The Complexity of Performing Simple Tasks
Why Republicans struggle to choose a leader
The easiest thing for a legislative party to do is choose its leaders. Members rise through the ranks, build relationships with their colleagues, raise campaign funds for them, and form alliances. Leadership challenges are managed behind the scenes with the understanding that the losing side will support the winner—a norm that advances the party’s goal of presenting a unified public face.
So it’s been remarkable—and confounding—to see House Republicans fumble this fundamental task. From Kevin McCarthy sweating through fifteen ballots in January to his ouster earlier this month to last week’s fiasco where Republicans voted for—then rejected—Steve Scalise, Republicans have been unable to transcend their differences and agree on a leader.
This is not an accident. Republicans face a structural challenge they cannot overcome.
Let’s dive into the incentive structure that’s driving our politics. We’ll find things that are deeply out of the ordinary which explain why Republicans can’t function when confronted with simple real-world tasks.
First, a quick look at how things traditionally work. It goes something like this:
Members of Congress are motivated by re-election
To win re-election, they need a record of accomplishment they can bring to their constituents
Partisan divisions within and across the branches incentivize them to compromise across party lines to build a record they can run on
This simple construction presupposes a few basic things:
Voters seek tangible results that will improve their lives
Voters will reward incumbents for delivering those tangible results
Incumbents want to appeal to as many voters as possible to bolster their chances in a general election
But what happens if these assumptions don’t hold? What if constituents aren’t demanding better roads or a new civic center? What if they’re angry at the direction of the country or fearful of the future and look for representatives who can be a mouthpiece for their grievances?
And what if those representatives are running in surgically gerrymandered districts where they never have to worry about winning a general election, but they do have to worry about a challenge from within their party from someone who might be a better agent of disruption?
Then the incentive structure is different. Those members aren’t going to be concerned with governing in the traditional sense. Their future doesn’t depend on assembling a broad coalition of voters through a record of accomplishment. But it does depend on being the best at acting out.
And by performing for the larger network of aggrieved voters, a network with its own media infrastructure and fundraising ability, these members really don’t need political parties the way conventional members do.
What can party leadership do to keep these members in line? Threaten to pull their fundraising? Threaten to take them off policy committees that help them deliver for their districts? It doesn’t much matter if the members can find money elsewhere or if they’re not dependent on policy accomplishments for re-election.
Of course, not every Republican is in this situation. Some of them aren’t completely dependent on angry constituents demanding them to engage in performance art. Not all of them are entirely free of general election challenges.
But that’s where margins come into play.
Last Friday, I wrote:
Imagine the Republican party as two parties in a coalition and their inability to choose a leader begins to make sense. The larger of the two parties is functioning more or less as a traditional legislative party willing to play by the rules. But the smaller party is run by chaos agents (led by Donald Trump) that thrive on tearing things down. Their objectives are incompatible, making the House ungovernable.
All Republicans have to calculate the risk of a MAGA challenger into their behavior, and we’ll come back to this shortly because it has ramifications for how to get out of this bind. But some do not have to be all MAGA all the time. This would give them the latitude to perform basic tasks like leadership selection were it not for the fact that they are in an unworkable alliance with the reactionaries.
If the traditional party were large enough, it could indulge the performative outbursts of the chaos agents knowing it wouldn’t make a difference.
If the traditional party were large enough, the MAGA party would be an annoyance—but it wouldn’t be empowered.
If the traditional party were large enough, the reactionaries wouldn’t have a role in governing.
If the traditional party were large enough.
But it isn’t.
Remember the Red Wave that never was? It gave us this.
If Republicans had won the 2022 election in the manner they and just about everyone in Washington expected, the five seat Republican majority would be a twenty or thirty seat Republican majority. The MAGA group would be smaller than the difference between the size of the Republican conference and the 218 votes it usually takes to pass anything in the House.
In parliamentary terms, Republicans wouldn’t need to bring MAGA into the government.
But with such tiny margins, Republicans do not have a majority without the reactionaries. So for the lack of an alternative, they have entered into a governing coalition.
Republicans face a structural challenge they cannot overcome.
That coalition is proving unworkable, for reasons which you have heard me talk about many times. You can’t do business with reactionaries. They want to blow things up. Their constituents want them to blow things up.
This gets you a cohort of members essentially acting as their own party who have as their objective shutting down the government, defaulting on the debt, and blocking leadership selection.
There is of course another way. A broadly bipartisan coalition of Democrats and some Republicans—most notably those representing blue districts—could form a functional governing majority.
In that traditional legislature we discussed earlier, it would make political sense for them to do it. A Republican in a Democratic district would normally want to brandish their bipartisan credentials.
But this is where the poison of MAGA has broadly infected the Republican party to the detriment of everyone. So widespread is the fear of Trumpian condemnation and so ingrained is the concern about primary challenges that Republicans who might otherwise want to conduct business as usual have found it impossible to reach across the aisle and make the government function.
They fear the wrath of Trump. They fear for their political futures. They may even fear for their physical safety if they defy a movement that regards the other side as illegitimate enemies.
This locks in dysfunction.
This week, Republicans will attempt to break their internal impasse with brute force by bullying reluctant members to support Jim Jordan. It’s an uphill battle. But even if he succeeds, Jordan will find himself hamstrung by Trumpian politics just like McCarthy was. He too will face the no-win choice of shutting down the government or turning to Democrats to keep it open, which is really the choice between being held captive by performance or nodding to reality.
We have one more year of this dynamic before the next election, and every day Republicans exhibit their dysfunction is a day they make the case for why they should not be returned to power.