Where does the suicide caucus live and what is it doing to the GOP’s prospects in the Electoral College?
According to Tom Holbrooke, the Democrats basically have a lock on 227 of the 270 votes that are needed to win the presidency. This is less optimistic than the measure of states that have gone Democratic in either five or six of the last six presidential elections. That total is 257, which is about as close to a lock as you can get without having one. Surveying the landscape, about the only piece of good news for the Republicans is that they are trending well in Minnesota and could soon make it a true battleground state. Meanwhile, the Democrats are creeping up in Arizona and Georgia.
Here’s Ryan Lizza on the makeup of the suicide caucus:
As with [Rep. Mark] Meadows [R-NC], the other suicide-caucus members live in places where the national election results seem like an anomaly. Obama defeated Romney by four points nationally. But in the eighty suicide-caucus districts, Obama lost to Romney by an average of twenty-three points. The Republican members themselves did even better. In these eighty districts, the average margin of victory for the Republican candidate was thirty-four points.
In short, these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.
In one sense, these eighty members are acting rationally. They seem to be pushing policies that are representative of what their constituents back home want. But even within the broader Republican Party, they represent a minority view, at least at the level of tactics (almost all Republicans want to defund Obamacare, even if they disagree about using the issue to threaten a government shutdown).
Remember when RNC Chairman Reince Priebus came up with a plan to make the GOP more attractive to a national audience?
How’s that working out?
