FiveThirtyEight’s top stories this week

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Popular This Week] Sunday, April 2, 2017 [1. The Two Cracks In The Republican Party]( Donald Trump promised to come to Washington and get government working again. But the stunning failure of President Trump and Paul Ryan’s first legislative priority, the American Health Care Act, reveals that he underestimated a unique fracture of the modern Republican Party. Yes, moderate and very conservative Republicans were against the AHCA for very different reasons, making it difficult to find common ground. But there was also a second fissure that helped to take down the American Health Care Act. It was the same one that took down Eric Cantor and John Boehner and that has bedeviled government for years. Call it establishment versus anti-establishment, or belief in governance versus political purity, or fidelity to ideology over party, or more simply: the beliefs of the Freedom Caucus. [Read more]( [2. Trump Doesn’t Have A Mandate For Paul Ryan’s Agenda]( There were so many reasons for the failure of the Republicans’ health care bill — and its failure was so spectacular — that it’s hard to tell which ones mattered most. The bill was poorly drafted and lacked buy-in from key Republican stakeholders. President Trump’s boardroom negotiating tactics didn’t translate well to the halls of Congress. The House Freedom Caucus was intransigent; it represents a new axis of conflict within the GOP, and House Speaker Paul Ryan didn’t have a good plan for handling it. [Read more]( [3. Tom Perriello Is Not Bernie Sanders]( [Read more]( [4. Yes, It’s Strange That Colin Kaepernick Doesn’t Have A Deal Yet]( Three weeks into the NFL’s free-agency period, Colin Kaepernick still doesn’t have a job. Ordinarily, an NFL veteran who is having difficulty finding a team isn’t exactly newsworthy. But NFL talent is scarce at quarterback, and Kaepernick’s situation is far from ordinary. [Read more]( [5. The AL East Won’t Be About The Yankees-Red Sox Rivalry This Year]( In honor of the 2017 Major League Baseball season, which starts April 2, FiveThirtyEight is assembling some of our favorite baseball writers to chat about what’s ahead. Today, we focus on the American League East with Sports Illustrated senior baseball editor Emma Span and ESPN.com baseball writer Dan Szymborski. The transcript below has been edited. [Read more]( [6. Trump Is Beating Previous Presidents At Being Unpopular]( President Trump reached a new low on FiveThirtyEight’s job-approval tracker this week, when his approval rating hit 41.3 percent. It’s a low for Trump, but how good or bad is a 41 percent approval rating two months into a president’s tenure in historical terms? To help put Trump’s ratings in perspective, we’ve added a new section to our tracker: Charts for each of the previous 12 presidents, showing approval, disapproval and net approval ratings compared with Trump’s at the same point in their presidencies. [Read more]( [7. The Cavs Might Actually Be In Trouble]( After making six straight NBA Finals, LeBron James and his teams have earned the benefit of the doubt when they hit a rough patch. His Heat and Cavaliers teams have shown they can turn things around in a hurry, almost as if all they needed to do is flip a switch to revert to their dominant selves. [Read more]( [8. Is The Home Run Back? Will The Shift Ever Die? And 8 More Burning Baseball Questions]( [Read more]( [9. What Should Trump Do Next?]( In this week’s politics chat, we debate what the Trump administration should focus on next, now that its health care reform push has fallen apart. [Read more]( [10. Should The Freedom Caucus Be Afraid Of Donald Trump?]( President Trump, apparently still frustrated by the opposition from the House Freedom Caucus that helped doom the GOP’s health care bill, threatened to “fight them ... in 2018.” In one of his tweets, he specifically blamed three members of the Freedom Caucus: Ohio’s Jim Jordan, Idaho’s Raul Labrador and North Carolina’s Mark Meadows, the caucus’s chairman. [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Politics Podcast: Live From Boise]( Lastly, The Riddler Edited by Oliver Roeder A sunny al fresco puzzle: On a lovely spring day, you and I agree to meet for a lunch picnic at the fountain in the center of our favorite park. We agree that we’ll each arrive sometime from noon and 1 p.m., and that whoever arrives first will wait up to 15 minutes for the other. If the other person doesn’t show by then, the first person will abandon the plans and spend the day with a more punctual friend. If we both arrive at the fountain at an independently random time between noon and 1, what are the chances our picnic actually happens? [Solve it!]( [FiveThirtyEight] [ESPN]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 147 Columbus Avenue, New York, NY 10023.