A Republican Spending Problem

As congressional Republicans prepare for a budget showdown later this year with President Biden, they say that they will insist on large cuts to federal spending. So far, though, they have left out some pretty important details: what those cuts might be.

Republicans have been more willing to talk about what they won’t cut. Party leaders have promised not to touch Medicare and Social Security. Republicans generally oppose reductions in military spending and veterans’ benefits. And neither party can do anything about interest payments on the debt that the government has already accumulated. Combined, these categories make up almost two-thirds of federal government spending.

The largest remaining category involves health care spending that benefits lower- and middle-income families, including from Medicaid and Obamacare. Hard-right Republicans, like some in the Freedom Caucus, have signaled they will propose reductions to these programs. Party leaders, for their part, have said they would eye cuts to anti-poverty programs such as food stamps.

But cuts like these would have a big potential downside for Republicans: The partisan shifts of recent years mean that Republican voters now benefit from these redistributive programs even more than Democratic voters do.

As The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein recently wrote, “The escalating confrontation between the parties over the federal budget rests on a fundamental paradox: The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now more likely than Democrats to represent districts filled with older and lower-income voters who rely on the social programs that the G.O.P. wants to cut.”

Almost 70 percent of House Republicans represent districts where the median income is lower than the national median, according to researchers at the University of Southern California. By contrast, about 60 percent of House Democrats represent districts more affluent than the median.

The politics of class, as Brownstein puts it, have been inverted.

Upside down

I’ve written before about the tensions that this inversion has created for Democrats. The party increasingly reflects the views of upper-income professionals who tend to be more liberal on social issues than most swing voters. Today’s left is less religious and patriotic than the country as a whole and less concerned about crime and border security. The left is more focused on differences among Americans, especially by race, gender and sexuality, than on what Americans have in common.

This shift has been happening for a long time, but it has accelerated in the past decade. “The new left is very conscious of identity,” my colleague Nate Cohn wrote last week. “Obama-era liberals tended to emphasize the commonalities between groups and downplayed longstanding racial, religious and partisan divisions.” (In that article, Nate make a thoughtful attempt to define “woke.”)

These developments have created challenges for the Democratic Party. It has continued to lose working-class white voters and recently lost some Latino and Asian American voters. Biden and his aides spend considerable time thinking about these problems, and he has tried to take a less elitist approach. Democrats don’t “pay nearly as much attention to working-class folks as we used to,” he has said.

But the new class dynamic also creates challenges for the Republican Party. For decades, it was the party that skewed affluent. It still had to manage the differences between its higher-income voters and its evangelical voters, but Republicans were mostly comfortable pushing for lower taxes and smaller government (other than the military). Paul Ryan, the former House speaker, embodied this outlook.

Donald Trump was able to engineer a hostile takeover of the party in 2016 partly because he recognized that many Republican voters had no interest in Ryan-style cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Trump promised to protect those programs and, unlike most Republican politicians, criticized trade deals. These positions helped him win the nomination and then the general election, as Matthew Yglesias of Substack has argued. In the 2024 Republican campaign, Trump is already using a similar strategy.

While Trump was president, however, he mostly did not govern as a populist. He acted more like a President Paul Ryan might have, cutting taxes on corporations and the affluent while trying to shrink Medicaid and repeal Obamacare. Those Trump policies weren’t popular. They contributed to the Republican Party’s huge losses in the 2018 midterms and probably hurt Trump’s re-election campaign too.

Polls show that even many Republican voters oppose cuts to government health care programs. The same message is evident in the outcome of state-level ballot initiatives: Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Utah have all voted to expand Medicaid.

The G.O.P. dilemma

The Republican Party has not yet figured out a solution to this problem. If the party were guided solely by public opinion, it might put together an agenda that was well to the right of the Democratic Party on social issues while also calling for higher taxes on the rich. “There is quite a bit of economically populist appetite even among Republicans for raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations,” Bryan Bennett, who oversees polling at the Hub Project, a progressive group, told The Atlantic.

But the Republican Party retains enough of its wealthy base that it remains staunchly opposed to tax increases. Instead, Republicans say that the solution to the budget deficit involves less spending. But the specific cuts that they have talked about so far — like calls to reduce Medicaid and food stamps — don’t come close to balancing the budget. Other Republicans have talked about reducing the “woke bureaucracy,” but it is not clear what that would entail.

“The math doesn’t actually work,” my colleague Catie Edmondson, who covers Congress, said. “This is such a dilemma for Republicans.”

Adding to the challenge for Kevin McCarthy, the speaker, is the slim Republican House majority. McCarthy can lose only four votes and still pass a bill without Democratic support. “It is very hard to envision a Republican budget that can satisfy the Freedom Caucus and still get votes from Republicans in swing districts,” Carl Hulse, The Times’s chief Washington correspondent, told me.

What’s next: Sometime this summer or fall, the U.S. government is likely to reach its debt limit. To avoid defaulting on debt payments — and risking a financial crisis — Congress will need to raise the limit before then, and Republicans say they will insist on cuts as part of a deal.

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A return: LeBron James came off the bench in the Lakers’ loss yesterday, his first action since Feb. 26.

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When video game developers remake games, they have to appeal to both new players and those hoping to relive a favorite. For horror games, there’s an added challenge: Can you scare someone twice?

In a new version of the 2005 classic Resident Evil 4, developers made the zombie enemies faster and smarter and added elements to surprise even those who had memorized the original. The goal, said Yasuhiro Ampo, the game’s director, was “to create that same feeling from when people played these games for the first time.”

Review: “Newcomers have a chance to understand what the fuss was all about, and the rest of us jump in a time machine,” Patrick Klepek writes at Vice.

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