As usual, the press gets it wrong.
News reports of Nancy’s Pelosi’s 203-vote victory in her caucus yesterday all come with the disclaimer that she still “must” win 218 votes on the House floor.
No.
Under house rules, the Speaker is elected by a majority of votes cast. That’s only the same as 218 votes if everybody votes.
That won’t happen.
If all the 32 dissenters were to abstain and everyone else were to vote for their respective party leaders, Pelosi would win the election 203-200 and become Speaker.
That won’t happen either, but it illustrates how votes are counted and suggests what might happen next.
If 5 abstain, Pelosi needs 215 votes, not 2018. If 10 do, it’s 213, 10 more than she has already. If the number is 20 abstentions, she only needs 5 additional votes.
What’s next?
If you are one of the 32 members of the House who is disinclined, for whatever reason, to vote for Pelosi, you have many options:
- Cite your vote against her in the Caucus as fulfilling any pledges you may have made and vote for her in January,
- Change your vote in return for concessions, real or pretended, that benefit your district,
- Vote for Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy,
- Vote for SETH MOULTON or other candidate to be named later,
- Abstain from voting.
I don’t put anything past Moulton at this point, but despite this headline I would be genuinely shocked if any House Democrat were to (3) vote for McCarthy.
Casting a (4) dark-horse ballot is, presumably, the stratagem of choice for the #fivewhiteguys and fellow travelers, since if enough of them do it there would be no winner and the balloting would go into subsequent rounds. Profit! Or something.
But for at least some of the 32, who do not want to cripple the party at an exceedingly dangerous point in the life of the nation, abstaining (5) will be the move of choice.
And I expect some of the 32 to chose (1) or (2). So, Pelosi does not need 2018 to win, and she probably has more than 203 votes already.
The underpants-gnome strategy of Moulton and the rest of the anti-old-woman caucus is to deprive Pelosi of a majority on every round of voting so that she is forced to withdraw (whereupon ?/profit). But it is more likely that some of this group, facing pressure and having both (a) satisfied any pledges and (b) (in some cases) embarrassed themselves, would peal off in subsequent voting rounds.
That is, change their vote to Pelosi or abstain, changing the math.
By the Numbers
Let’s start with the 203 votes that Pelosi got in the caucus. If the 200 Republicans vote en bloc for McCarthy, which is normal and expected, and she picks up no more votes, then it would only take 3 Democratic votes cast for other candidates to deny her a win (and force a second round). There would be 406 votes cast (Peolsi 203, McCarthy 200, Moulton 3), so that Pelosi’s 203 votes would be exactly half–but not a majority.
More likely, though, she will get additional votes from (1) and (2) above, with the opportunity to get still more in round 2 of balloting, should it come to that. The more cohesive the (3) block is, the more pressure there will be on other dissenters to take options (1) or (2). The wind is really at her back.
To absolutely deny Pelosi the speakership, the “not this particular woman” crowd would need to muster and retain 18 solid votes for someone else, which could be multiple candidates.
Each of the dissenters could vote for him or her self, which would be fitting.
For a group that has no end-game, no candidate, no vision, and leadership that is feckless at best, I think 18 votes is really unlikely.
But those are the numbers to watch.
Brilliant analysis, Trickle up. Thank you for laying it out there.
“Diversity is our strength. Unity is our power.” Speaker nominee Nancy Pelosi
Pelosi diversity pledge in action, not words. Yesterday, the Democratic Caucus unanimously elected Congresswoman -elect Sharice Davids (KS-03) to the leadership position of Regional Whip. She is one of the first two Native American women to serve in Congress and is the first open LGBTQ member of the Kansas delegation.
I think this is wonderful and you did a good job, Trickleup.. as far as it goes. I remain confused however, and I have some questions… mostly because, as you note first, the press often gets it wrong.
1) I can’t find anywhere to confirm the final numbers. What’s the final tally of Democrats in the 116th Congress? Some say 235… but I’ve seen here the vote tally as 203 yea, 32 no, 3 blanks and one absent, which adds up to 239. And, to be frank, with all the late spade of counts and concessions it’s hard to keep track.
B) This vote has been portrayed as the ‘Democratic Caucus’ which, to my understanding, is defined as all the members currently serving in the 115th Congress… and which would, it seems to me, exclude all Representatives-elect… Those who will constitute the 116th Congress and who haven’t yet been sworn in. . and therefore can’t vote in Congress. And, there aren’t 235 Democratic representatives in the 115th Congress.
Thank you, petr. Your points are well taken.
i) My understanding is that the “caucus” that met to elect leadership for the next Congress comprises indeed the elected Dem. members of that Congress. As you point out, the numbers reported would not make sense otherwise.
However, none of the reporting I have seen is clear on that point.
• The dust has still not settled in some of the districts, but it’s looking like there will be 235 Democrats and 200 Republicans in the next Congress. That happens to be what I assume above, though I could just as easily have gotten it wrong (and things could change).
Also as I recall there has been one Democrat who was officially elected since the Caucus who declared himself for Pelosi.
So her position is marginally better. I suspect it will continue to improve.
Unless the D/R split changes, the numbers I gave are essentially correct. What we don’t know how is many abstentions and how many additional votes for Pelosi there are, and that will tell the tale.
Presumably she has a pretty good idea.
I think this is correct but adequate journalistic confirmation seems hard to come by.
If this the case then, it seems to me, this is a private vote amongst fellow Democrats who will one day do something public together and, as such, isn’t likely to be legally binding.
But the wider point is(and you make it): it will be politically binding and that future changes (either to the make up of the congress or any as-yet unmade up minds in the caucus) is likely to redound to the good for Pelosi.
Since these are not formal legislative actions and just those of the party caucus, that body does not have to wait to be sworn in in order to meet. It is the Representatives-elect of that party that meet to determine leadership (and remember since the House is completely reconstituted each biennium even incumbents are technically Representatives-elect as far as the 116th Congress is concerned) while the full Speakership vote must wait until the new House is convened by the Clerk, the only officer who manifests continuity. This also means that any members of the 115th Congress who were not re-elected do not participate in these votes.
We all know how it is supposed to work in the abstract, Christopher. But you are being as sloppy as the reporters since you use ‘caucus’ as interchangeably as they. The questions I had resulted from the reporting of it, or the lack thereof: Representatives-elect are, technically, not part of the ‘Democratic Caucus.’ Which journalistic fail did not distinguish, as you later did, so the resulting stories appeared to describe a ‘quantum’ vote… Schroedingers congress, if you will… suggesting the vote to be both legislatively valid and not legislatively valid.
As with quantum physics, applied scrutiny clarifies things accordingly… and, at least as regards your point of view in the other thread, I don’t think this is sufficient for J. Random Representative -elect to allow ‘ those folks can go home and say they voted against her in caucus and now get on board,’ since they are not yet truly a part of the caucus. I think this is just a group of people who are, at the moment, bound by nothing but party affiliation, saying how they will act when they are legislatively bound together.
I’m reminded of the several Massachusetts representatives who, years ago, very publicly voted to impose federal restraints on abortion when they knew full well that those constraints could never be become law (either because they never had enough votes or because they were clearly unconstitutional).
The venerable pattern was to point to those votes while appearing before pro-life audiences and point to the impossibility of them taking effect while appearing before pro-choice audiences.
It’s another example of why so many people have such contempt for elected officials.
I’m not using anything interchangeably. We know, with the exception of a couple of uncalled races, who constitutes the Democratic caucus of the 116th Congress, which membership is of course different (and bigger!) than the Democratic caucus of the 115th Congress. During the lame duck period both exist simultaneously though the 116th probably has a lot more to do. For them to get organized ahead of the general election for Speaker is no different or less valid than the parties organizing national conventions to nominate a candidate for President ahead of the actual election in November.
Maybe I should have just expressed it mathematically.
The number of votes M that Nancy Pelosi will need to be speaker is a function of the number of votes cast. That function is the following value rounded up to the next whole integer:
where H is half the number of votes cast
and A is the number of vacant seats plus the number of other ballots not cast (due to absence, abstention, etc.)
M is 218 for only two values of A, 0 and 1. I’ll bet there will be more than that.
To answer petr’s second question, this function is correct no matter how many Ds and Rs there are.
Point 1 is due to the presence of non-member delegates in the Democratic caucus. The four extra votes are from those delegates who caucus with the Democrats (and to whom the caucus grants voting rights for caucus business) but who do not have a vote for Speaker on the House floor. This complicates the math cited a bit.