Morning Distribution for Monday, August 30, 2021

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Morning Distribution]( Monday, August 30, 2021 Your daily briefing from FiveThirtyEight --------------------------------------------------------------- The Morning Story [House Returns From Recess To Consider Infrastructure And Reconciliation Bills]( [What Drove 9 Moderate House Democrats To Hold Up Their Party’s Agenda?]( By [Nathaniel Rakich]( With Democrats clinging to just an [eight-seat majority]( in the House of Representatives, even a small number of defectors can hold up the party’s legislative agenda. That reality was on vivid display last week, when nine moderate Democrats [threatened to vote no]( on moving forward with Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget resolution unless the House first voted to pass the Senate’s bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure package. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi eventually [struck a deal with the bloc]( and the budget resolution passed on a party-line vote, but this will probably not be the last we hear of the “Moderate Nine.” So let’s get to know these fairly anonymous members of Congress a little bit better by exploring three key questions. First, do they have a long track record of moderation, or did their objection to the budget come as a surprise? Second, are they tacking toward the center for electoral reasons, or are they acting out of principle? And finally, might any of them be vulnerable to progressive primary challenges in 2022? First of all, these were the members of Congress you would by and large expect to balk at ambitious progressive legislation. Eight of the nine are members of the [Blue Dog Coalition]( a caucus of centrist Democrats. And they mostly have moderate voting records, too. According to the first dimension of [DW-Nominate]( which uses voting records to quantify the ideology of every member of Congress on a scale from 1 (most conservative) to -1 (most liberal), seven of the nine have ideology scores of -0.254 or closer to zero. That places them among the top 32 most conservative Democrats in the House. In fact, one of them — Rep. Jared Golden — is the single most conservative Democrat in the House according to DW-Nominate, with a score of -0.112. And Rep. Josh Gottheimer, the Moderate Nine’s unofficial ringleader, is the third-most conservative, with a score of -0.147. [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [500 Home Runs Is A Lot Of Home Runs]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.