The Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, who remains in the House of Representatives and is a firm “no” vote against Speaker John A. Boehner’s budget bill, has a favorite metaphor: the three-legged stool of the the conservative movement, which consists of foreign policy and social and fiscal conservatives.
In his inability so far to whip together enough Republican votes to secure passage of his bill, Mr. Boehner has faced a triple threat of his own. The first leg of the stool is the Tea Party. The second are first-term Republicans, who make up more than a third of his caucus. And the third is the threat of primary challenges to his members.
Each of these elements is interconnected, of course. The energy and financial backing of the Tea Party was responsible for getting many of those freshman Republicans elected in 2010. But with Republicans having won the vast majority of competitive seats in the House, the Tea Party may turn its attention to primary races in 2012.
The Tea Party Caucus has 60 members in the House — exactly one-quarter of the Republican delegation. It is responsible, however, for 13 of the 25 Republicans who have indicated that they will vote no on the bill, or slightly more than half.
In percentage terms, 22 percent of the Tea Party Caucus has come out against the bill, as opposed to 7 percent of Republicans who are not a part of the group.
The 88 Republicans serving in their first full term (counting 3 who won special elections in 2010) are also more likely to oppose the bill: 14 percent of them have done so, versus 9 percent of Republicans who have served for two or more terms. Mr. Boehner can afford no more than 24 defections, or 10 percent of Republicans, for his bill to pass without Democratic support. If first-term Republicans voted like the veteran members did, Mr. Boehner would have just enough votes for passage. (Or at least he’d be close — accounts differ on how many Republicans remain undecided.)
In fact, however, although Mr. Boehner has received the support of some influential freshmen like Allen B. West of Florida, it is unusual, other things being equal, that they have been more likely to defy him. Not only do they come from more moderate districts (although they have not voted more moderately), but they also have less seniority and are showing more chutzpah by bucking Mr. Boehner.
Finally, there is the threat of primary challenges, which has been made explicitly by many activist groups and implicitly by Sarah Palin.
Just 3 percent of Republicans running for re-election in districts rated as competitive in the general election are believed to oppose the bill. But 13 percent of Republicans who are running in safe seats or who are retiring to run for higher office are “no” votes. (I count Mrs. Bachmann in this category although her retirement from the House is not certain depending on how her primary campaign goes.) Those seats which are safe in the general election are precisely those that are often not safe in the primaries, however, so the threat of primary challenges is probably what is driving the disparity.
There’s some good news here for those of us who would like to avoid a debt default. The fact that so few Republicans who face competitive general elections have defied Mr. Boehner implies that Republicans perceive public opinion among the broader electorate to be on the side of action to raise the debt ceiling. This makes the situation quite different from something like the bank bailout of 2008, and could make a compromise more likely down the line. But it isn’t doing much to help Mr. Boehner for the time being.