Is The Era Of ‘Macho Man’ Politics Here?
42:57 Share

Your data is like gold to hackers. They'll sell it to the highest bidder. Are you protected? McAfee helps shield you, blocking suspicious texts, malicious emails, and fraudulent websites. McAfee's secure VPN lets you browse safely, and its AI-powered text scam detector spots threats instantly. You'll also get up to $2 million of award-winning antivirus and identity theft protection, all for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit McAfee.com. Cancel any time. Terms apply.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. Many of the big political stories from the last several weeks have come from two places: the White House and the courts responsible for ruling on the White House's executive actions.

It might be easy to assume that those are the only two branches of government, but there is actually a little-known third branch. They have their own building and everything. It's like this big marble compound on a hill. Actually, I don't remember what they call it. Okay, jokes aside. After a month and a half of keeping relatively quiet in Trump's Washington, this week, Congress will be thrust into the spotlight.

Tuesday night, Donald Trump will make the first address to a joint session of Congress of his second term. It's not technically a State of the Union address, but that's basically what it is.

Meanwhile, the government will run out of money and shut down next Friday unless Congress comes to a bipartisan agreement. And Republicans are at the same time trying to pass a budget, one that cuts taxes and spending. But passing big spending cuts with slim majorities and nervous members from swing districts is tricky to say the least. So where is it all heading? That's what we're going to talk about today. Plus, we also have a good or bad use of polling. Has America become too soft-tongued?

and feminine. Growing numbers of Republicans say yes, but how should we interpret that data? Joining me to discuss it all and more is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Welcome to the podcast, Jeff. Hey there, Galen. Happy so-too week or whatever we're calling those joint address to Congress week.

Yes. Happy fake so too weak to you as well, Jeff. Also joining us is Rachel Bade, senior Washington correspondent at Politico and contributing political correspondent at ABC News. Welcome to the podcast, Rachel. Galen, I'm a little insulted that you said the third branch of government has been very quiet when I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off writing about Congress for two months now. Well, now we are finally all paying attention. You have our attention, Rachel. Good. Good.

And we couldn't talk about this big mess without you, Rachel. So I'm glad that you're here. But first, we are going to talk about some polling that caught our eye last week, the

The New York Times published a piece by three political scientists with the headline, Republican Men and Women are Changing Their Minds About How Women Should Behave. The article cites data from the Views of the Electorate Research Survey, which asked whether respondents agreed that, quote, women should return to their traditional roles in society. Just since 2022,

The share of Republican men and women who agreed has increased markedly, while Democratic men and women have stayed basically the same. So today, 48% of Republican men say women should return to their traditional roles. That's up from 28% in 2022. So a 20 percentage point increase in roughly three years. Among Republican women, it's 37% up from 23%.

Among Democratic men and women, the share is in the teens as a reference point. So have that many Republicans changed their minds about the role of women in society in just three years? Or could there be something else going on? Jeffrey, is this a good or bad use of polling? I don't know if it's a bad use of polling. I don't think it's necessarily bad.

Yeah.

It may be that their responses were primed by, I don't know, recent rhetoric in Republican politics, perhaps. Republican respondents have become more likely to answer a certain way because maybe it's on their minds more because it's a point of conversation more often now.

As in, it's become part of the stuff that politicians campaign on. And so Republicans think, oh, this is the Republican answer, so I'm going to give that answer. Whereas Democrats, for Democrats, the answer has been the same. Rachel, I'm curious if you feel like this is something that politicians are increasingly talking about in Washington. I think what it suggests to me is, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is right, I do feel like Republicans and conservative voters around the country are

over the past few years have sort of doubled down even more so on like family social values. And I think the reason they're doing that is because a lot of talk about LGBTQ rights, things that make them uncomfortable, trans women in sports, and sort of this blowback we have seen to various types of

policing of certain language, like, for instance, pregnant women. You're now supposed to say pregnant person because maybe the person does not identify as a woman. I just think that Republicans and conservative voters are probably starting to not only push back on that, but maybe even revert further back to maybe views they once had that they had sort of loosened up on. So this actually doesn't surprise me. It is a huge shift, but

But I also know, like, we're seeing, you know, Republicans really push back on things that Democrats and folks on the left have sort of embraced as, you know, new social norms.

It's interesting because sometimes we talk about expressed preferences versus revealed preferences. So your expressed preference could be like, oh, I think, you know, women should return to more traditional roles in society. But your revealed preference would be like, okay, you're also somebody who's in a relationship with a woman who's in the workforce and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So on one hand, participation amongst prime age women in the workforce has never been higher than this moment right now.

And the number of men who say that they are spending more time doing things like shopping or taking care of children has also never been higher, even though the burden still disproportionately falls to women. On one hand, you could say people are saying this because it's become a political talking point. But when you actually look at how people are living their lives, they're not acting as if they think we should revert to traditional gender norms. Or you could say people see that society has changed and they don't like it and they want to revert back.

I don't know, but I'm curious for your thoughts if this is just another partisan signaling thing or if we're actually seeing a sort of negative reaction, a rebellion against modern gender roles. Yeah, it seems to me it's sort of a case of you say what maybe in some idealized world you would want.

But the reality of actually bringing about that idealized world is extremely complicated and perhaps even not financially possible if you're in a relationship where you need both people to be working in order to make ends meet, which is a very significant chunk of the country.

People making these sorts of statements about what they would prefer versus their actual lived experience, it's not even down necessarily to the revealed preferences, but just sort of like revealed realities of how our economy functions, how our workplaces function in the state age. And kind of rolling that back and making that kind of change would be very difficult to make happen, at least in a short amount of time.

Let's talk about the men here. This survey also asked respondents whether they believe that society as a whole has become too soft and feminine. Republican women and Democratic men saw the biggest changes here, okay? So in 2011, 14 years ago, 40% of Republican women and Democratic men said that society was too soft and feminine. So interestingly enough, those two groups of people were in the same place.

Over the past 14 years now, 67 percent of Republican women say that society is too soft and feminine. So Republican women, we saw the most movement amongst them saying that society is too soft. And Democratic men have also changed their mind rapidly, where only 20 percent of Democratic men today say that society is too soft and feminine.

I think this particularly caught our eye because of the way that some people are talking about masculine energy in public life. You know, Mark Zuckerberg comes to mind. But there's been lots of theories about Trump's appeal being sort of more macho. I'm curious, Rachel, for your take on that, if you do feel like a different kind of masculine energy is being sort of used in politics to try to capture this vibe or if this vibe is a result of politics.

I'm not surprised by this poll either, because if we go back to the campaign, I did this podcast with Sarah Longwell at The Bulwark, and she does a whole bunch of these focus groups with voters about, you know, what they're seeing on the campaign trail, how they're reacting. And one of the most interesting pieces that she brought out was actually something like this. It was this notion that increasingly she was seeing voters...

Republican women, but also some Democrats. Trump was appealing to them because of this strongman vibe that he was sort of asserting. Like, people liked that he was like, you know, I'm going to crack down on the border and, you know, we're going to be America first and the criminals, we're going to crack down on... They liked

that. And I remember talking to her about it and her sort of theory was that, well, you know, society, like a lot of voters are very concerned about immigration. They're concerned about the border. There's this, there's still this fear or the sense that crime is out of control, which sort of peaked obviously during the pandemic and has started to level out or come down, but people still have this notion that,

that, you know, things are really dangerous in the world. And that was one of the reasons, you know, some voters, even Democratic voters, were interested in Donald Trump and liked this idea of this strongman sort of mentality. So,

I think that Trump knows that. And I think that he was reacting to that and these sort of fears that they knew voters had. And that's one of the reasons why you saw him sort of don't this, you know, this sort of macho man alpha dog. Well, he kind of does that naturally, but he really leaned into it in the campaign. And you saw other Republicans, you know, try to do the same. You know, a lot of Republicans are taking advantage of that and trying to put forward a certain macho man mentality.

Yeah, it's interesting because in some ways this might fit into a comparison people have used over the years. I think I might have first heard it when I was watching West Wing when I was like 15 years old or something. The idea of the Republicans as the daddy party and Democrats as the mommy party and this having to do with basically the idea that issues that are salient, like immigration, that maybe have something to do with security or crime concerns, that

Republicans tend to do better. And if concerns are about things like the healthcare system, Democrats tend to do better. The only problem with this kind of attempt to categorize things this way among actually the many problems with it is that the economy maybe is a little harder to position in this conversation. But if you do think about immigration and I think security and the idea of like a strong leader pushing back on big

basically concerns about what people are experiencing, what they think dangers are to the country, plus the fact that inflation was bad. I think you can see how Trump succeeded. Jeffrey, you set me up perfectly here. Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on Saturday that he's running for mayor of New York City.

Important context here was that he was pressured to resign by the Democrats in the state legislature after 11 women accused him of sexual misconduct, and he resigned back in 2021.

In his announcement video over the weekend, he said, quote, we know that today our New York City is in trouble. He went on to say, you see it in the empty storefronts, the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence. The city just feels threatening, out of control and in crisis. This is a Democratic primary, right? So.

This guy who has been accused of sexual misconduct, forced to resign, is campaigning on that message in a Democratic primary and primaries in New York state are closed. So this is only going to be Democrats who are voting in this primary. That is quite a change. And we've said this many times on this podcast from eight years ago.

Have Democrats themselves changed their tune on gender politics? And if so, is it the rank and file or were the rank and file never where the elites were, where the politicians were? What's going on here? Well, I think if you're like looking at some of the polling we were just discussing, it would seem that this message would be sort of at odds in certain ways because you do see maybe more liberal views or sort of similar views that

Among Democrats, for instance. Right. Like Democrats don't say society is too feminine or soft. And they don't want women to go back to traditional gender roles. The Democratic voters don't seem to have been like enthralled with this message that Republicans are pushing. But Cuomo thinks that this is the pathway to winning the primary.

And perhaps that's specific to New York City. Perhaps it's a misreading of the electorate that it will end up costing him when voters actually go to the polls.

So maybe he's actually having a somewhat incorrect reading of the electorate, or it's a situation where, you know, the things that are particularly salient in New York City right now, that message might find resonance, even if people are answering on other questions that they, you know, their view of gender roles hasn't changed.

for instance, or have become even more liberal-minded about that. You know, it's worth noting, I was looking at some of the data on this. So Emerson College did a poll of the primary and found Cuomo leading if he was running with like a third of the vote.

And they also asked about his favorability, and he was above water, 55% favorability among Democrats in New York City and like 36% unfavorable. That's interesting because I look back at some polling right when he was forced out of office as governor, and in New York City, his approval rating as governor was pretty much even roughly while it was well underwater in the rest of the state.

So, you know, again, it's like he's a Democrat. People didn't think he was doing necessarily a poor job as governor, but they didn't, you know, didn't approve of his personal behavior. And I don't know, we live in a world where even if there has been a push, obviously, with like the Me Too moment, you know, it's possible that Democrats have

softened how much they're letting that overrule other considerations politically. You know, I think that's like a realistic thing that may have happened, even if their views on the whole have not changed. I'll say here too, that in the same way that Republicans could be cued up to say that society has become too soft or feminine or that women should return to traditional gender roles, Democrats also know what the Democrat answer is to that question. And so while they may feel like,

things are out of control and I want somebody to come in and sort of strong arm the city into, you know, being clean and orderly and whatever, they might still say in this poll, no, I don't think society is too soft and feminine. Okay, let's move on because we got to talk about Washington. But first, a break.

Today's podcast is brought to you by Oracle. Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere, from self-driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it's coming, and fast. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? Time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

or OCI. OCI is a blazing fast and secure platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, plus all your AI and machine learning workloads. OCI costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for networking. So you're saving a

pile of money. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to OCI, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters, and Suno AI. Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI for new U.S. customers with minimum financial commitment. Offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com slash 538. That's the numbers, not the letters. Oracle.com slash 538.

Today's podcast is brought to you by Shopify. So it's a new year 2025. And you're thinking, how am I going to make this year different? How am I going to build something for myself? I'm dying to be my own boss or see if I can turn this business idea I've been kicking around into a reality, but I don't know how to make it happen.

Shopify is how you're going to make it happen. And let me tell you how. The best time to start your new business is right now. Shopify makes it simple to create your brand, open for business, and get your first sale. Get your store up and running easily with thousands of customizable templates, no coding or design skills required. All you need to do is drag and drop. They're powerful social media tools that you connect all your channels and create shoppable posts and help you sell everywhere people scroll. With Shopify, your first sale is closer than you think.

established in 2025 has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash 538. That's the numbers, not the letters. Go to shopify.com slash 538 to start selling with Shopify today. Shopify.com slash 538.

I want to talk about the House Republican budget and looming shutdown. But before we get to that, the latest thing that rocked Washington was Trump's Oval Office meeting slash public fight with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. And I'm sure most folks are familiar with it. But Vice President Vance and President Trump accused Zelensky of not being grateful enough to the administration to

and the U.S. after Zelensky suggested that diplomacy with Putin hasn't worked in the past. This was in response to Vance's suggestion that the administration was taking a new approach to the conflict in its diplomatic efforts with Russia. Rachel, what's the fallout in Washington been like since this meeting on Friday?

Oh, boy. The fallout. I mean, well, it's all anybody talked about over the weekend, obviously. Democrats accusing Donald Trump and J.D. Vance of siding with Putin. There was a lot of speculation on the Internet that this whole meeting was a setup, basically a trap for Zelensky to come in, try to provoke him and have this meltdown so that Trump and Vance can officially cut off ties with Ukraine once and for all.

I did some reporting on this over the weekend, talked to a bunch of people in the White House. And what I can tell you is that the reporting does not show any evidence of that. Quite the contrary. Like a lot of people were talking about how

The only thing Donald Trump likes more than winning elections is signing big, beautiful deals that the whole world thinks are impossible to land. And this was seemingly one of them he talked about on the campaign trail. He wanted to end the war. And Trump personally saw this as like a first step toward doing that. And so they had all this, you know, celebration in mind and that they were going to move forward with this. Nobody expected that.

what happened to the Oval Office to happen. I can tell you that. You know, I think in terms of what happens next, I know there's a lot of Republicans on the Hill who are obviously big fans of this idea of supporting Ukraine. Lindsey Graham, for example. They're trying to gauge like how they can bring, pull things back together.

And part of that means accusing Zelensky of being ungrateful, suggesting that he might need to step down. I think that this is all sort of posturing for the administration to try to get them back to the table, Ukraine that is. And so...

I mean, I can tell you I'm being told Trump wants this deal. And if he wants this deal, the mineral deal, the mineral deal with the U.S. And so I guess, you know, some people want Slensky to apologize, which obviously a lot of people would disagree with on that, too. But it's not the end of the story yet. I just think people are trying to figure out what are the next steps here.

I'm curious, Jeff, almost exactly three years in, what do Americans think about this conflict and what this argument kind of was about, which is American support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression? Well, you know, Pew Research has done a good job of sort of tracking American attitudes on, are we providing too much support to Ukraine? Are we providing about the right amount support? Are we providing not enough support?

And on the whole, Americans are not as keen on supporting Ukraine as they were. They now are more likely to think we're giving them too much support in 2022 when the conflict started. 7% said we were giving too much support, now 30% do. Now, by comparison, about two-thirds said that we were providing not enough or about the right level of support back in 2022 when things started going.

Now it's about 45 percent total between those two categories. So it would seem on average that Americans are still slightly more supportive of the U.S. being involved, like we're giving the right amount of support or need to even give more. But what's really changed is that Republicans have become much more likely to say that we are giving too much support to Ukraine.

The idea that Trump would like a big, beautiful deal where he can say, oh, we've got this mineral deal with the Ukraine. We're getting something. And, you know, Biden wasn't getting something, but I got something for all the support that we're giving them, I think would fit right into what you've seen from in terms of Republican rhetoric on voting for funding bills, for providing aid to Ukraine, which we've seen increased Republican opposition in Congress for that.

So overall now, actually, in the 2025 polling that Pew just did, about half of Republicans or people who leaned Republican said that they thought the U.S. was giving too much support. Basically, almost three in four Democrats were saying we were giving about the right amount or not enough. So, I mean, a pretty clear partisan split here. You mean to say that we've become divided along partisan lines, Jeffrey? Amazing. Things are polarized. I can't believe it. Speaking of polarizing.

party lines. Last Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a budget resolution on a 217 to 215 nearly party line vote. The plan calls for four and a half trillion dollars in tax cuts and two trillion dollars in spending cuts. And it's the first step in implementing President Trump's legislative agenda. The details of exactly which taxes are cut or which spending is cut is

is not there yet. But this is basically a path forward for a bill that is going to become more fleshed out in the coming months. Rachel, there was a lot of drama even getting to this point, the framework point. Can you sort of recap how we got here and the main tension points?

Yeah, sure. I mean, there's there's a lot of tension points between Republicans on this. I mean, Senate Republicans wanted to do a very quick, narrow, partisan bill that focused only on the border and on bolstering military spending and save taxes for later in the year. House Republicans wanted to do everything together. And because of his slim margin, Speaker Biden.

Mike Johnson, so far at least, it looks like he's going to win out. He was able to get his conference to move this package. And this is basically the starting gun to moving Trump's legislative agenda. The details have yet to be worked out. The problem areas or the inflection points are going to be a couple things. One is this question of what they're going to cut. I mean, they put in $2 trillion worth of cuts, as you mentioned, to try to win over conservatives. The reality is that finding $2 trillion in the federal budget is very difficult at

especially when the president is saying you can't touch social security, you can't touch Medicare. What is left, a lot of Republicans said, was Medicaid. And so for a long time, a lot of Republicans were saying they were going to do work requirements on Medicaid, potentially per capita caps, basically capping the amount of money the federal government would reimburse for health care, which is a huge deal if they cap that for people around the country. And

President Trump basically came in and said, we're not going to do that. I don't want to take away people's benefits. They gave all these assurances to moderate Republicans that they weren't going to do this. And yet they convinced them to vote for this budget and they still have to find two trillion dollars worth of cuts. So watch that because that's going to be a big, a big thing. I think people's health care, when you mess with that, that's what starts political reckonings to the point that you could lose a chamber over that.

And that's why Democrats are really honing in on this, because the math kind of requires Medicaid cuts. So the budget resolution seeks $880 billion in cuts from the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees both Medicare and Medicaid. Obviously, they've said that Medicare is off the table in terms of cuts. So one analysis found that even if the committee cuts every single dollar that's not appropriated to health care from Medicaid,

the Energy and Commerce Committee, they would still be $600 billion short, and they couldn't get that from anywhere but Medicaid, given what they have said about the red lines elsewhere. How

How does this play out? What are the movable objects here? I mean, we're going to hear a lot about funny money in the coming months. OK, and funny money. OK. All right. New new vocab word. Funny math, whatever, whatever you want to call it. And we're going to hear about that in terms of, you know, tax cuts being covered. I mean, right now, Republicans are talking about just assuming that.

Basically assuming a baseline, it's like this calculation that the tax cuts don't cost any money. Okay, so they're just going to assume that, which is a big...

leap from what you know i think a lot of conservatives want to you know pay for them and actually cover them that's it that's a huge difference so that's one thing but because they're saying that it would boost gdp and it would increase the tax base because people have more money and that's how we pay that's why they're saying basically lower regulation means more you know energy production which means more economic growth etc that sort of thing but true conservatives are like we want to balance the budget so we have to cut spending if we're actually going to give

people and corporations, a $4.5 trillion tax cut. Exactly. In theory, at least. I think the conservatives are getting a little soft on this, which is interesting to me because I thought they were going to drive a really hard bargain with Donald Trump. But I'm skeptical that they're going to do that anymore. But to bring this back to health care and to Medicaid in particular and funny money, the speaker said when he was trying to get a lot of these moderates to vote for this budget that there is $50 billion on an annual basis worth of fraud in the program.

And there have been, you know, nonpartisan entities that said 30 billion a year of fraud in Medicaid. But even those those sort of groups say it's really hard to actually recoup that. It's a lot easier said than done to, like, find that waste and fraud and abuse. And it sort of reminds me of, you know, the tax gap that the IRS has every what is it every year or something? I don't know. Every year, every five years, whatever. The number is like six hundred billion dollars worth of tax gap.

that the IRS is supposed to collect that they don't. That's a lot of freaking money. And in theory, if you find it, great, you can put it toward the deficit, pay for things, whatever. But they've been trying to do that for years. It's just very hard to root out some of this stuff. So

So a lot of the moderates told me that they voted for this because they are trusting Speaker Johnson that there's going to be some sort of $50 billion worth of savings a year. Add that up, that's a lot of money. And it gets you like halfway to that $800 billion worth of savings that they have to find from the committee that basically does health care. So we'll see if they can actually do it. But even if they can't figure out how to do it, they'll probably just write it in there and assume, oh, there's the money. We're going to save it. And voila.

And whatever happens, happens. Right. You know, we're speaking at a time, Jeffrey, when just as we're logging on to record this podcast for the first time since Trump started his second term, his approval rating is net neutral. So when he took office on Inauguration Day for the second time, he was at an approval rating of net plus eight.

So I think maybe you can say that the honeymoon is officially over. Maybe it ended a little bit before and we're just catching up with public opinion data. But you can no longer say that Trump is popular in America. His approval rating is no longer above water.

Is it this kind of stuff? Is it prices? Is it the like extracurricular activities that just accompany some of the, you know, stuff that Trump does online or whatever, the Doge stuff? How should we be thinking about Republicans' vulnerability here while they're considering maybe even cuts to health care? Well, it certainly seems from polling that pollsters will ask, you know, is Donald Trump doing enough to deal with, I don't know,

rising prices or inflation and people will say no it doesn't take a genius to look at what happened in the 2024 election and see a lot of it having to do with people's dissatisfaction with the economic situation obviously immigration was a big issue but I think

the kind of swing that we saw across, you know, virtually the entire country, you know, that kind of consistency really speaks to dissatisfaction with the status quo, a lot of which had to do with pent-up frustration over rising prices and inflation. I don't know if Trump really owns the economy yet, but eventually he's going to. And the fact that his approval rating is now at, you know, basically net even, you know, we live in an era of things being highly polarized and people having...

obvious things to be dissatisfied about. And obviously, with some of the things coming down the pike here, like if Trump pursues tariffs, to some degree, so far, it's looked more like he's made threats and has gotten things that he wanted and then has not necessarily carried through with the threats. But if he were to carry through with the threats and we'd have tariff hikes and raising the prices of things, that would seemingly fall into the category of things that might

upset people. Plus, yes, talking about potentially cutting things like Medicaid funding. And you just end up with a whole host of things that could be major political problems down the line. And I think it's part of, you know, going into the start of this Congress and looking at Republicans having a 220 to 215 edge in the House, now a couple of those seats are vacant. You know, it's going to be hard for them to hold the House anyway. If they want to pursue Trump's agenda, it's probably going to cost them the House.

And maybe the Senate gets more interesting if the broad public opinion gets even gets a lot more unfavorable for Trump. At the moment, it doesn't look that way, but we're a long way from November 26th. Looming over all of this is the potential for a government shutdown if Congress doesn't figure out a way to fund government by March 14th. Rachel.

Trump now says they just want sort of a continuing resolution, basically. They want to continue funding as it is for maybe the rest of the fiscal year, but they need Democratic votes in order to make that happen. So where's the bargaining stand? Yeah, this is really interesting. I think in the next two weeks are going to be really like the dynamics are going to be so interesting on Capitol Hill. But I will say a couple of weeks ago, I wrote this column about how

I thought a lot of people on the left and some Democrats were getting this whole government shutdown fight wrong. I mean, at the time, we heard a lot of progressives say that Democrats should refuse to vote for any government funding unless they get a commitment from the administration that Elon Musk is basically going to stop what he's doing with Doge, that the administration was going to approve all congressionally approved funding and start spending things on stuff they're supposed to rather than just making these cuts.

And at the time, like I was hearing from a lot of senior Democrats, we read your column. You're absolutely right. This is not the fight we should be doing. Democrats don't engage in shutdown fights. We just don't do it. And this isn't the political bomb that the left seems to think it is. Fast forward, like two and a half, three weeks. I'm hearing something totally different now from senior Democrats. They are actually considering, um,

whether allowing the government to shut down is okay. And they're talking to their members about it. A lot of their members are saying, let's go for it, unless we get a commitment from Trump that Elon is going to stop. We're really on the hook for a potential shutdown here. And I'm quite shocked because...

I think it's a lot harder to vote against a government funding bill that extends current government funding that your own president signed into law. Joe Biden signed. This is like a Democratic level of spending. But Democrats will argue, well, it doesn't matter because their administration isn't even listening to us. So why would we help them at all? The problem there is right now the public knows who to blame for Doge, right? They're blaming Elon. They're blaming Trump.

But as soon as we're in a government shutdown, because Democrats will not vote for a clean continuing resolution that continues their own spending levels, you're going to have employees across federal government who are not getting paid. The pain is going to be the pain is there now with the federal government. Right. But it's going to shoot through the roof. And I just think that Democrats are going to be blamed as much as Republicans are on this. And it's just going to get really messy really fast.

Jeffrey, we've been through this rodeo before and we have polling history to look at in order to judge. I mean, if we do enter a government shutdown, who gets blamed?

Well, in recent history, it's usually been Republicans who have gotten more of the blame. But is it because they are the ones making the demands that shut the government down? So in most cases, I would say that it's sort of every time that Democrats have been a little bit more involved in the circumstances that brought about the shutdown, you will see the blame a bit more evenly split. But obviously, in most cases in recent years, it has been more of a Republican-driven situation.

move to end up with a shutdown, whether it's congressional Republicans or, you know, during Donald Trump's first term in office when he was frustrated and essentially led to a shutdown, you know, they basically had a deal.

It's very possible that Democrats might see more blame this time than they have in the past. I will say that maybe the one thing that they're counting on is that Republicans have full control of the government. And so for people looking at this from 30,000 feet being like, well, why can't Republicans have full control? They can't just do this. Not understanding that, yes, they need Democratic votes in the Senate to move past a filibuster.

But at the same time, yeah, Democrats risk having more damage. I will say that, again, the one thing that complicates any of this conversation is that

The long-term effects of a shutdown on sort of people's political opinions, it's not really much of a thing. People sort of bounce back in terms of their viewpoints about things. So if one side takes damage from a shutdown, it doesn't guarantee that that's going to linger for a really long time. And especially in the world we live in, there's going to be something else pretty soon, right?

All right, we'll keep an eye on that. Let's preview Trump's address to Congress on Tuesday night. But first, a break. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm

I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch.

As I mentioned at the top, Trump won't technically be delivering the first State of the Union of his second term Tuesday night on a technicality, but it's basically an address to a joint session of Congress that feels very much like a State of the Union address. We are going to have a late night podcast reacting to it. So, of course, you should tune in.

And Trump potentially has a lot to talk about during his first month. Plus, there have been a barrage of executive orders, shifting foreign alliances, Doge actions, as we discussed, a lot more that he still wants to do. Rachel, what are you going to be watching most closely in Trump's address on Tuesday night?

If you go back, like what I was going to say four years ago, but I guess it was eight years ago, his first address to Congress. What's time, Rachel? You know, he seemed to try to make an attempt to say he wanted to appeal to Democrats and be bipartisan. And I mean, people sort of took that, obviously, with a grain of salt. But his tone, he made some, you know, outreach. I'm really curious what sort of tone he sets now. I mean, he's got majorities in the House, majorities in the Senate.

Technically, he doesn't need Democrats for a lot of the stuff he wants to accomplish during these first year or two in office.

But obviously, when it comes to government funding, he's going to have to work with Democrats. You know, we've heard a lot about how his biggest fear of this first year is what Democrats will hold over his head with the debt ceiling. That's a big fight that's coming down the pike. What are Democrats going to demand from him in order to raise the debt ceiling? That's something he is actually—that actually keeps him up at night. So he's going to have to work with Dems at some point. And then, you know, if they lose the House, he's going to have to work with Dems, you know, three years from now. So

I'm just really curious what sort of tone he strikes. And the other thing I'm really watching is some of the polling on Doge is starting to show that, you know, people are increasingly more concerned about it. I have always thought like, you know, cutting federal workers is not something that's going to resonate with voters long term, like unless it actually impacts them and their personal lives. But

Some of the polling on that shows that people are becoming increasingly more skeptical. So I am really curious to see how much he leans in on what Elon Musk is doing, because that seems to be the story that is dominating everything right now. And it's not just people here in Washington. People across the country are wondering what's going on. Like, what, you know, what's this Elon Musk doing? And like, what are they doing with cutting federal workers, et cetera? And Republicans seem to think that long term, you

This is going to be in their interest. And like I said, it's not going to resonate with with people who are, you know, a thousand miles away and not impacted by this. Democrats think it's going to impact every American and are really leaning into this, leaning into the fight, fighting against it. So I'm curious. I'm really going to be watching the tone he strikes on Doge on this.

Yeah, absolutely. Sort of how partisan of a speech is it and how partisan is the atmosphere in the chamber? You know, do you have some Democrats, you know, making comments and does Trump respond to them? We've seen this kind of back and forth.

in recent addresses to Congress, more so than in the past, maybe a little less decorum than there once was. And I'll say for me, the thing that I'm sort of watching is obviously Trump has done a lot through executive action here at the start, whether you're thinking about Doge or the large number of executive orders he has signed for all kinds of other things.

How much does he sort of talk about those as accomplishments or things that he's doing and things that he wants to do? And how much time does he actually spend asking Congress to do things? Since in theory, one of the things that he's doing in the State of the Union is talking about policies he would like Congress to propose and pass. And obviously, there's a big thing going on with the budget right now. But how much time does he actually spend making requests to do things?

So we got data from two political scientists, Donna Hoffman and Allison Howard, who have been monitoring this over the years. They've basically tracked how many requests

for legislation or policy requests that the president makes in the State of the Union or joint address that's like the State of the Union. And in his first term, Trump did not actually make that many. He was under the median or the average, no matter which you use, in terms of the number of requests he made. He was in like the 20s, the median over time since LBJ's 1965 speech has been 31. Biden was back up in the 30s and low 40s. So,

Trump already was sort of inclined to make fewer requests, but obviously sort of his rhetoric about presidential power and the power of the executive –

And the things that he's done here at the opening of his administration, I'm very curious to see if he sort of breaks away from from even making that many requests and asking that much of Congress and talks more about what he's been doing and what he plans on doing and, you know, sort of leaving Congress out of the out of the picture to some extent. Yeah, to that point, according to the tracking so far, by this point in Trump's first term, he had signed eight bills into law.

This time around, it is only one bill that he signed into law, the Lakin-Riley Act. So the exclusion of Congress seems to be a trend overall. All right. Well, we are going to be watching all of this on Tuesday night, and we're going to podcast about it right here. Until then, thank you, Rachel and Jeffrey, for joining me today. Thank you. Thanks, Galen.

My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with 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.