Krugman in his newsletter on why McConnell is so sure that his play on the debt ceiling won’t blow back on him:
It has long been clear that voters are far less informed about parties’ policy actions than we’d like to imagine, even when those policies touch their lives directly. Earlier this year most Americans received stimulus checks thanks to the American Rescue Plan, which was enacted by Democrats on a straight party-line vote. Yet a poll of rural voters found that only half gave Democrats credit for those checks; a third credited Republicans, not one of whom supported the plan.
So what do voters respond to? In general, they tend to support the incumbent party when things are going well, oppose it if things are going badly — even if the positive or negative events have no conceivable relationship to that party’s actions.
The political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels like to use the example of the 1916 election, which was much closer than most people expected; in particular, Woodrow Wilson lost his home state of New Jersey. Why? Achen and Bartels make a compelling case that one major factor was the panic created by a wave of shark attacks along New Jersey’s beaches. Whatever you think of Wilson, he wasn’t responsible for those sharks. But voters blamed him anyway.
More prosaically, many presidential contests turn on how the economy was doing in the few quarters before the election, even though presidents usually have relatively little influence on short-term economic developments, certainly as compared with the Federal Reserve. When people voted against Jimmy Carter, they were really voting against Paul Volcker, the Fed chairman at the time, who pushed the economy into recession to curb inflation — but they didn’t know that.
Of course, retrospective voting isn’t new. What is new is the complete ruthlessness of the modern Republican Party, which is single-mindedly focused on regaining power, never mind the consequences for the rest of the country.
So ask yourself: If a party doesn’t care about the state of the nation when the other party is in power, and it knows that its opposition suffers when bad things happen, what is its optimal political strategy? The answer, obviously, is that it should do what it can to make bad things happen.
Sometimes the sabotage strategy is almost naked. Consider Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida. DeSantis has done everything he can to prevent an effective response to the latest pandemic wave — trying to block mask and vaccine requirements, even by private businesses. Yet this hasn’t stopped him from blaming President Biden for failing to end Covid.
And now comes the debt crisis. Nobody has ever accused McConnell of being stupid. He knows quite well just how disastrous failing to raise the debt limit could be. But the disaster would occur on Biden’s watch. And from his point of view, that’s all good.
That is correct.
But you will notice that McConnell has said that they will vote to fund the government separately:
Speaking before the vote Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., reiterated that Republicans would vote for a short-term funding bill that does not raise the debt ceiling.
Government shutdowns do not go well for Republicans. I suspect that’s because everyone knows they are the ones who are hostile to government so most people just assume they are the ones who want to shut it down. He’s wary of that. But anything else he’s more than happy to blame Biden for and then happily run on Democratic failure.