The spy balloon spotted over Montana wasn’t the first recent incident to spark fears about national security and espionage in the U.S. Only a few years ago, a Chinese billionaire named Sun Guangxin planned to build a wind farm on part of 140,000 acres his company had amassed in southwest Texas, near Laughlin Air Force Base. But after the proposed project sparked national attention, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law to stop the wind farm from being built. 

And just last year, a Chinese company bought 300 acres in North Dakota near the Grand Forks Air Force Base, planning to build a corn milling plant. The Grand Forks City Council voted to stop that project earlier this month.  

These two incidents, along with others, have focused the attention of state legislators on foreign land ownership, especially large tracts of farmland. Currently, 14 states prohibit or restrict foreign ownership of private agricultural land,1 but that number could grow this term. According to data from the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas, nine of those states2 have new bills on the docket aimed at expanding the existing laws to limit or prohibit foreign ownership of agricultural land, a designation that can include cropland, livestock pastures and timberland. And an additional 15 states3 with minimal regulations or none at all are considering new bills on the matter. Many of these bills are designed to prevent foreign governments, companies and, in some cases, nonresident citizens of other countries from owning agricultural land.

It’s the latest political flashpoint in a long history of concerns over foreign ownership of United States farmland, said Micah Brown, the staff attorney for the National Agricultural Law Center. The fears go as far back as the Revolutionary War, and although the reasons have changed throughout history, national security is the primary concern today, Brown said. Legislators promoting such bills have framed them as necessary to protect the safety of the U.S. food supply, prevent shortages and keep land available and affordable for young American farmers. But it’s not clear that laws banning foreign land ownership would solve those problems. 

In 1978, Congress passed the Agriculture Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, driven by concerns over American families leaving farms and the security of the U.S. food supply, according to The New York Times. The law required that foreign ownership of farmland be reported to the United States Department of Agriculture, and the first report, in 1980, found that less than half of 1 percent of farmland was owned by foreign investors or entities.

Now, foreign investors hold just 3.1 percent of all privately owned agricultural land in the United States, according to the most recent USDA report, which covers through the end of 2021. The numbers vary by state, but overall, investors from Canada own the most, and foreign-owned land was most often timber or forest. 

While many of the states considering a ban on foreign ownership do not mention specific countries in their bills, it’s clear that some are targeting China. “Here in New Jersey, we should learn from what’s happening in other states and stop the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from establishing strategic control over sprawling tracts of our farmland,” state Sen. Doug Steinhardt, who introduced a bill there this year, wrote in an editorial at NJ.com. These types of bills began surfacing in the past two years, on the heels of anti-China rhetoric during President Donald Trump’s administration, and anxiety about the relationship between the U.S. and China more broadly. Indeed, Trump has said that if he becomes president again, he will ban Chinese citizens from owning farmland outright, according to reporting from The New York Post. 

However, some have argued that the focus on China is more about anti-Asian sentiment than genuine concerns, and could lead to legal immigrants being prevented from buying farmland. “Texas prides itself on sacrifice, hard work, opportunity and economic growth,” Jon Taylor, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio, wrote in the San Antonio Express-News. “How are these values served by denying land or property ownership to immigrants and their families from China, Iran, North Korea or Russia?”

And despite concerns about Chinese citizens buying land near military bases, Chinese investors own less than 1 percent of foreign-owned acreage nationwide. The total share of acreage owned by foreign investors and entities has been growing rapidly over the past few decades, but the overall numbers remain small. 

Even some lawmakers’ concerns about the effect of foreign land ownership on the food supply would not likely be addressed by the sort of bills currently being introduced, said Tomotaroh Granzier-Nakajima, an energy and environment policy fellow at MOST Policy Initiative, in Missouri. That’s because supply is less an issue of who grows food than one of who consumes it. “There are no restrictions in this bill that best stipulate where agricultural products can be sold,” he said of a bill advancing through the Missouri House. “So a domestically owned business that is producing food could sell anywhere.”

Other issues have focused attention on ownership of farmland, though. Under current law, the USDA requires reporting of foreign ownership, with a civil penalty for a failure to disclose. But a 2017 review by Investigate Midwest found holes in the data and lax enforcement. Last year, 130 lawmakers asked the Government Accountability Office for a review. Additionally, Sens. Chuck Grassley and Tammy Baldwin have recently cosponsored legislation to require more information to be collected. And Grassley elaborated on his worries about farmland ownership in a statement posted to his website in January. “Young and beginning farmers here at home should not be squeezed out or compete with foreign investors subsidized by the American taxpayer, especially those backed by unfriendly regimes, such as the Communist Party of China,” he wrote. (In some cases, foreign owners may be eligible for USDA subsidies or programs.) 

A 2022 report by the National Young Farmers Coalition found a majority of surveyed farmers ages 40 and under struggled to find affordable land. But the USDA has found foreign investment has no consistent, significant effect on the prices of farmland, although they say more research is needed.

Family farms in the U.S. have been dwindling for decades, struggling to keep up as agriculture became a global industry. Rural Americans today are much more likely to be employed in education, health care or the service and retail sector than in agriculture, forestry, fishing, hunting and mining, which, together, employ only about 1 in 10 workers in rural counties. A strong majority of Americans holds farmers in high regard, but despite some younger Americans entering the profession in recent years, a need for young farmers remains.

Whether these new laws about foreign land ownership would be constitutional is unsettled, said Brown. But even if they are, it’s not clear they would prevent security threats or help farmers in the ways lawmakers are promising.

Political battles in Washington sometimes feature the hallmarks of a bad sequel that uses the same narrative threads as its predecessor — just with less verve and imagination.

In 2023, it’s taking the form of another round of drama over the debt ceiling. Congressional Republicans say they won’t back a debt ceiling hike without spending cuts, while President Biden wants Congress to raise the limit with no strings attached to avoid any risk of a shock to the global economy.

This tension isn’t new: Legislative fights over the debt ceiling date back to the 1950s, as both parties have used the issue to make the other side look fiscally irresponsible for backing a higher limit — even though the threshold only affects the government’s ability to pay what it already owes and does not authorize new spending. What is new is the increased political brinkmanship, which in recent years has taken the country to the edge of default multiple times. Most infamously, a divided government only avoided a default with a last-minute deal in 2011, prompting a downgrade to the nation’s credit rating for the first time. Now the clock is ticking on whether 2023’s episode will be worse than 2011’s: The country reached the debt ceiling last month, and the Treasury will only be able to use “extraordinary measures” to pay the bills until early June.

Once again, a Democratic president, a thin Democratic Senate majority and a newly minted Republican House majority must work together to resolve the debt ceiling conflict. But the end result will depend on how the debate plays out in the current political environment, which differs from 2011 in several crucial ways. Firstly, the GOP has a much narrower majority in the House than it did 12 years ago. And it’s also much less united behind Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who had to make concessions to the right flank of his party to win the speakership after 15 rounds of balloting, than it was under then-Speaker John Boehner. 

McCarthy’s narrow majority and limited hold over his caucus could hamper his ability to find a compromise between his party and Biden. But Republicans’ weaker-than-expected midterm showing could also make some in the GOP reticent to engage in an all-out struggle, a departure from 2011 when the Republicans felt they had a mandate from a strong midterm performance to seek a showdown with former President Barack Obama. Given this, here are two different pathways for the latest debt-ceiling clash:

It could be the worst yet

The political environment in Washington, especially the internal workings of the House GOP, could make finding a deal treacherous. Much like in 2011, Republicans are intent on using the debt ceiling as leverage to extract cuts in the name of fiscal restraint, said Laura Blessing, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. “But we’ve got a more volatile House of Representatives in terms of difficulty controlling the individual members,” Blessing said. “You have folks who are perfectly willing to march to the beat of their own drum.”

Some House Republicans are opposed to a debt limit hike under any circumstances — and McCarthy only has 222 votes to start with. Even more moderate Republicans have spoken out against the idea of a “clean” debt ceiling hike — saying Biden will need to agree to at least some cuts — but what the 70-odd members of the GOP’s more center-right Main Street Caucus find acceptable may differ significantly from the preferences of the 40-odd members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus. 

As a result, McCarthy is almost certainly going to need some Democratic votes to pass a debt ceiling hike. That’s not a surprise, though, since Democrats control the Senate and the White House, said Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton University. “The party with more institutional power traditionally bears more of the burden for carrying debt limit increases,” Lee said. “Republicans will be looking to Democrats to pony up votes on this.” But in terms of pure arithmetic, McCarthy could also be aided by the fact that House Democrats have been more amenable to raising the debt ceiling over the past decade or so, even when former President Donald Trump was in office.

However, what Republicans want and what Democrats might be willing to vote for seem very far apart right now. Republicans have suggested they’d target spending cuts in areas such as aid for low-income families, climate change initiatives and Affordable Care Act subsidies — reductions Democrats are unlikely to support. Now, the parties are only at the opening stages of negotiation, but McCarthy’s willingness to reduce his party’s requests to gain Democratic votes could also result in him losing much-needed GOP support. “What happens when you get Democratic votes? That probably makes it harder to hold on to some of the Republican votes that he still has,” Blessing said. “I think the narrow margins are an indication of how volatile this negotiation is going to be.”

And the rules changes McCarthy agreed to during the speaker race could complicate his flexibility in negotiations. For one thing, it now only takes one member to file a “motion to vacate the chair,” meaning a single unhappy Republican could start the process to bring about a vote to remove McCarthy as speaker. And the rules also require a three-fifths supermajority in the House to raise taxes. In essence, McCarthy has to find just the right balance in a deal while the Sword of Damocles hangs over his head and a political trapdoor lies below his feet.

And we can’t forget about the Senate either. “[Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell is saying, ‘Hey, McCarthy, you take the lead in these negotiations,’” Blessing said. “That makes sense. McCarthy has a harder conference to deal with here.” But while Democrats have control and have recently shown a greater willingness to vote for debt ceiling increases, their narrow majority still has to contend with the filibuster. In most debt ceiling clashes dating back to 2011, the Senate needed to find 60 or more votes at some point in the legislative process. 

And even if Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and McConnell come up with their own deal in the Senate, the House still has to agree to a vote on it. This could certainly happen if the government is on the brink of default, but it may take that sort of risk to produce a vote. “The crisis is not upon us yet. It will come. But Congress has a tendency to push things down to the last minute,” said Lee. “And so I would certainly look for that to be likely in this case.”

It might not be as bad this time around

It’s easy to assume the worst, but Lee cautioned that this debt ceiling clash might not be as intense as the 2011 one, which came on the heels of massive Republican gains in the 2010 midterms. This time, the conflict follows a midterm in which Republicans only barely captured the House and fell short in the Senate. “Republicans don’t have a sense of mandate coming out of those elections,” Lee said. “That’s often very important for how members interpret recent elections, very important for their priorities, and also for what they think they’re expected to do and what they’ll be held accountable for next time.”

On top of this, the risk of shouldering the blame could also make it more likely for the two sides to find an agreement. “That risk helps to bring members to the table, regardless of their ideological preferences,” Lee said. While polling suggests, at first blush, that Americans are not sure or even slightly oppose upping the debt limit, Americans have shown a strong preference for raising the threshold in surveys that have asked if the ceiling should go up if the alternative is default. And with Democrats wanting a clean debt limit increase and Republicans looking for cuts first, the GOP may face more risk of blame. (This is not to say Democrats would avoid blame entirely, and they surely don’t want a fiscal calamity on Biden’s watch ahead of the 2024 election campaign.)

But also working in favor of an agreement is the GOP’s weakened ideological commitment to small government, as it has embraced a populist strain of conservatism more focused on cultural issues. For instance, Trump said recently that any debt ceiling deal should not reduce Social Security or Medicare benefits — a far cry from the entitlement-cutting approach of former Republican Speaker Paul Ryan. “I don’t think the Republican Party is as unified now as it was in 2011 on putting the brakes on spending,” Lee said. “I see this is much more of a problem of them figuring out how they’re going to negotiate rather than the unstoppable force meets the immovable object that we saw in 2011.”

Recent history also points to a less-combative path to a deal. In October 2021, the parties agreed to a short-term debt ceiling increase that set up a December showdown, in which Republicans would try to force Democrats to use the more burdensome budget reconciliation process to get around a GOP filibuster. But that December, the Senate remarkably put together a one-time carveout to the filibuster that allowed an up-or-down vote on the debt ceiling — although the legislation implementing the carveout still required 60 votes (with at least 10 Republicans joining) to break a filibuster. The use of a filibuster exception for the debt ceiling — “historically unusual,” in Blessing’s words — suggests the Senate, at least, could get creative to move a deal forward if the House is struggling.

And while McCarthy will want a deal that gets the cuts the GOP wants, the threat of a debt default could lead him to push forward with a House vote on legislation that won’t get majority support from his caucus. But that wouldn’t be groundbreaking — it’s what Boehner eventually did, Lee noted, as he decided to move “must-pass” legislation to the floor regardless. The last three debt ceiling bills that passed the House during Boehner’s speakership had support from a minority of Republicans. 

For Lee, the intensity of this debt ceiling fight is more a question of “ungovernability” than “showdown” for Republicans. That remains a far cry from 2011 — for now. “I had no idea how that was going to get resolved! I couldn’t even see how it could get resolved, considering the way people had boxed themselves into corners on that,” Lee said of the 2011 clash.

The script for this debt ceiling saga is still in the early stages, so we’re a long way from knowing how it’ll play out. “Right now, everyone’s showing off their fancy steps in this weird little tango that we do,” said Blessing. “This stage will end, and then we will get down to brass tacks at some point.” That end point will probably be right down to the wire, though, even if things aren’t as acrimonious as in 2011. “That’s so normal for Congress to not do a deal before you absolutely have to,” said Lee. “There’s bargaining leverage all the way up until the last minute, in fact. That’s part of what incentivizes the brinkmanship.” 

Let’s just hope this sequel isn’t as bad as, say, the fourth Jaws movie.

Political battles in Washington sometimes feature the hallmarks of a bad sequel that uses the same narrative threads as its predecessor — just with less verve and imagination.

In 2023, it’s taking the form of another round of drama over the debt ceiling. Congressional Republicans say they won’t back a debt ceiling hike without spending cuts, while President Biden wants Congress to raise the limit with no strings attached to avoid any risk of a shock to the global economy.

This tension isn’t new: Legislative fights over the debt ceiling date back to the 1950s, as both parties have used the issue to make the other side look fiscally irresponsible for backing a higher limit — even though the threshold only affects the government’s ability to pay what it already owes and does not authorize new spending. What is new is the increased political brinkmanship, which in recent years has taken the country to the edge of default multiple times. Most infamously, a divided government only avoided a default with a last-minute deal in 2011, prompting a downgrade to the nation’s credit rating for the first time. Now the clock is ticking on whether 2023’s episode will be worse than 2011’s: The country reached the debt ceiling last month, and the Treasury will only be able to use “extraordinary measures” to pay the bills until early June.

Once again, a Democratic president, a thin Democratic Senate majority and a newly minted Republican House majority must work together to resolve the debt ceiling conflict. But the end result will depend on how the debate plays out in the current political environment, which differs from 2011 in several crucial ways. Firstly, the GOP has a much narrower majority in the House than it did 12 years ago. And it’s also much less united behind Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who had to make concessions to the right flank of his party to win the speakership after 15 rounds of balloting, than it was under then-Speaker John Boehner. 

McCarthy’s narrow majority and limited hold over his caucus could hamper his ability to find a compromise between his party and Biden. But Republicans’ weaker-than-expected midterm showing could also make some in the GOP reticent to engage in an all-out struggle, a departure from 2011 when the Republicans felt they had a mandate from a strong midterm performance to seek a showdown with former President Barack Obama. Given this, here are two different pathways for the latest debt-ceiling clash:

It could be the worst yet

The political environment in Washington, especially the internal workings of the House GOP, could make finding a deal treacherous. Much like in 2011, Republicans are intent on using the debt ceiling as leverage to extract cuts in the name of fiscal restraint, said Laura Blessing, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. “But we’ve got a more volatile House of Representatives in terms of difficulty controlling the individual members,” Blessing said. “You have folks who are perfectly willing to march to the beat of their own drum.”

Some House Republicans are opposed to a debt limit hike under any circumstances — and McCarthy only has 222 votes to start with. Even more moderate Republicans have spoken out against the idea of a “clean” debt ceiling hike — saying Biden will need to agree to at least some cuts — but what the 70-odd members of the GOP’s more center-right Main Street Caucus find acceptable may differ significantly from the preferences of the 40-odd members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus. 

As a result, McCarthy is almost certainly going to need some Democratic votes to pass a debt ceiling hike. That’s not a surprise, though, since Democrats control the Senate and the White House, said Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton University. “The party with more institutional power traditionally bears more of the burden for carrying debt limit increases,” Lee said. “Republicans will be looking to Democrats to pony up votes on this.” But in terms of pure arithmetic, McCarthy could also be aided by the fact that House Democrats have been more amenable to raising the debt ceiling over the past decade or so, even when former President Donald Trump was in office.

However, what Republicans want and what Democrats might be willing to vote for seem very far apart right now. Republicans have suggested they’d target spending cuts in areas such as aid for low-income families, climate change initiatives and Affordable Care Act subsidies — reductions Democrats are unlikely to support. Now, the parties are only at the opening stages of negotiation, but McCarthy’s willingness to reduce his party’s requests to gain Democratic votes could also result in him losing much-needed GOP support. “What happens when you get Democratic votes? That probably makes it harder to hold on to some of the Republican votes that he still has,” Blessing said. “I think the narrow margins are an indication of how volatile this negotiation is going to be.”

And the rules changes McCarthy agreed to during the speaker race could complicate his flexibility in negotiations. For one thing, it now only takes one member to file a “motion to vacate the chair,” meaning a single unhappy Republican could start the process to bring about a vote to remove McCarthy as speaker. And the rules also require a three-fifths supermajority in the House to raise taxes. In essence, McCarthy has to find just the right balance in a deal while the Sword of Damocles hangs over his head and a political trapdoor lies below his feet.

And we can’t forget about the Senate either. “[Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell is saying, ‘Hey, McCarthy, you take the lead in these negotiations,’” Blessing said. “That makes sense. McCarthy has a harder conference to deal with here.” But while Democrats have control and have recently shown a greater willingness to vote for debt ceiling increases, their narrow majority still has to contend with the filibuster. In most debt ceiling clashes dating back to 2011, the Senate needed to find 60 or more votes at some point in the legislative process. 

And even if Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and McConnell come up with their own deal in the Senate, the House still has to agree to a vote on it. This could certainly happen if the government is on the brink of default, but it may take that sort of risk to produce a vote. “The crisis is not upon us yet. It will come. But Congress has a tendency to push things down to the last minute,” said Lee. “And so I would certainly look for that to be likely in this case.”

It might not be as bad this time around

It’s easy to assume the worst, but Lee cautioned that this debt ceiling clash might not be as intense as the 2011 one, which came on the heels of massive Republican gains in the 2010 midterms. This time, the conflict follows a midterm in which Republicans only barely captured the House and fell short in the Senate. “Republicans don’t have a sense of mandate coming out of those elections,” Lee said. “That’s often very important for how members interpret recent elections, very important for their priorities, and also for what they think they’re expected to do and what they’ll be held accountable for next time.”

On top of this, the risk of shouldering the blame could also make it more likely for the two sides to find an agreement. “That risk helps to bring members to the table, regardless of their ideological preferences,” Lee said. While polling suggests, at first blush, that Americans are not sure or even slightly oppose upping the debt limit, Americans have shown a strong preference for raising the threshold in surveys that have asked if the ceiling should go up if the alternative is default. And with Democrats wanting a clean debt limit increase and Republicans looking for cuts first, the GOP may face more risk of blame. (This is not to say Democrats would avoid blame entirely, and they surely don’t want a fiscal calamity on Biden’s watch ahead of the 2024 election campaign.)

But also working in favor of an agreement is the GOP’s weakened ideological commitment to small government, as it has embraced a populist strain of conservatism more focused on cultural issues. For instance, Trump said recently that any debt ceiling deal should not reduce Social Security or Medicare benefits — a far cry from the entitlement-cutting approach of former Republican Speaker Paul Ryan. “I don’t think the Republican Party is as unified now as it was in 2011 on putting the brakes on spending,” Lee said. “I see this is much more of a problem of them figuring out how they’re going to negotiate rather than the unstoppable force meets the immovable object that we saw in 2011.”

Recent history also points to a less-combative path to a deal. In October 2021, the parties agreed to a short-term debt ceiling increase that set up a December showdown, in which Republicans would try to force Democrats to use the more burdensome budget reconciliation process to get around a GOP filibuster. But that December, the Senate remarkably put together a one-time carveout to the filibuster that allowed an up-or-down vote on the debt ceiling — although the legislation implementing the carveout still required 60 votes (with at least 10 Republicans joining) to break a filibuster. The use of a filibuster exception for the debt ceiling — “historically unusual,” in Blessing’s words — suggests the Senate, at least, could get creative to move a deal forward if the House is struggling.

And while McCarthy will want a deal that gets the cuts the GOP wants, the threat of a debt default could lead him to push forward with a House vote on legislation that won’t get majority support from his caucus. But that wouldn’t be groundbreaking — it’s what Boehner eventually did, Lee noted, as he decided to move “must-pass” legislation to the floor regardless. The last three debt ceiling bills that passed the House during Boehner’s speakership had support from a minority of Republicans. 

For Lee, the intensity of this debt ceiling fight is more a question of “ungovernability” than “showdown” for Republicans. That remains a far cry from 2011 — for now. “I had no idea how that was going to get resolved! I couldn’t even see how it could get resolved, considering the way people had boxed themselves into corners on that,” Lee said of the 2011 clash.

The script for this debt ceiling saga is still in the early stages, so we’re a long way from knowing how it’ll play out. “Right now, everyone’s showing off their fancy steps in this weird little tango that we do,” said Blessing. “This stage will end, and then we will get down to brass tacks at some point.” That end point will probably be right down to the wire, though, even if things aren’t as acrimonious as in 2011. “That’s so normal for Congress to not do a deal before you absolutely have to,” said Lee. “There’s bargaining leverage all the way up until the last minute, in fact. That’s part of what incentivizes the brinkmanship.” 

Let’s just hope this sequel isn’t as bad as, say, the fourth Jaws movie.

Playing chicken with the national economy is not unusual for Congress and the president. There was the time that former President Donald Trump ground the government to a halt because he wanted money for his border wall. Oh, and the time that tea party Republicans threatened to send the U.S. into debt default if Congress didn’t slash spending.

In fact, since 2010, there have been no fewer than five major fiscal standoffs between Republicans and Democrats akin to the one(s) we’ll probably brave later this year. These crises had tangible economic consequences, including the furloughing of 800,000 federal workers and the downgrading of the U.S.’s credit rating. But they also had political repercussions for the elected officials who caused them. And that track record could give us an idea of whom Americans would blame if brinksmanship in Washington, D.C., again upsets the economic apple cart.

So I looked at what caused each of the five prior crises and what the polls said after they were resolved. The results bode poorly for Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his fellow Republicans: Since 2010 at least, the public has always blamed and soured on the GOP more than Democrats in the wake of these standoffs.

The OG debt-ceiling crisis

What happened: The first time most Americans had probably heard the term “debt ceiling” was in 2011, when it became a political football in a fight over spending. The debt ceiling establishes how much money the federal government can borrow to pay its existing financial obligations. If it were hit, the U.S. would eventually1 be forced to default on its debt, precipitating an economic crisis. So the debt ceiling had historically been raised regularly without controversy to avoid this. 

However, after the 2010 election ushered in a Republican majority in the House and gave the conservative tea party movement a seat at the table, Republicans demanded that then-President Barack Obama agree to cut spending in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. The two sides traded proposals, making little headway until July 31, 2011, when they struck a deal that raised the debt ceiling and cut spending. The compromise also scheduled across-the-board spending decreases — called “sequestration” — for 2013 if Congress couldn’t agree on a more specific cost-cutting plan. Obama signed the agreement into law on Aug. 2, just hours before the U.S. was expected to default. 

What Americans thought: Republicans came out worse, but neither Obama nor Republicans emerged from the crisis in a good light. According to FiveThirtyEight’s historical presidential-approval average, Obama’s approval rating dropped by nearly 3 percentage points2 between July 15 and Aug. 10. But Congress’s approval rating sank by more. According to Gallup, it fell 5 points between July and August; according to The New York Times/CBS News, it fell 6 points between June and August.

While “Congress” consists of both Republicans and Democrats, CNN/ORC found that the favorability rating of the Republican Party also dropped 8 points between July and August. And FiveThirtyEight’s retroactive3 polling average of the generic congressional ballot suggests Democrats’ margin in head-to-head polls increased by almost 3 points4 between July 15 and Aug. 10. According to The New York Times/CBS News, 47 percent of Americans blamed Republicans in Congress for the feud more than they blamed Obama and the Democrats. Only 29 percent said the opposite — although 20 percent volunteered that both were equally at fault.

The so-called “fiscal cliff”

What happened: An economic double-whammy was narrowly averted. After the 2011 compromise, Congress couldn’t agree on a more specific cost-cutting plan, so sequestration was set to go into effect at the beginning of January 2013, immediately after tax cuts passed under former President George W. Bush were expiring. The combination of a sudden tax increase and spending decrease — deemed the “fiscal cliff” — threatened to plunge the U.S. into a recession.

After lengthy negotiations, Obama and congressional Republicans again reached a deal at the last minute. On Jan. 2, Obama signed a law that delayed sequestration by two months and made the Bush tax cuts permanent for all but the highest earners.

What Americans thought: Americans approved more of Obama’s actions than of Republicans’, but neither party suffered a significant penalty. Obama’s average approval rating stayed around 53 percent during late December and early January, while Democrats’ average lead in generic congressional ballot polling rose only slightly.5 

However, Gallup did detect a 4-point drop in Congress’s approval rating between December and January. The pollster also found that 46 percent of Americans approved of how Obama handled the negotiations, while only 25 percent approved of the way Republican leaders in Congress did. The Pew Research Center found an even wider gap: 48 percent approval for Obama’s handling of the negotiations and 19 percent for Republican leaders’.

The combined debt-ceiling crisis and government shutdown

What happened: Just months after the fiscal cliff, the U.S. faced two separate economic deadlines, blowing right past one and barely making the other. First, the country was once again slated to default if the debt ceiling was not raised by Oct. 17, 2013. Second, Congress needed to pass a budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 — but House Republicans insisted they would only pass a spending bill that defunded, or at least delayed implementation of, the Affordable Care Act. Obama and Senate Democrats refused, so the federal government partially shut down on Oct. 1, furloughing 800,000 federal employees and suspending many federal services like national parks.

The government remained closed for 16 days until Republicans finally caved as the country teetered on the brink of default. Shortly after midnight on Oct. 17, Obama signed a resolution that funded the government — Obamacare and all — and suspended the debt ceiling until 2014.

What Americans thought: They focused their anger on Republicans. Obama’s average approval rating held steady at around 44 percent throughout the shutdown. Meanwhile, Gallup found that Congress’s approval rating went from 19 percent in September to 11 percent in the middle of the shutdown to 9 percent in November. Democrats’ lead in generic ballot polling increased by almost 4 points6 between Sept. 22 and Oct. 28.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted just after the shutdown laid bare Republicans’ PR disaster. Congress’s approval rating was only 12 percent, and the favorability rating of the Republican Party was only 32 percent. Both were the lowest numbers the pollster had ever recorded. Disapproval over the GOP’s handling of the shutdown — already a dismal 63 percent on the eve of the shutdown — surged to 77 percent by the time it ended. Even Republicans and self-identified tea partiers disapproved.

According to ABC News/The Washington Post, 53 percent of Americans said Republicans were mainly responsible for the shutdown, 29 percent said Obama and 15 percent said both sides were equally responsible — similar numbers to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted during the shutdown. However, USA Today/Princeton Survey Research found that 39 percent of adults said Republicans deserved more blame, 19 percent said Democrats and 36 percent faulted both parties equally.

The shutdown over immigration

What happened: The next government shutdown came less than five years later, but this time, it centered on immigration. In January 2018, Republicans controlled the White House, Senate and House. But Senate Democrats filibustered the GOP’s proposed spending bill because it did not address the status of immigrants covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which then-President Trump had ended in 2017. As a result, the federal government partially shut down on Jan. 20. However, Democrats quickly dropped their filibuster after Republicans promised to consider an immigration bill. The government reopened on Jan. 22.

What Americans thought: More Americans blamed Democrats than in the previous three standoffs, but most still faulted Republicans. In an average of four polls7 conducted during the shutdown, 36 percent of Americans felt that Democrats in Congress were responsible for it, 34 percent felt that Trump was responsible and 16 percent felt that Republicans in Congress were responsible. 

However, the share that blamed Democrats (36 percent) versus the combined share that blamed Republicans (50 percent) was similar to Trump’s approval/disapproval ratings at the time (40 percent to 55 percent across those same four polls). So the public response broke down along partisan lines, and the national mood at the time was strongly Democratic-leaning. As a result, it didn’t significantly impact either party’s political fortunes. Trump’s approval rating in FiveThirtyEight’s average faltered by about 2 points8 between Jan. 17 and Jan. 23 but recovered to its old level by Feb. 3. And according to YouGov/The Economist, registered voters’ views of Democrats in Congress held steady at 36 percent favorable between Jan. 15 and Jan. 29. Democrats’ lead in the FiveThirtyEight generic congressional ballot polling average slipped less than 1 point9 during that span. However, according to Gallup, Congress’s approval rating did fall 5 points between January and February.

The longest shutdown in U.S. history

What happened: The most recent government shutdown was also fought over immigration, but this time, it took longer than three days to resolve. In December 2018, Republicans in Congress were well on their way to passing a spending bill when Trump announced he would not support it because it didn’t fund his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. House Republicans then passed a bill funding the wall, but Senate Democrats filibustered it. As a result, the government partially shut down on Dec. 22. 

Democrats took control of the House on Jan. 3, 2019 (when the winners of the 2018 election were seated), giving them more leverage. After 35 days of back-and-forth — the most protracted government shutdown in American history — Trump finally blinked. On Jan. 25, he signed a stopgap funding bill that ended the shutdown and kicked a decision on the border wall down the road.

What Americans thought: A majority of Americans agreed: This one was on Trump. According to a Morning Consult/Politico poll and a YouGov/The Economist poll conducted just after the shutdown ended, 52 percent of registered voters blamed Trump the most for the shutdown. His famously stable approval rating also sank by nearly 3 points10 between Dec. 21 and Jan. 25. 

While partisanship ensured that a significant minority of registered voters blamed Democrats in Congress (34 percent in the Morning Consult/Politico poll, 41 percent in YouGov/The Economist), if anything, they emerged from the shutdown more popular. According to YouGov/The Economist, their favorability rating increased by almost 2 points between Dec. 17 and Jan. 28. And Gallup found that Congress’s approval rating increased by 3 points between December and February.

Here in 2023, House Republicans have already made it clear that they will demand spending cuts, as they did in 2011, before raising the debt ceiling. And if history is any indication, Americans will see that as a reason to blame them for any ensuing chaos. 

But Americans may not penalize the GOP at the ballot box for it. That’s because the political effects of these crises are short-lived; there’s always another news cycle that replaces it. After the 2011 debt-ceiling fight, Obama’s approval rating eventually recovered the ground it had lost. After the 2013 shutdown, the troubled launch of healthcare.gov reversed Republicans’ slide on the generic congressional ballot; by December they were polling better than before the shutdown. And after the 2018-19 shutdown, Trump’s approval rating shot back up to pre-shutdown levels within a month. Though he eventually lost reelection, a few other things were going on in 2020 that might explain that better.

Ergo, events, dear reader, events will probably put the memory of 2023’s fiscal turbulence in the rearview mirror by the time of the 2024 election. But that doesn’t make public opinion surrounding the debate irrelevant — far from it. Impasses like 2013’s and 2019’s were likely broken because Republicans felt intense public pressure to give in. So while Republicans probably don’t need to worry about losing an election due to their hard line on spending, they still ought to fret about losing public support: It will make it harder for them to stand firm in the showdown to come.

Playing chicken with the national economy is not unusual for Congress and the president. There was the time that former President Donald Trump ground the government to a halt because he wanted money for his border wall. Oh, and the time that tea party Republicans threatened to send the U.S. into debt default if Congress didn’t slash spending.

In fact, since 2010, there have been no fewer than five major fiscal standoffs between Republicans and Democrats akin to the one(s) we’ll probably brave later this year. These crises had tangible economic consequences, including the furloughing of 800,000 federal workers and the downgrading of the U.S.’s credit rating. But they also had political repercussions for the elected officials who caused them. And that track record could give us an idea of whom Americans would blame if brinksmanship in Washington, D.C., again upsets the economic apple cart.

So I looked at what caused each of the five prior crises and what the polls said after they were resolved. The results bode poorly for Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his fellow Republicans: Since 2010 at least, the public has always blamed and soured on the GOP more than Democrats in the wake of these standoffs.

The OG debt-ceiling crisis

What happened: The first time most Americans had probably heard the term “debt ceiling” was in 2011, when it became a political football in a fight over spending. The debt ceiling establishes how much money the federal government can borrow to pay its existing financial obligations. If it were hit, the U.S. would eventually1 be forced to default on its debt, precipitating an economic crisis. So the debt ceiling had historically been raised regularly without controversy to avoid this.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/debt-ceiling-countdown-begins-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-96623875

However, after the 2010 election ushered in a Republican majority in the House and gave the conservative tea party movement a seat at the table, Republicans demanded that then-President Barack Obama agree to cut spending in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. The two sides traded proposals, making little headway until July 31, 2011, when they struck a deal that raised the debt ceiling and cut spending. The compromise also scheduled across-the-board spending decreases — called “sequestration” — for 2013 if Congress couldn’t agree on a more specific cost-cutting plan. Obama signed the agreement into law on Aug. 2, just hours before the U.S. was expected to default. 

What Americans thought: Republicans came out worse, but neither Obama nor Republicans emerged from the crisis in a good light. According to FiveThirtyEight’s historical presidential-approval average, Obama’s approval rating dropped by nearly 3 percentage points2 between July 15 and Aug. 10. But Congress’s approval rating sank by more. According to Gallup, it fell 5 points between July and August; according to The New York Times/CBS News, it fell 6 points between June and August.

While “Congress” consists of both Republicans and Democrats, CNN/ORC found that the favorability rating of the Republican Party also dropped 8 points between July and August. And FiveThirtyEight’s retroactive3 polling average of the generic congressional ballot suggests Democrats’ margin in head-to-head polls increased by almost 3 points4 between July 15 and Aug. 10. According to The New York Times/CBS News, 47 percent of Americans blamed Republicans in Congress for the feud more than they blamed Obama and the Democrats. Only 29 percent said the opposite — although 20 percent volunteered that both were equally at fault.

The so-called “fiscal cliff”

What happened: An economic double-whammy was narrowly averted. After the 2011 compromise, Congress couldn’t agree on a more specific cost-cutting plan, so sequestration was set to go into effect at the beginning of January 2013, immediately after tax cuts passed under former President George W. Bush were expiring. The combination of a sudden tax increase and spending decrease — deemed the “fiscal cliff” — threatened to plunge the U.S. into a recession.

After lengthy negotiations, Obama and congressional Republicans again reached a deal at the last minute. On Jan. 2, Obama signed a law that delayed sequestration by two months and made the Bush tax cuts permanent for all but the highest earners.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/kevin-mccarthy-speaker-tough-job-ahead-96326192

What Americans thought: Americans approved more of Obama’s actions than of Republicans’, but neither party suffered a significant penalty. Obama’s average approval rating stayed around 53 percent during late December and early January, while Democrats’ average lead in generic congressional ballot polling rose only slightly.5 

However, Gallup did detect a 4-point drop in Congress’s approval rating between December and January. The pollster also found that 46 percent of Americans approved of how Obama handled the negotiations, while only 25 percent approved of the way Republican leaders in Congress did. The Pew Research Center found an even wider gap: 48 percent approval for Obama’s handling of the negotiations and 19 percent for Republican leaders’.

The combined debt-ceiling crisis and government shutdown

What happened: Just months after the fiscal cliff, the U.S. faced two separate economic deadlines, blowing right past one and barely making the other. First, the country was once again slated to default if the debt ceiling was not raised by Oct. 17, 2013. Second, Congress needed to pass a budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 — but House Republicans insisted they would only pass a spending bill that defunded, or at least delayed implementation of, the Affordable Care Act. Obama and Senate Democrats refused, so the federal government partially shut down on Oct. 1, furloughing 800,000 federal employees and suspending many federal services like national parks.

The government remained closed for 16 days until Republicans finally caved as the country teetered on the brink of default. Shortly after midnight on Oct. 17, Obama signed a resolution that funded the government — Obamacare and all — and suspended the debt ceiling until 2014.

What Americans thought: They focused their anger on Republicans. Obama’s average approval rating held steady at around 44 percent throughout the shutdown. Meanwhile, Gallup found that Congress’s approval rating went from 19 percent in September to 11 percent in the middle of the shutdown to 9 percent in November. Democrats’ lead in generic ballot polling increased by almost 4 points6 between Sept. 22 and Oct. 28.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted just after the shutdown laid bare Republicans’ PR disaster. Congress’s approval rating was only 12 percent, and the favorability rating of the Republican Party was only 32 percent. Both were the lowest numbers the pollster had ever recorded. Disapproval over the GOP’s handling of the shutdown — already a dismal 63 percent on the eve of the shutdown — surged to 77 percent by the time it ended. Even Republicans and self-identified tea partiers disapproved.

According to ABC News/The Washington Post, 53 percent of Americans said Republicans were mainly responsible for the shutdown, 29 percent said Obama and 15 percent said both sides were equally responsible — similar numbers to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted during the shutdown. However, USA Today/Princeton Survey Research found that 39 percent of adults said Republicans deserved more blame, 19 percent said Democrats and 36 percent faulted both parties equally.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/americans-lonely-political-consequences-fivethirtyeight-politics-96858073

The shutdown over immigration

What happened: The next government shutdown came less than five years later, but this time, it centered on immigration. In January 2018, Republicans controlled the White House, Senate and House. But Senate Democrats filibustered the GOP’s proposed spending bill because it did not address the status of immigrants covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which then-President Trump had ended in 2017. As a result, the federal government partially shut down on Jan. 20. However, Democrats quickly dropped their filibuster after Republicans promised to consider an immigration bill. The government reopened on Jan. 22.

What Americans thought: More Americans blamed Democrats than in the previous three standoffs, but most still faulted Republicans. In an average of four polls7 conducted during the shutdown, 36 percent of Americans felt that Democrats in Congress were responsible for it, 34 percent felt that Trump was responsible and 16 percent felt that Republicans in Congress were responsible. 

However, the share that blamed Democrats (36 percent) versus the combined share that blamed Republicans (50 percent) was similar to Trump’s approval/disapproval ratings at the time (40 percent to 55 percent across those same four polls). So the public response broke down along partisan lines, and the national mood at the time was strongly Democratic-leaning. As a result, it didn’t significantly impact either party’s political fortunes. Trump’s approval rating in FiveThirtyEight’s average faltered by about 2 points8 between Jan. 17 and Jan. 23 but recovered to its old level by Feb. 3. And according to YouGov/The Economist, registered voters’ views of Democrats in Congress held steady at 36 percent favorable between Jan. 15 and Jan. 29. Democrats’ lead in the FiveThirtyEight generic congressional ballot polling average slipped less than 1 point9 during that span. However, according to Gallup, Congress’s approval rating did fall 5 points between January and February.

The longest shutdown in U.S. history

What happened: The most recent government shutdown was also fought over immigration, but this time, it took longer than three days to resolve. In December 2018, Republicans in Congress were well on their way to passing a spending bill when Trump announced he would not support it because it didn’t fund his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. House Republicans then passed a bill funding the wall, but Senate Democrats filibustered it. As a result, the government partially shut down on Dec. 22. 

Democrats took control of the House on Jan. 3, 2019 (when the winners of the 2018 election were seated), giving them more leverage. After 35 days of back-and-forth — the most protracted government shutdown in American history — Trump finally blinked. On Jan. 25, he signed a stopgap funding bill that ended the shutdown and kicked a decision on the border wall down the road.

What Americans thought: A majority of Americans agreed: This one was on Trump. According to a Morning Consult/Politico poll and a YouGov/The Economist poll conducted just after the shutdown ended, 52 percent of registered voters blamed Trump the most for the shutdown. His famously stable approval rating also sank by nearly 3 points10 between Dec. 21 and Jan. 25. 

While partisanship ensured that a significant minority of registered voters blamed Democrats in Congress (34 percent in the Morning Consult/Politico poll, 41 percent in YouGov/The Economist), if anything, they emerged from the shutdown more popular. According to YouGov/The Economist, their favorability rating increased by almost 2 points between Dec. 17 and Jan. 28. And Gallup found that Congress’s approval rating increased by 3 points between December and February.

Here in 2023, House Republicans have already made it clear that they will demand spending cuts, as they did in 2011, before raising the debt ceiling. And if history is any indication, Americans will see that as a reason to blame them for any ensuing chaos. 

But Americans may not penalize the GOP at the ballot box for it. That’s because the political effects of these crises are short-lived; there’s always another news cycle that replaces it. After the 2011 debt-ceiling fight, Obama’s approval rating eventually recovered the ground it had lost. After the 2013 shutdown, the troubled launch of healthcare.gov reversed Republicans’ slide on the generic congressional ballot; by December they were polling better than before the shutdown. And after the 2018-19 shutdown, Trump’s approval rating shot back up to pre-shutdown levels within a month. Though he eventually lost reelection, a few other things were going on in 2020 that might explain that better.

Ergo, events, dear reader, events will probably put the memory of 2023’s fiscal turbulence in the rearview mirror by the time of the 2024 election. But that doesn’t make public opinion surrounding the debate irrelevant — far from it. Impasses like 2013’s and 2019’s were likely broken because Republicans felt intense public pressure to give in. So while Republicans probably don’t need to worry about losing an election due to their hard line on spending, they still ought to fret about losing public support: It will make it harder for them to stand firm in the showdown to come.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/big-elections-happening-2023-96780613

Playing chicken with the national economy is not unusual for Congress and the president. There was the time that former President Donald Trump ground the government to a halt because he wanted money for his border wall. Oh, and the time that tea party Republicans threatened to send the U.S. into debt default if Congress didn’t slash spending.

In fact, since 2010, there have been no fewer than five major fiscal standoffs between Republicans and Democrats akin to the one(s) we’ll probably brave later this year. These crises had tangible economic consequences, including the furloughing of 800,000 federal workers and the downgrading of the U.S.’s credit rating. But they also had political repercussions for the elected officials who caused them. And that track record could give us an idea of whom Americans would blame if brinksmanship in Washington, D.C., again upsets the economic apple cart.

So I looked at what caused each of the five prior crises and what the polls said after they were resolved. The results bode poorly for Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his fellow Republicans: Since 2010 at least, the public has always blamed and soured on the GOP more than Democrats in the wake of these standoffs.

The OG debt-ceiling crisis

What happened: The first time most Americans had probably heard the term “debt ceiling” was in 2011, when it became a political football in a fight over spending. The debt ceiling establishes how much money the federal government can borrow to pay its existing financial obligations. If it were hit, the U.S. would eventually1 be forced to default on its debt, precipitating an economic crisis. So the debt ceiling had historically been raised regularly without controversy to avoid this.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/debt-ceiling-countdown-begins-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-96623875

However, after the 2010 election ushered in a Republican majority in the House and gave the conservative tea party movement a seat at the table, Republicans demanded that then-President Barack Obama agree to cut spending in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. The two sides traded proposals, making little headway until July 31, 2011, when they struck a deal that raised the debt ceiling and cut spending. The compromise also scheduled across-the-board spending decreases — called “sequestration” — for 2013 if Congress couldn’t agree on a more specific cost-cutting plan. Obama signed the agreement into law on Aug. 2, just hours before the U.S. was expected to default. 

What Americans thought: Republicans came out worse, but neither Obama nor Republicans emerged from the crisis in a good light. According to FiveThirtyEight’s historical presidential-approval average, Obama’s approval rating dropped by nearly 3 percentage points2 between July 15 and Aug. 10. But Congress’s approval rating sank by more. According to Gallup, it fell 5 points between July and August; according to The New York Times/CBS News, it fell 6 points between June and August.

While “Congress” consists of both Republicans and Democrats, CNN/ORC found that the favorability rating of the Republican Party also dropped 8 points between July and August. And FiveThirtyEight’s retroactive3 polling average of the generic congressional ballot suggests Democrats’ margin in head-to-head polls increased by almost 3 points4 between July 15 and Aug. 10. According to The New York Times/CBS News, 47 percent of Americans blamed Republicans in Congress for the feud more than they blamed Obama and the Democrats. Only 29 percent said the opposite — although 20 percent volunteered that both were equally at fault.

The so-called “fiscal cliff”

What happened: An economic double-whammy was narrowly averted. After the 2011 compromise, Congress couldn’t agree on a more specific cost-cutting plan, so sequestration was set to go into effect at the beginning of January 2013, immediately after tax cuts passed under former President George W. Bush were expiring. The combination of a sudden tax increase and spending decrease — deemed the “fiscal cliff” — threatened to plunge the U.S. into a recession.

After lengthy negotiations, Obama and congressional Republicans again reached a deal at the last minute. On Jan. 2, Obama signed a law that delayed sequestration by two months and made the Bush tax cuts permanent for all but the highest earners.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/kevin-mccarthy-speaker-tough-job-ahead-96326192

What Americans thought: Americans approved more of Obama’s actions than of Republicans’, but neither party suffered a significant penalty. Obama’s average approval rating stayed around 53 percent during late December and early January, while Democrats’ average lead in generic congressional ballot polling rose only slightly.5 

However, Gallup did detect a 4-point drop in Congress’s approval rating between December and January. The pollster also found that 46 percent of Americans approved of how Obama handled the negotiations, while only 25 percent approved of the way Republican leaders in Congress did. The Pew Research Center found an even wider gap: 48 percent approval for Obama’s handling of the negotiations and 19 percent for Republican leaders’.

The combined debt-ceiling crisis and government shutdown

What happened: Just months after the fiscal cliff, the U.S. faced two separate economic deadlines, blowing right past one and barely making the other. First, the country was once again slated to default if the debt ceiling was not raised by Oct. 17, 2013. Second, Congress needed to pass a budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 — but House Republicans insisted they would only pass a spending bill that defunded, or at least delayed implementation of, the Affordable Care Act. Obama and Senate Democrats refused, so the federal government partially shut down on Oct. 1, furloughing 800,000 federal employees and suspending many federal services like national parks.

The government remained closed for 16 days until Republicans finally caved as the country teetered on the brink of default. Shortly after midnight on Oct. 17, Obama signed a resolution that funded the government — Obamacare and all — and suspended the debt ceiling until 2014.

What Americans thought: They focused their anger on Republicans. Obama’s average approval rating held steady at around 44 percent throughout the shutdown. Meanwhile, Gallup found that Congress’s approval rating went from 19 percent in September to 11 percent in the middle of the shutdown to 9 percent in November. Democrats’ lead in generic ballot polling increased by almost 4 points6 between Sept. 22 and Oct. 28.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted just after the shutdown laid bare Republicans’ PR disaster. Congress’s approval rating was only 12 percent, and the favorability rating of the Republican Party was only 32 percent. Both were the lowest numbers the pollster had ever recorded. Disapproval over the GOP’s handling of the shutdown — already a dismal 63 percent on the eve of the shutdown — surged to 77 percent by the time it ended. Even Republicans and self-identified tea partiers disapproved.

According to ABC News/The Washington Post, 53 percent of Americans said Republicans were mainly responsible for the shutdown, 29 percent said Obama and 15 percent said both sides were equally responsible — similar numbers to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted during the shutdown. However, USA Today/Princeton Survey Research found that 39 percent of adults said Republicans deserved more blame, 19 percent said Democrats and 36 percent faulted both parties equally.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/americans-lonely-political-consequences-fivethirtyeight-politics-96858073

The shutdown over immigration

What happened: The next government shutdown came less than five years later, but this time, it centered on immigration. In January 2018, Republicans controlled the White House, Senate and House. But Senate Democrats filibustered the GOP’s proposed spending bill because it did not address the status of immigrants covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which then-President Trump had ended in 2017. As a result, the federal government partially shut down on Jan. 20. However, Democrats quickly dropped their filibuster after Republicans promised to consider an immigration bill. The government reopened on Jan. 22.

What Americans thought: More Americans blamed Democrats than in the previous three standoffs, but most still faulted Republicans. In an average of four polls7 conducted during the shutdown, 36 percent of Americans felt that Democrats in Congress were responsible for it, 34 percent felt that Trump was responsible and 16 percent felt that Republicans in Congress were responsible. 

However, the share that blamed Democrats (36 percent) versus the combined share that blamed Republicans (50 percent) was similar to Trump’s approval/disapproval ratings at the time (40 percent to 55 percent across those same four polls). So the public response broke down along partisan lines, and the national mood at the time was strongly Democratic-leaning. As a result, it didn’t significantly impact either party’s political fortunes. Trump’s approval rating in FiveThirtyEight’s average faltered by about 2 points8 between Jan. 17 and Jan. 23 but recovered to its old level by Feb. 3. And according to YouGov/The Economist, registered voters’ views of Democrats in Congress held steady at 36 percent favorable between Jan. 15 and Jan. 29. Democrats’ lead in the FiveThirtyEight generic congressional ballot polling average slipped less than 1 point9 during that span. However, according to Gallup, Congress’s approval rating did fall 5 points between January and February.

The longest shutdown in U.S. history

What happened: The most recent government shutdown was also fought over immigration, but this time, it took longer than three days to resolve. In December 2018, Republicans in Congress were well on their way to passing a spending bill when Trump announced he would not support it because it didn’t fund his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. House Republicans then passed a bill funding the wall, but Senate Democrats filibustered it. As a result, the government partially shut down on Dec. 22. 

Democrats took control of the House on Jan. 3, 2019 (when the winners of the 2018 election were seated), giving them more leverage. After 35 days of back-and-forth — the most protracted government shutdown in American history — Trump finally blinked. On Jan. 25, he signed a stopgap funding bill that ended the shutdown and kicked a decision on the border wall down the road.

What Americans thought: A majority of Americans agreed: This one was on Trump. According to a Morning Consult/Politico poll and a YouGov/The Economist poll conducted just after the shutdown ended, 52 percent of registered voters blamed Trump the most for the shutdown. His famously stable approval rating also sank by nearly 3 points10 between Dec. 21 and Jan. 25. 

While partisanship ensured that a significant minority of registered voters blamed Democrats in Congress (34 percent in the Morning Consult/Politico poll, 41 percent in YouGov/The Economist), if anything, they emerged from the shutdown more popular. According to YouGov/The Economist, their favorability rating increased by almost 2 points between Dec. 17 and Jan. 28. And Gallup found that Congress’s approval rating increased by 3 points between December and February.

Here in 2023, House Republicans have already made it clear that they will demand spending cuts, as they did in 2011, before raising the debt ceiling. And if history is any indication, Americans will see that as a reason to blame them for any ensuing chaos. 

But Americans may not penalize the GOP at the ballot box for it. That’s because the political effects of these crises are short-lived; there’s always another news cycle that replaces it. After the 2011 debt-ceiling fight, Obama’s approval rating eventually recovered the ground it had lost. After the 2013 shutdown, the troubled launch of healthcare.gov reversed Republicans’ slide on the generic congressional ballot; by December they were polling better than before the shutdown. And after the 2018-19 shutdown, Trump’s approval rating shot back up to pre-shutdown levels within a month. Though he eventually lost reelection, a few other things were going on in 2020 that might explain that better.

Ergo, events, dear reader, events will probably put the memory of 2023’s fiscal turbulence in the rearview mirror by the time of the 2024 election. But that doesn’t make public opinion surrounding the debate irrelevant — far from it. Impasses like 2013’s and 2019’s were likely broken because Republicans felt intense public pressure to give in. So while Republicans probably don’t need to worry about losing an election due to their hard line on spending, they still ought to fret about losing public support: It will make it harder for them to stand firm in the showdown to come.

Cleveland is one of the poorest cities in the country. It’s far from the expensive coastal cities like New York City and San Francisco, where astronomically high rents are common. Cleveland doesn’t fit the stereotype of a city people want to move to; in fact, it has been losing population since the 1950s. But since 2020, there have been some wild fluctuations in the rental market. Even in many cities that had previously been affordable, rents keep getting higher, stretching more families’ budgets and spreading a largely coastal problem to nearly every part of the country.

Even as the pandemic moves into a maintenance phase, Cleveland families are still getting sick, still struggling financially and still seeking help to find affordable housing and to pay their rents, said Julie Wisneski, director of the housing stability program at the United Way of Greater Cleveland. 

Most of her organization’s clients struggle to get by on low incomes, she said. When they can find places with rent that they can technically afford, those properties are usually in rough shape. “There’s lead paint, there’s broken windows, there’s broken … stairs, there’s plumbing issues,” she said. For Wisneski’s clients, being able to pay rent doesn’t do much good if the apartment is not a safe place to live. “The lack of affordable housing is so bad in Cleveland right now,” she said.

While rents for new leases measured by Zillow and other apartment listing sites finally began dropping nationwide at the end of 2022, the dip came only after a year of historic, nationwide rent increases throughout 2021. (The Consumer Price Index, which surveys a sample of landlords and renters and includes renewals, hasn’t shown a drop yet.) The effects of the COVID-19 lockdowns, intercity moves made at the beginning of the work-from-home era and record-high inflation made the long-standing problem of increasing rents all the worse. Today, rents remain much higher in many cities than they were before the pandemic, even in some cities that had previously been more affordable. Now, with the economy poised on the edge of a recession, the programs established during the pandemic to help families afford housing are expiring. 

In the years leading up to the pandemic, rents steadily increased nationwide by an average of about 4 percent year-over-year, according to Zillow data of the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas going back to 2015.1 It is worth mentioning, though, that while Zillow’s rent index is a frequently used metric for measuring changes in rent, data sets from apartment listing websites are not a perfect reflection of renters’ on-the-ground experiences, and companies like Zillow aren’t neutral observers of the rental market. Rent indexes by Zillow and others can differ greatly, largely because of rent inflation among new tenants instead of among renewing tenants, as described in this working paper by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That being said, the broad trends captured by Zillow’s index are mostly in line with other data sets.

At that pre-pandemic pace, rents had already been becoming more unaffordable for average families for decades. Then came COVID-19. At first, rents fell in many cities because people stayed home and delayed moves they might otherwise have made. But after the initial shocks wore off, mobility skyrocketed. People who’d delayed moves the previous year packed their bags, as did people who divorced or split from roommates they were sick of, young people who’d delayed leaving their parents’ homes and people who left expensive cities to get more space for less money elsewhere.

The pandemic “greatly increased the importance of home,” said Chris Herbert, managing director for the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. “For everyone who was living, working, studying from home, and much of your social life was home, the value of having a place to gather was that much more important.”

This trend hit some regions harder than others. Cities in the Mountain West, like Boise, Idaho, and Las Vegas, as well as those in the Sun Belt, like in Florida, saw huge rent spikes. Through summer 2021, rents in Boise and Las Vegas were roughly 20 percent to 26 percent higher than at the same points the previous year. Cape Coral, Florida, saw year-over-year rents swell 33 percent this past January, after months of climbing. And at the end of August 2021, Allentown, Pennsylvania, saw rent prices nearly 18 percent higher than 12 months earlier. Now some of these cities are seeing the biggest slowdowns in the rate of rent increases.

Florida has long been a popular state to move to, but that trend was amplified during the pandemic. In many cities in Florida, rents over the summer of 2021 increased by 20 to 30 percent over what they’d been at the same point in the previous year. 

The vacation-home market also boomed, pushing rents up in smaller resort communities, like Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and towns near ski resorts in Western states. Rents increased too much for low-wage workers and seasonal workers in those areas to afford.

But in cities like Cleveland, the rent increases swelled later. While they never reached the same heights as some of the biggest boom cities in 2021, their rises have lasted longer and are generally increasing less rapidly now. Toward the end of 2022, the year-over-year rent increases weren’t as high as earlier in the year: Rents in Louisville, Kentucky, still increased by 11.2 percent in November 2022, compared with 12 months earlier — a modest 0.1 percent less than during the previous month. Year-over-year rents in November also increased by 10.6 percent in Kansas City, Missouri, which was 0.3 percent less than in October; and they increased by 8.3 percent in Cleveland, which was 0.7 percent less.

It makes sense that some of these cities are not seeing rents fall as quickly, said Rob Warnock, a senior research associate at Apartment List, an online marketplace for listing apartments. “It didn’t experience the same dramatic run increases that like Florida did, and so now it’s the last part of the country that people are looking toward when they feel like they can go somewhere and get a deal.” 

The price increases in the indexes used by companies like Zillow and Apartment List are for new rental agreements, which means that the increases they capture hit new tenants harder. But they can impact existing tenants, too, by affecting their negotiating power with the current landlords or limiting their ability to move from a bad or unsuitable apartment, like the conditions Wisneski described.

These forces push the people struggling with very low-incomes into more and more marginal areas, said Josiah Quarles, the director of organizing and advocacy for the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless. Quarles works to organize tenant groups in Cleveland and says he’s had to stop working in some buildings because he believes they’re unsafe for tenants and his organizers. 

The rental data from Zillow doesn’t capture such complexities, and it can make rents seem more affordable than they truly are.

Some of the trends now affecting Quarles’s clients began during the housing crisis and the Great Recession, and then accelerated during the pandemic, he said. As he put it, investors would buy cheap housing stock in cities like Cleveland and rent it out at market rates without spending money on upkeep. “The large majority of the purchases on the east side of Cleveland are investor purchases,” he said. “So we’re seeing people … who are paying the same amount that they would have been paying five years ago for a place, except now the place is actually a condemned building.” He added that significant investments were being made on higher-end rental units, which has left people searching for the few affordable places to go.

In some cities, prices are still 30 percent higher than they were before the pandemic, Warnock says.  “[That is] certainly not something your average, everyday person can just absorb.”

If rents return to their pre-pandemic normal, we’ll still be in a situation that’s difficult for many families. In 2019, the percentage of renters who spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities — an “affordability” benchmark — was 46 percent, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. What’s new is that a growing number of middle-income renters are struggling to afford their housing costs as well. Between 2014 and 2019, the share of middle-class renters (i.e., those with incomes between $30,000 and $74,999) whose housing costs were higher than that benchmark rose 4 percentage points, to 41 percent. 

But even as more people in more places are struggling … there’s suddenly less support. Many of the COVID-19 relief programs have run out of money.

Some cities have tried to fill that gap. This past summer, the Cleveland City Council passed an ordinance that halts eviction proceedings if a tenant can come up with the full amount of back rent and any late fees by their court date. Voters in cities and states around the country passed rent stabilization ordinances, which prevent landlords from increasing rates more than a certain percentage on existing tenants. St. Petersburg, Florida, and some communities in Cape Cod and California are also trying to make it easier to build detached accessory dwelling units on existing properties, which could be rented out to single people or small families.

But those are piecemeal solutions to a fundamental problem that remains: There is not enough housing for people to live in, and it’s gotten more unaffordable for a wider swath of Americans. A recession, if it happens, would hit renters even harder, and more families are stuck in the rental market while interest rates remain high. It’s a big problem that’s been brewing nationwide for decades, just more visible now.

What a year 2022 has been. There was so … much … news. We saw record-high inflation, war in Ukraine, a landmark Supreme Court session, continuing effects of the pandemic, the Winter Olympics, the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the World Cup and, of course, the midterms. In typical FiveThirtyEight fashion, we’ve been reflecting on 2022 the way we do best: through numbers. Here, seven of our reporters share some of the most important stats of the year, highlighting big political decisions, feelings of the electorate and hints at what’s to come in 2023.

Poverty

In September, the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual supplemental poverty rate for the previous year. That’s the poverty rate after accounting for the impact of key government programs targeted at low-income families, among other things. For reporter and editor Santul Nerkar, the defining number of the year was 7.8 percent, the supplemental poverty rate for 2021 and lowest rate on record. It was the first concrete measure of how COVID-19 stimulus money effected poverty in America. 

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/us-poverty-rate-hit-record-low-expect-stay-95391465

Abortion

In June, the Supreme Court released its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. In short order, many states enacted abortion bans, including total bans without exceptions for rape or incest. For senior writer Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, the defining number of the year was 10,000 — that’s how many fewer legal abortions there were in just the first two months after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/number-captures-impact-dobbs-decision-fivethirtyeight-95627922

Forever Chemicals

Per- and polyfluorinated chemicals, or PFAS, are used in all sorts of household products, from nonstick pans to dental floss. These pervasive chemicals are dangerous to human health, and the government and industry are finally starting to crack down on them. That brings us to senior science reporter Maggie Koerth’s numbers of the year: four, the number of PFAS the EPA released new guidelines for, and 4,700, the rough number of different PFAS chemicals out there.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/epa-finally-addressing-4-dangerous-forever-chemicals-4000-95750270

Election Deniers

Denying the results of the 2020 presidential election was the cornerstone of many Republican campaigns this election cycle. Election denial is hardly a new thing, but it reached unprecedented levels in the 2022 midterms. That’s why 47 is the defining number of the year for politics and tech reporter Kaleigh Rogers. It’s the percentage of Republican candidates who ran for House, Senate, governor, secretary of state and attorney general this year and didn’t accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/number-election-denying-republicans-defined-2022-midterms-fivethirtyeight-95710927

Inflation

Heading into the midterm elections, Americans told pollsters that one issue was their top priority: the economy and inflation. For senior writer Monica Potts, the 9.1 percent inflation rate in June topped her list of most important stats of the year. Here she explores the ways — big and small — that historic levels of inflation affected American lives in 2022.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/inflations-41-year-high-impacted-american-life-fivethirtyeight-95850805

The Republican Margin In The House

The results of the 2022 election were worse for Republicans than one might expect, given that the president’s party usually loses ground in the midterms. In the U.S. House, Republicans gained a majority but only a slim one. They won by only nine seats, which for editor Maya Sweedler is one of the most important numbers of the year. What Republicans will — and won’t — be able to do with that majority will define American politics for at least the next two years.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/number-shape-republicans-politics-2023-fivethirtyeight-95905408

Democratic Trifectas

With Congress divided between Democrats and Republicans after the 2022 midterms, some of the most important political shifts of the next few years could be coming at the state level. Those new policies might lean liberal because, for the first time in 12 years, more Americans will live in states totally controlled by Democrats than by Republicans. That’s why senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich picked 140 million as his defining stat of the year. It’s the number of Americans who will soon be living in a state where Democrats will have total control over state government.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/140-million-americans-live-states-controlled-democrats-fivethirtyeight-95547189

Thanks for watching, reading and listening to FiveThirtyEight this year. We’ll see you in 2023!

This video is part of our series “The Numbers That Defined 2022.”

Transcript

One of the most important numbers of the year that you might not have heard of is 7.8 percent. That’s the share of Americans who were living in poverty in 2021, according to the most recent supplemental poverty rate, which was released by the U.S. Census Bureau in September of 2022. This metric, as opposed to the official poverty rate, captures how many people are living in poverty after accounting for the impact of key government programs targeted at low-income families.

During the pandemic, the government spent unprecedented funds to aid lower-income families. So this is one of the first clear measurements we have of how COVID stimulus influenced poverty in America. And 7.8 percent is, in fact, the lowest recorded poverty rate on record, since the Bureau started tracking this metric. Included in that figure is just 5.2 percent of American children who lived in poverty in 2021, a 46 percent drop from 2020 and also the lowest figure we’ve seen.

A lot of the drop in poverty can be ascribed to the government’s COVID-19 relief efforts in 2020 and 2021, including the expanded child tax credit, which helped significantly reduce child and overall poverty in America by giving low-income families with children extra cash. For all that we often talk about Congress not being able to legislate or being stuck in gridlock, it seems clear that it enjoyed one of the most unquestionable policy victories in recent U.S. history: lifting millions out of poverty.

But of course, it’s more complicated than that. For the same reasons that all that government aid helped reduce poverty, its absence will likely help bring poverty back. You can’t permanently solve poverty with a temporary influx of cash.

The last federal COVID stimulus checks went out all the way back in March of 2021, and the expanded child tax credit was phased out at the end of last year. By early this year, it appeared that child poverty was rising again, and many Americans reported not being able to pay for basic needs. Inflation is a part of that — and some would argue, spurred on by the extra stimulus. And now, rising interest rates — and the fear of a recession — also loom large for lower-income families.

So while just 7.8 percent of Americans living in poverty counts as a policy victory, expect that number to be higher next year.

Additional information about the SPM chart: The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) estimates for 2019 and beyond reflect the implementation of revised SPM methodology; more information is available in “Poverty in the United States: 2021” report from the US Census Bureau, Appendix B. The data for 2017 and beyond reflect the implementation of an updated processing system. The data for 2013 and beyond reflect the implementation of redesigned income questions.

When President Biden signed a bill to prevent a rail-worker strike this past Friday, it was only the latest in a series of union actions that have gotten national attention in the past few years. Starbucks and Amazon workers are trying to unionize around the country. Nationwide, 78,000 workers went on strike in the first half of the year. Members of The New York Times Guild walked out on Thursday.

The National Labor Relations Board reported a 57 percent increase in the number of union elections in the first half of the 2022 fiscal year — Oct. 1, 2021, through March 31 this year — and unions are winning more than three quarters of their votes. And the share of Americans who support unions, 71 percent, is at the highest level since 1965, according to Gallup. After a decades-long slump, organized labor is on the upswing. 

Some of this undoubtedly results from the tumult in workplaces throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. First, essential workers who couldn’t stay home banded together to demand more safety measures in the months when the virus was new and vaccines weren’t yet available. Then, as workplaces and the country began reopening, unemployment plummeted and has stayed low. Despite some recent mass layoffs, especially in tech and journalism, the labor market is so far mostly defying fears of a recession and ignoring the Federal Reserve’s efforts to tame it. That has put workers in a relatively powerful position, at least up to now.

Workers have recently undertaken everything from work stoppages to strikes for better pay and working conditions, according to data from the IRL Worker Institute at Cornell University. The institute has seen a “noticeable uptick” in union activity this year compared with the previous year, according to Johnnie Kallas, a Ph.D. candidate who is the project director of the IRL Worker Institute’s Labor Action Tracker. But it’s hard to know how that compares with the past. Because of budget cuts in the Reagan era, the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped tracking all but the biggest labor actions. It’s also unclear if recent labor actions will translate into long-term change for workplaces, unions and the workers they represent.

For most of the time since the 1930s, a majority of Americans have favored labor unions, but support began to decline in the 1960s, dropping from 71 percent in 1965 to 55 percent by 1979. After a slight increase, Americans’ support of unions hit a low of 48 percent in 2009. The share of private-sector workers in unions also declined steadily since the 1980s. This was caused by a multitude of political and economic factors — industrial deregulation, the rise of anti-union politicians, increasing globalization — but American workplaces also fundamentally changed. Employment opportunities moved from traditionally organized workplaces, like factories, into a service industry where union density was already lower. Many workers unionizing today are making coffee instead of cars, and issues like high turnover and irregular worker schedules in those industries led to job instability.

Support for unions today is also divided along partisan lines: Sixty-five percent of Democrats and 43 percent of independents support unions, while a plurality of Republicans (47 percent) oppose them, according to CivicScience. That being said, a majority of Americans think that whether to unionize should be entirely the workers’ choice and that employers should stay neutral.

And despite the partisanship, Americans largely favor the kinds of worker protections and benefits unions fight for. In general, Americans think businesses should treat workers with respect, pay fair wages and provide health care benefits. Sixty-two percent of Americans support a $15 federal minimum wage, and three-quarters of Americans think the current federal minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, is too low. Americans strongly support paid family and medical leave, a sticking point in the rail-worker negotiations. While the pandemic led to more states and cities mandating paid sick leave and 79 percent of civilian workers had paid leave available to them as of March 2021, the workers least likely to have it are the lowest paid. 

But all of that general support didn’t carry over to the specific case of the rail workers and their requests for paid sick leave to be included in their contract. CivicScience found that 68 percent of Americans approve of Biden blocking the rail strike. A poll from The Economist/YouGov conducted Dec. 3-6 found that 56 percent of Americans approve of government action to avoid a strike that could harm the American economy, suggesting that supply-chain concerns in the middle of the holiday shopping season might have outweighed sympathy to the rail workers’ demands. But rail workers have warned that more disgruntled employees could bail on an industry that is already understaffed. That has been the overall story of how workers in all kinds of industries have flexed their power in the labor market over the past few years, whether or not they personally have a union to back them up. If conditions and pay at one job don’t meet workers’ expectations, many have had an easier time finding a job that does.

Other polling bites

Americans are more likely than citizens of other countries to be wary of social media’s role in politics, according to polling conducted in 19 different nations and recently published by Pew Research Center. Sixty-four percent of Americans said that social media has had a negative impact on democracy — a percentage higher than that of any other country surveyed, which ranged from 54 percent in the Netherlands down to 15 percent in Poland. Despite their concerns about social media, Americans’ usage has risen over the past ten years: Seventy-two percent of American adults use such sites today, versus just 50 percent in 2012. All in all, this is not so different from places where social media is viewed as less threatening to democracy. Sixty-six percent of Polish citizens, for example, use social media now, up from 40 percent a decade ago. (In 2012, Pew asked the social-media-usage question only of people who first reported they used the internet, whereas in 2022 that question was asked of all respondents.)Americans were more confident that their 2022 midterm-election ballot was counted accurately than they were that their 2020 presidential-election ballot was, per Nov. 17-21 polling from Navigator Research. Sixty percent of Americans believed their 2020 ballots were counted correctly and fairly, versus 71 percent who said the same about 2022. The level of confidence reported by Democrats and independents remained virtually the same across the two elections, but the same did not hold true for Republicans: While only 31 percent felt their 2020 ballot was correctly counted, nearly double (58 percent) voiced the same about their 2022 ballot.Gun ownership in America varies widely by gender, according to recently released Gallup polling. Just 22 percent of American women reported personally owning a gun, but that rate is nearly double among men (43 percent). Men’s gun ownership levels have remained fairly consistent since 2007, according to annual surveys from Gallup, while the number among women has risen slightly from 13 percent in the organization’s first poll on the matter, conducted in 2007-2008. A Nov. 18-22 survey from Data For Progress found that more than two-thirds of Americans (69 percent) were at least somewhat worried climate change will lead to higher consumer prices in the future. High numbers of Democrats were worried about the impact of climate change on prices (82 percent), but 56 percent of Republicans also share these concerns. That said, there’s less consensus on what to do about it. Almost half of Democrats (45 percent), for example, said that renewable energy production will bring down energy costs “a lot,” yet only 12 percent of Republicans were on the same page.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,1 42.1 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 52.6 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -10.5 points). At this time last week, 41.4 percent approved and 53.2 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -11.7 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 41.4 percent and a disapproval rating of 53.5 percent, for a net approval rating of -12.1 points.