all pretends for the future.
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Kevin McCarthy made some concessions to the 20 rebels, the former Tea Party, whatever you want to call it, the Freedom Caucus.
that essentially weakened his position as House Speaker, although it at least secured him that position in the first place. As you laid out, Catherine, some of those details we know, some we don't know but might find out, and others we will never know. So what does this weakened Speaker's position mean for how the House conducts itself for the next two years? You know, I think
And as Nate was kind of saying, like, we're just going to have to see how that really plays out. But the reality is they have a thin majority. It's going to be a food fight, frankly, on a lot of things. Now, what that is, whether I know, obviously, there's questions about the deficit budget, government shutdowns, how that will look. But I mean, I asked him.
When was it? I mean, the days are all blending together. I think it was Friday morning, Friday afternoon. You know, I think my question to him was, what do you say to those who essentially are thinking you're making too many concessions to the Freedom Caucus and you're essentially letting them, you know, control the show of the whole Republican conference? And...
He doesn't really have a great answer for that one, because how could you? But the answer was, oh, I think this is really good to like let this play out on the floor. We can get it done ahead of time. We can sort out our differences ahead of time. But to your question about ultimately how this will play out with future legislation and votes on the floor, I don't necessarily think it got done ahead of time. I think you'll see a lot of what happened this past week on a lot of
on a lot of issues. There's going to be a lot more backroom deals and a lot more negotiating and whether they're able to legislate in that type of environment, you know, your guess is as good as mine.
Yeah, I mean, so I think it's important to make a subtle distinction here, which is that this fight was obviously within the Republican Party, right? It was between the, you know, these 20 group of, you know, McCarthy rebels, you know, Freedom Caucus types, Tea Party types, whatever you want to call them, and the rest of the Republican Caucus. The future fights are going to be between Democrats and Republicans.
some Republicans, right? And like the question is,
How kind of hostage, if you want, is Ms. McCarthy going to be to these 20 members or however many they are? Part of kind of what he has promised them, and it's basically just a handshake deal at this point is my understanding, but is that he's going to start from a very kind of conservative negotiating position when it comes to issues like the debt ceiling and the budget and things like that. And the question is, why?
Will he maintain that? Does he even have the power to, if it gets to the kind of the precipice of a debt default, or if we're in week five of a government shutdown, does he have the power anymore to defy people within his own caucus? That, I think, is the interesting question for me. Catherine, I don't know if you have insight. No, I think that's...
entirely true and how he's able to get that done. I mean, I know...
from talking to people close to McCarthy and his, you know, whether they're advisors on the Hill or outside advisors, that's their, that's their same worry here. Is he too held hostage, if you will, by the Freedom Caucus and those 20? I mean, I honestly think the answer is yes, because you saw what just happened. And just to get him elected, yeah, he had to kowtow to them in a sense. So no, I totally agree. One other point of context to keep in mind is that like,
It's pretty unusual for the Speaker to switch parties after the incoming party has such kind of an underwhelming year electorally, right? So it's not like Kevin McCarthy's approach to the minority was particularly validated. I don't know. I mean, I think he was going to have a fairly difficult time no matter what. Wait, I don't know what you're saying, Nate. Well, what's new? Are you saying during this Congress or in 2024? No, I'm saying like, so the GOP kind of like,
I mean, they didn't like lose the midterm, but they kind of did relative to expectations. They actually did lose a seat in the Senate, right? So like it's pretty weird for you to like have this – I mean it's kind of like if Hillary had like just narrowly won in 2016, right, instead of narrowly losing. It wouldn't be like she was –
elected with all that much of a mandate. Exactly. Right. And there might be a lot of interparty criticism where even though you won like a technical win, but a moral defeat. Right. Yeah. And I think that's part of what empowers like if it had been like some like let's say they wind up with the same number of seats, but had started out with fewer. So it felt like a bigger like moral victory. Right. Like
You know, McCarthy would have had more been more empowered, I think, to tell people, hey, look, we should have this like this. What Trump actually said, we have this great win. Let's celebrate. Right. That brings a little bit hollow when when you barely win the House, you lose a seat in the Senate when you had delusions, I guess, about like, you know, winning Patty Murray's seat in Washington and stuff like that. So, you know, that undermines his credibility to some degree.
I think the other thing, and we talked about this a bit, and you were talking about the Freedom Caucus and how that has been there for some time. I mean, Trump likes to think that he created the Freedom Caucus, but that's just obviously not true. And I think...
the dynamic that was fascinating to see play out. And like, okay, I think at the end of the day, it had an effect. But the whole Trump factor of this, you know, people close to him were telling me he was constantly making calls. He was constantly trying to whip votes on this.
since, you know, before Monday or Tuesday, whenever the vote came to the floor. And it didn't matter. It wasn't changing any votes. Him calling and saying, knock it off, this is ridiculous. Instead, Matt Gaetz is literally nominating Donald Trump as a candidate. And he got like one vote, which was Gaetz. And you can imagine Trump does not like that, to see his name on a board losing.
And it was really remarkable because those like Lauren Boebert, those, you know, the Bob Goodes of the world who weren't, they didn't even want to take his calls. They were like, okay, great, but we're not going to listen to you. And then, of course, you saw the photos on the floor early Saturday morning when McCarthy finally got it with Marjorie Taylor Greene having Donald Trump on the line. And one of the, who was it? I think it was Rosendale, Matt Rosendale, one of the members being like, I don't even want to talk to him. But then, this is crazy. So...
McCarthy comes out and talks to us at like 2.30 in the morning and comes out. And almost the first thing he says was, oh, and you can't underestimate the power and influence of Donald Trump.
I don't necessarily think that that is true. McCarthy said he just talked to Trump, and I'm sure Trump told him to say that from covering Trump. I know that he probably told him to say that, given that Trump considered the whole thing embarrassing to him. But the point is that as much as Trump was trying to influence this before the vote even went to the floor, you had these 5, 10, 15, 20 people who were just like, eh, no, we're not going to listen to you. We're going to ignore you. Until they didn't. But it took four days. So...
Well, it sort of brings up what was always a weird alliance during the Trump years. Like during Trump's candidacy in 2016, it was some of the House Freedom folks who are most opposed to Donald Trump because Ted Cruz was their candidate. They thought he was anathema to what conservatives actually stood for. But then once he became president, they kind of became interesting allies because they
he came in without a lot of legislative priorities. And so they could use him sort of as a vessel to try to further whatever, you know, legislative priorities they do actually have. Because since they are pretty ideological within the party, they have a lot of policies, you know, whether they're popular or not, that they can put forward if given the opportunity. Now it seems like it was exactly the Freedom Caucus again that was like, we don't give a shit about what Trump is saying. We don't like Kevin McCarthy. And he is not, you know, an ideologue in the way that we want him to be.
Which I guess sort of brings us to the question of, Nate, you outlined the three groups that you saw being defined during this argument, which is the moderates, the Ideological Freedom Caucus, and everyone else. What did everyone else see as sort of the divides within the Republican Party that were illuminated through this process and how they might play out for the next two years? Well, I do think...
Yeah, it's a good question, Galen. I think that you did see, I think Catherine alluded to this earlier, that like,
not all of the 20 anti McCarthy voters had the same priorities, right? McCarthy kind of struck this grand bargain on Thursday night slash Friday morning that won over, I think it was like 14 of them. But this wasn't quite enough to get him into majority territory. And that included people like Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz, who eventually had to vote president in order to get McCarthy kind of over the hump.
Um, and so I do think that they have different interests and like, um, Boebert is obviously someone who came to Congress after the Tea Party during the Trump administration. I think Gates also, I think Gates came in 2016. So like they may not kind of share those same, you
They're not kind of cut from the same cloth as the original Tea Party folks. I kind of see this as I think the Tea Party and Trump, I think we're both clearly kind of fueled by the same thing, which is like grievance within the Republican base. And I think they both use that to kind of great effect.
But I think that most of the people in the original Tea Party wave were like genuinely like ideological purists, like true conservative believers.
and who kind of tapped into the grievance to get elected. But what Trump kind of taught us in 2016 is that actually the Republican primary voters didn't actually care about kind of the pure lower taxes essence of the Tea Party movement. It was actually just the grievance all along. And so Trump comes along, taps into the grievance, doesn't have a lot of ideology, isn't particularly conservative. And even we've talked about this, that he was kind of the quote unquote moderate option in 2016 in that primary election.
And so now you kind of have these two groups who have kind of been, you know, like allies at times when it suits them. Think about like the Club for Growth and Donald Trump and Republican primaries. But then also kind of when it comes down to, you know, maybe certain other issues and ideological purity, they are at odds. And so I think that explains why you see, you know, the Freedom Caucus, you know, sometimes allying themselves with Trump and sometimes saying, you know, this is bigger than you, buddy.
To wrap this all up here, so it was a sort of, you know, blockbuster week for C-SPAN. Now that there's going to be a new package of rules put in place and C-SPAN cameras are going to have, you know...
stricter guardrails on what they can actually cover on the floor of the House. We're not going to see quite so much drama anymore. But in the grand scheme of things, what does this all mean? Do voters care? Are they like, wow, Republicans really can't govern when given the opportunity? Like, were most people like me not paying attention at all? Like, does this matter in terms of how Republicans pitch themselves to the country over the next two years?
I think it matters, but I don't think that the majority of Americans were sitting around their dinner table saying, wow, you know, I wonder who's going to be elected speaker. And is it going to happen today or is it going to happen tomorrow? Though, I mean, I do think just on like a, this isn't a representation of the country, but yeah, I think more people were engaged with, you know, the...
C-SPAN and the video and all that. But to your point, we're not going to be seeing that. I think it ultimately comes down to, obviously, the constituents. And you heard people, you know, Chip Roy and everybody saying, Washington is broken. That's why we're protesting. Things don't work in this city, which like, yeah, sure, they don't actually. Everything moves really slowly and nothing can get done. Fair point, right? But I think, you know, at the end of the day, that's what
the majority of Americans care about, right? These issues that are affecting them. And they're not going to bed thinking every day, like, oh, only if Jim Jordan was speaker would this happen, or only if Kevin McCarthy lost, I wouldn't be in the position that I am, right? I think it comes down to
How in the world are is Kevin McCarthy and the Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, going to work together? How is that going to look in the Senate? And then do they get anything across the finish line in terms of legislating with this White House? I think.
That's what people care about. I think it's become and Trump created a lot of this. It becomes almost like taboo. Right. To like in this. That was how one of the Republicans described it to me last week to even do anything with the other party. Right. You know, it's almost like a criticism. Trump will say, oh, can you believe Trump?
Kevin McCarthy's talking to Jeffries, like, which is just silly, right? That's not how government has worked. But, um, I think seeing how all of this can kind of get over to the finish line and what roadblocks there are and how they can work with the Senate and the white house. And, and like, if you think about it, Pelosi and McCarthy never spoke, they hated each other. That relationship was awful. It was never going to be repaired. Um, they wouldn't even look at each other. Um,
So, you know, I'm most fascinated by how McCarthy approaches the Democrats. And I think that's what Americans truly care about, not, you know, the ins and outs of Washington gossip. So we'll see. So I kind of think it's both. I do think that this broke through. So if you look at closed captioning data from cable news, McCarthy was mentioned over 2,000 times in four consecutive days. That is a very high level of coverage.
I think that, um, yeah, so, and, and this is something that we're going to be watching closely at five 38 to look at whether the, the kind of favorable ratings of the Republican party, um, have, um, you know, decreased in the wake of this and polling. Um, that said, I, I do think that, you know, by the time Americans get back around to voting again, this will be pretty far in the rear view mirror. I do think that things like whether the country defaults on its debt and whether there's a government shutdown will end up being more relevant to how people eventually vote. Um,
But but I would not be surprised at all to see this hurt Republicans, you know, at least temporarily in the eyes of the American people. Nate, I'm curious, given what everyone said here, is there some sort of consensus from past episodes of debt limit default brinkmanship about this?
how those kinds of episodes affect public opinion? Like does the party that seems to be blockading things or the Republican party during the Obama years, for example, do they get blamed or is it the party that's, you know, controls the white house that usually gets blamed in these circumstances? I mean, when there's a government shutdown, it tends to, uh, turn people off, uh, to everybody, but I think mostly blaming Congress, however, uh, which are parties in charge of Congress. Um,
However, it tends to snap back relatively quickly. To me, the question is like, is Republican Party putting itself back on a path where they're going to like appeal to like the suburban moderates that they lost in both 2020 and 2022? And the answer is, of course not, right? You know, the party isn't fit enough, so to speak, to be kind of anywhere near kind of moderating, I don't think. And the question is like,
Are we going to have a serious like shit show over a potential debt default if the debt ceiling is not increased? And then how does that fallout affect different parties, right? On the one hand, it would seem like if you have like a huge disruptive economic event, it's bad for the president's reelection. On the other hand, I think people are like sometimes like a little bit too literal minded about like just looking at economic data and not looking at like the cause behind it, right? I mean, if –
Democrats kind of credibly persuaded voters that like, hey, this is not our fault. This is the GOP's fault. They were the ones kind of holding this grenade and it blew up, right? Then it might not be like a typical disruptive economic event, but that's an important question. Yeah. We just went through a whole election cycle that was a lot about, you know, voters being able to process nuance and vote accordingly. So an important lesson to keep
Before we go, I do want to talk about the other, as Chad, my editor, who helped me with the script today, would say, Mishigas that sort of ran Rampage while I was gone. We're going to talk about George Santos.
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George Santos is a Republican from New York representing Nassau County on Long Island and part of Queens in the House. He flipped a, well, I guess it's a new district, so I don't know if you could say he flipped a formerly Democratic district, but he added one seat to Republicans' numbers in New York, helping Republicans with their narrow majority in the House. He's also the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. But from there, things get a whole lot murkier.
So, Nivania, I know you have been following this. So what has the story been over the past couple weeks in terms of his biography falling apart?
Most of this happened in kind of late December and kind of led by this big New York Times expose. But basically, we found that he had lied about most of his biography. So he said that he graduated from college and he never did. He said that he worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and he never directly worked for them. He said that he owned 13 properties and...
That's not true. And he also has kind of some other arguably more serious things that could actually get him into legal trouble. So there was he was accused of check fraud when he was 19 years old and living in Brazil. He also didn't fully disclose the source of his income on his personal financial disclosure forms, which could land him into kind of campaign finance issues.
And he's still in arrears for unpaid rent after kind of facing some evictions in apartments from several years ago also. There's also other minor stuff, I think, but that's the big stuff. Didn't he also say that his mother died in 9-11, but then also mark her death like a decade later as well?
I didn't see the resolution of that one. He said that 9-11 cost his mother her life and that she was there in the towers, but she did die in 2016, I believe. So there could be some long-term effects going on there. I'm not sure if anyone's gotten to the bottom of that one yet, but...
But yeah, there's a bunch of other kind of smaller stuff. But I think the really serious stuff obviously goes to potentially things that he has potentially broken the law on and then things kind of undergirding his qualifications for Congress. Like what is going on here? Why is this coming out post-election? I mean these are some pretty ostentatious lies.
Yeah. Is it like, is that the answer? It was like sort of so audacious that no one's really suspected that he would fabricate his entire biography. Yeah.
Well, this is a really interesting question, Galen, and it's kind of spurred a lot of debate online, and I'd be curious what the panel thinks. So first of all, a couple of kind of kernels of this did come out before the election. So the North Shore Leader, which is a local paper on Long Island, did kind of raise questions about the fact that there was no evidence that he owned the 13 properties that he said he owned or a sum number of properties.
I'm not sure if they questioned all 13. And then also the DCCC, the House campaign arm of the Democratic Party, also put together kind of like an opposition research sheet on Santos that included some of these things. There was actually like a charity that he claimed that he started that wasn't registered properly. But a lot of these things just kind of scratched the surface and like a lot of the big stuff
like the fact that he didn't graduate from college and didn't work at any of the places he said he worked. That was broken by the New York Times after the election. But it's definitely worth noting, like, why were these things out there and then nobody kind of dug deeper? Or maybe they were digging deeper, but they didn't publish their findings or, you know, kind of run negative ads about them until after the election. Obviously, the negative ads wouldn't have happened after the election. But I think there is...
some of this goes to something that we, you know, at five 38 talk out, which is just kind of like having a, um, not being great at judging, you know, probabilities and, and predicting elections. Like, I think this was a race that, that we, and I know, and other forecasters agreed was competitive, but kind of among all the bigger, you know, battleground and the focus on the Senate and things like that. Um,
People weren't paying a ton of attention to this race, it seems like. I think a lot of people were perhaps wrongly taken aback by Santos' win here. Maybe the magnitude of his win maybe was surprising because of the kind of mini red wave in New York, but...
um but yeah it's interesting and some people have blamed you know democrats for not um digging up more of this dirt and airing ads on it like i said some people have blamed media and also like specifically like whether it's specific media outlets like the new york times for not exposing this earlier or just kind of in general the decline of local media and how sad that is and how a kind of a robust um you know more robust local paper or a robust regional paper might have broken the story so
Yeah, it's an interesting question, obviously. Did he face a competitive primary? No, yeah, that was an interesting question, too. He actually ran for the first time in 2020 against this district's old Democratic incumbent. And so this is a second run for Congress. So in theory, this should have come out in 2020 if people were really doing their jobs. But no, this year, actually, there was no primary. He was the only Republican candidate who filed for
It's kind of a, you know, he, I mean, you know, he obviously did a bad thing by lying, but he was successful in so far as he kind of managed to be the only Republican to take seriously the fact that they could flip this district and he was right. So he's now a congressman. Catherine, what is George Santos' life like in Washington currently? Yeah.
I know you were off, but you might have seen these videos of him just like wandering the halls of Congress. I think...
When you first come up to Capitol Hill, I mean, it's confusing. There's like all these tunnels, like your office isn't an office building, right? Which you can access not by going through like the U.S. Capitol proper. So, you know, some of our reporters and producers were there his first day there where he literally just picked up his keys. And I
I don't quite know who's working for him. If anybody's working for him, maybe he has a couple people who are thinking about it, but he just kind of walks in with his backpack and literally walks right past his office. And then it's like, Oh, it's over here. And then went in his office. And I don't think, I mean, that's the beauty of reporting on Capitol Hill, um, is you can find whoever you want when you want to find them, right? You could be outside their office. You could
follow them to the Capitol. I'm not sure he was totally ready for that barrage of reporters. So there's just all this video of him, of course, not answering questions. But then, like, he had to leave his office to go to the Capitol. That's where the House floor is. So he's, like, wandering through all these tunnels. He's getting lost. He ends up in the Rayburn House office building. And I just think he...
It wasn't totally ready for what it would be like. But on a more serious note, though, and I really think that this is important, McCarthy or leadership, and this isn't for lack of asking. We've asked them every time, not every time, but a lot of times when we see them, just even for like a general comment about Santos, and he won't answer. He just will not answer. And a lot of that was because he needed his vote to win.
secure the speakership. But there are real serious questions about what happens now with his political future in Congress. You can talk about the Ethics Committee, but that's split. And will they investigate him? So I don't know. I think there's a lot more to come on this story now that he's actually sworn in as a member of Congress.
Yeah. Like, are there any clear calls from Republicans to investigate him or to consider, you know, booting him from the House? I mean, I'm not exactly sure what what you can do in a situation like this as, you know, the majority party and this being somebody who's a member of the majority party. But like, is anyone making any commotion now that McCarthy's speaker vote is behind him to try to get Santos out of office?
I mean, there's not too many yet, at least. I mean, they're all back up on Capitol Hill this week. So maybe we'll hear more. I mean, there's been some calls from I think it's another incoming Republican for the ethics committee to investigate. But that's just, you know, they'll look at it and who knows what they'll ultimately do. But, you
You know, he's also under federal investigation. So like the reality is that that will, could, I don't know, dictate the future of his, you know, political future, if you will. But, you know, will he resign? No. I mean, I know that there's the reporting that he said he's not going to run again in 2024. I think he said that privately. I don't think he said that publicly. That's so far away.
So I don't know. And look, things are, I'm curious what you guys think about this because with scandals on Capitol Hill, you just think, and especially just now, generally speaking, they're pretty short-lived, right? Like people forget easily. And I don't think they should. Like, I think it's important. And I think he needs to answer questions about this. But, you know, in two weeks from now, will people care? Will we be talking about it? Will the Republicans, you know, be talking about a completely different scandal?
So I think that's just something that, you know, will play out over these next couple of weeks. But it got to the point where he would just walk by and, you know, there was nothing else to ask him. He would answer maybe a question about McCarthy, but he just wasn't biting on any of this. So part of the reason why I think this story, which was reported in local media, so you can't say, oh, it's just a lack of local media, right? There is pretty robust local media in New York, right?
is that it didn't kind of fit into any prevailing narrative particularly, right? The narrative about him is, oh, he's an openly gay Latino congressman, right? And maybe that kind of is more zeitgeisty, right? So it's kind of like, you know, why would Republicans potentially want to, you know, boot him out of office or whatever, right? Well, it could be because they think that he damages their brand somehow. I'm not sure how much like the
George Santos brand like rubs off on the GOP brand where I can imagine other scandals where it had more of an effect. I don't know. Wait, say more. Like what, what is a scandal that would have more of an effect? He's such a goofy, comic, ridiculous figure that he's kind of just his own thing, right? I mean, he's ridiculous, right?
He's mockable, right? People kind of enjoy his presence. He's going to generate thousands of memes. Comedic relief. And he'll lose re-election the first time he runs for re-election. If he runs. If he runs, right? But there's not like, you know, this doesn't speak to some broader truth about the GOP, I don't think.
Well, but I mean, to Catherine's point about scandals being short lived, right? I mean, we were just talking about a speakership election in which Matt Gaetz became something of a kingmaker. And not so long ago, as Chad has written in my script here, Matt Gaetz was the scandalous house member du jour himself when he was alleged to have been involved in a sex trafficking scheme that included an associate paying a 17 year old for sex.
So like, is there a world in which all of this just goes by the wayside and George Santos becomes, you know, the openly gay Latino member of the Republican House caucus that sort of like defies assumptions about who Republicans are and becomes something somewhat popular? Or is that like a pipe dream?
Yeah, I don't think so. I think so. I would I would do I would make two distinctions. First of all, Matt Gaetz is in a safe Republican seat and he's kind of got the Donald Trump, you know, sheen of invincibility in primaries. Right. So like you can write out if you're in, you know, there are lots of Republicans and Democrats in safe seats who have been accused of some pretty gnarly stuff who are still in Congress.
Santos is going to have to run for reelection in a seat that voted for Biden by eight points. Like this is going to come up in his next reelection campaign. At some point, you got to think that district is blue enough that it's going to boot him.
But then secondly, like, I'm not sure I agree that scandals have a short shelf life. I mean, like if nobody ever talked about the scandal again, sure. But like this is going to come up again. He might get investigated by the House Ethics Committee. They're going to release a report and then it's going to all come back out up again. And then there's going to be new pressures. And like the reason like the Matt Gaetz stuff is kind of fizzled out is that that kind of legal case has been
or we don't know what's going on with it. Right. Um, but like, you know, I think you can bet that if he were indicted tomorrow, that would, you know, be the new story to shore. Um, so I don't think this is the last we've heard of George Santos. Maybe he's, he's, uh, or like of his scandal specifically. Um,
They're going to make a Lifetime movie, of course. But also, we don't know. There's a federal investigation, but who knows what else they could be investigating. More of this could come out, things that we don't even know or are talking about or aren't already reported in the news. This is going to come up again in November when there's a new report. Then it's going to come up again in 2024 when he's running for re-election. I don't think this is over.
So this has been a little bit gossipy here, but to ground this in, you know, our quantitative efforts, we have spent a lot of time tracking how much how scandals affect elections. If this had been fully reported out before the election, do you think George Santos would have lost based on what we know about, you know, the size of the scandal and the effects of scandals on elections?
yeah i wrote about this um in an article with site galen and didn't come to a conclusive answer i don't think it's easy to tell so as i mentioned this is a biden voting district by eight points but in 2022 of course there was this red wave and this district didn't just vote for santos it's not like he was an unusually strong candidate it voted for republicans up and down the ballot even chuck schumer in the senate race lost this district by four points
And that's a situation where you'd have a pretty big gulf between a very strong Democratic candidate and a pretty weak Republican candidate. So even if all that stuff had come out about Santos, does the kind of mini red wave carry him across the finish line? I think maybe, but it's impossible to know for sure.
Well, isn't it like on average, House candidates have faced a nine point penalty for scandals? So it's right on the edge. If you take that literally. And he won by eight points. So like maybe, maybe. Is that how the math works? I'm a little bit more deterministic here. I think this is like a...
much worse than average scandal, having spent a lot of time looking at that database, which is actually factored into our forecast. Did we pull the scandal lever for him, or were we not on top of that? No, because it wasn't. We never pulled the scandal lever for him. I was going to say, what defines scandal?
Because this is like scandals, plural times 100, right? Well, there's only one lever and it either gets pulled or not pulled. And Nathaniel is our like scandal expert here. So he can tell you everything that will get the lever pulled for you. Most of the stuff obviously didn't came out after the election. If we, we, I didn't, you know, full disclosure, we're part of the problem. I didn't notice the, the North shore leader article, um,
We expect politicians to lie.
Right, basically. Like the bad stuff for him, I think, empirically, legally, are the campaign finance issues, this criminal case in Brazil. No, I mean, it was also a race where like, I mean, New York, you had very low Democratic turnout for the most part. And so if there had just been kind of more attention paid to the race for any reason, that might have hurt Republican candidates, right? Because Democrats had like more of a reason to vote potentially. Yeah.
All right. Well, we will see how this plays out, but let's leave it there for now. Thank you, Catherine, Nathaniel, and me. My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room, and Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon. Bye.
