Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:
Yes, I think a lot of this was people feeling, especially on the House side, that they had been caught off guard, right, that there was an agreement that they were going in this together.
Hakeem Jeffries on the House side kept all but one of his members voting no. Fundamentally, I think Schumer’s biggest challenge at this moment is that he’s fighting the last war. And you could hear it in this interview, which is, he’s citing examples from 2006 and 2018, when there was also a trifecta of Republican governors, a governorship, right, a Republican president and Republicans in control of Congress, and that the same strategies that worked then are going to work now.
The major difference, even with 2017, is that the Republican Party is so much more unified behind Donald Trump, and he is so much more popular in the districts and states where these members come from. So I think his fundamental misreading of the moment, of this just specific moment of this government funding bill was that he thought, as did I think many House Democrats, that the speaker would be unable to keep everybody in line, because, again, in the past, in the last wars, they weren’t able to do that, and Johnson only had a one-seat margin.
Well, he did it. And I think that is the theory that they need to be playing now going forward, which is, these Republicans are not going to split away from Donald Trump. And that is hard. And that’s to tell your voters that, even if all of our people stick together and all of their people stick together, it’s not going to work.