How is congressional dysfunction playing in Davenport?

A special report from the Iowa State team on people's attitudes toward the Speakership drama

It has been an eventful couple of months for the Republican Party. In Congress, the chaos and divisions around Republican leadership and factions led to an unprecedented ousting of the Speaker of the House and nearly led to a government shutdown twice. Congressional Republicans spent the bulk of October trying to find someone – anyone – who could serve as Speaker. At the same time, candidates for president have been plentiful, but the persistent theme in the nomination contest is former President Trump’s dominance. He’s had massive leads in every poll (national and in the early states) over the last few months. 

There is an interesting contrast between these two stories. In DC, the Republican Party appears deeply divided and fractious. In Iowa, the Republican Party appears to have mostly unified behind Trump. Yes, the former is about members of Congress while the latter is about rank and file voters, but the difference between the chaos in Congress and stability in the polls is striking. 

Most of the coverage of these two developments has occurred separately. Occasionally, writers will note that the chaos of congressional Republicans is related to Trump’s history in the Republican Party, but we have not seen much discussion of how the divisions over the factions in Congress play out in the nomination campaign.  

As part of our October survey of likely Iowa caucusgoers, we asked people what they thought about what congressional Republicans were up to and how that related to their preferences for the Republican nomination. Specifically, we asked several questions in our survey about Congressional Republicans that had been prominent in the news shortly before our survey went into the field (October 6-10). 

There were at least two major stories that received widespread attention about congressional Republicans prior to our October survey. First, the House narrowly passed a bill that prevented a government shutdown. This vote revealed the divisions in the party and only passed with the support of House Democrats. Second, that vote resulted in the ousting of Kevin McCarthy and the eventual selection of Mike Johnson as the new Speaker of the House.  

Our question about the blame for the potential shutdown focused on the House’s near inability to pass the continuing resolution. We asked the respondents, “If the Republican majority in the US House had not prevented [a government shutdown], who would you have held responsible?” We gave respondents three options: then Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the Freedom Caucus, or moderate Republicans. We were interested in the reactions of Iowa Republican caucusgoers and we didn’t want to give them the easy out of blaming congressional Democrats or President Biden.

Asking about the removal of Keven McCarthy as Speaker of the House was straightforward. We simply asked respondents how strongly they approve or disapprove of the removal of McCarthy as Speaker.  

Iowans react to the chaos

Our respondents were fairly divided over these questions. When asked about the potential shutdown, more than 30 percent blamed each of the three options, with moderate Republicans getting the most blame, but that difference was pretty small.  

The respondents were similarly divided in their views about former Speaker McCarthy. The majority of respondents approved of the ousting of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, but more than 40 percent disapproved of this outcome. Iowa Republican caucusgoers appear to be about as divided over these events as congressional Republicans were. These divisions were not isolated to only congressional Republicans. 

In our November survey, we followed up on these questions by asking respondents if they approved of naming Mike Johnson as the new Speaker of the House. Almost 90 percent of likely caucusgoers in our November survey approved of naming Johnson as Speaker. Iowa Republican voters may have been divided over the chaos that existed in October, but they unified on the choice of Johnson just like congressional Republicans did. 

Congressional Republican divisions and candidate support

The divisions among caucusgoers mirror those in Congress, but do they connect to candidate support? Do the factions in House Republicans exist in caucusgoers? The easiest way to approach this is to look at how the divisions about McCarthy and the near-shutdown connect to candidate support. To visualize this, we chose to focus on the top five candidates in our October survey: Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy. These were the only candidates who received more than five percent in our survey.

We start with the attitudes about McCarthy’s ouster. More than 40 percent of Trump and Ramaswamy supporters strongly approve of McCarthy’s removal. In contrast, the majority of DeSantis and Haley’s supporters disapprove of this outcome. It looks like the DeSantis supporters are a bit more ambivalent than the Haley supporters because they mostly disapprove not strongly. We don’t want to make too much of these differences, because we are starting to slice the data thinly here, but it does seem like the Haley supporters are the ones who are most supportive of “normal” politics in the House.

Attitudes about who would have been responsible for a government shutdown show a similar pattern. The Haley supporters overwhelmingly blame the Freedom Caucus for nearly causing a shutdown. In contrast, Trump supporters place blame mostly on moderate Republicans. Interestingly, former Speaker McCarthy does not receive the most blame from the supporters of any of the candidates.  

The difference between Trump and Ramaswamy supporters on the one hand and Haley and DeSantis supporters on the other is the main conclusion from these results. That said, we do want to note the difference between Haley and DeSantis supporters. In a previous Tusk post, we argued that Haley and DeSantis are drawing from different parts of the party. Haley gains support from Iowans who are opposed to Trump’s actions. DeSantis supporters, instead, couch their opposition to Trump as being about things other than Trump’s actions. In these data, DeSantis supporters also appear to be in the middle ground. They only modestly disapprove of removing McCarthy. They are more divided over blame for the near shutdown. They appear to be different from Trump supporters but are not as unified in this as Haley supporters. Again, we do not want to emphasize differences when we divide the sample into this small set of groups, but the results are consistent with our previous post. 

As in DC, so in Iowa

Despite the fact that Donald Trump appears to be in a commanding lead in the polls, the Republican Party is divided. The factions and divisions in the House parallel factions among Iowa voters. Caucusgoers are picking up on the things that are dividing congressional Republicans and are choosing sides. They could be following cues from the candidates they support, but our experience living through the campaign in Iowa is that none of the candidates other than Trump spent much of their time discussing the dysfunction in the House. This implies to us that Iowa caucusgoers are responding to the fractious politics of Congress the same way they are responding to the Republican campaign in Iowa.