It’s difficult to overstate how unpopular President Donald Trump’s agenda is right now. On most key items and issues, it’s even more unpopular than the already unpopular president.
For example: A new CNN poll released Wednesday showed Americans opposed Trump’s signature new domestic policy law by a 22-point margin. That makes it perhaps the most disliked major new law in decades.
Of course, Congress still passed it. To the political credit of Trump and those around him, they are getting their agenda across the line, in large part because Republicans are afraid of his wrath.
But the way they are doing it only reinforces how fraught Trump’s proposals are. Despite Republicans expanding their Senate majority to a more comfortable 53-47 edge in the 2024 election, they’ve relied on tie-breaking votes from Vice President JD Vance in a historic way.
In fact, Vance is on pace to nearly double the current record for tie-breaking votes in a four-year period.
And he’s been called on to break ties on major votes much more often than his predecessors – even as his nearest competitors generally had smaller majorities.
Put more simply: It’s not unheard of for a vice president, who serves as president of the Senate, to break a tie. But it’s never been this frequent. It’s usually on smaller items. And it’s usually because the party in power had fewer votes to spare.
Vance has broken ties five times this month alone, split across two legislative efforts: Trump’s agenda bill two weeks ago and a “rescissions” package Tuesday, which is an effort to codify some of the spending cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency.
Despite seemingly going for the lowest-hanging fruit and moving to codify only a small portion of the DOGE cuts – about $9 billion, which is a drop in the bucket in the federal budget – Republicans are still dealing with significant defections and struggling to get it passed.
Earlier this year, Vance was called upon to break ties to defeat a bipartisan rebuke of Trump’s tariffs and to confirm Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Those seven votes put Vance on pace for 58 tie-breaking votes in Trump’s second term if he continues to break ties at the rate he has so far. That would be far more than the record of 33 set by Kamala Harris between 2021 and 2025, according to the Senate Historian.
If Vance is called upon to break another tie to pass the rescissions package Wednesday evening – which seems possible – he will be on pace to exactly double Harris’ record with 66 tie-breakers.
Vance’s pace would also blow away other recent presidents. Mike Pence broke just 13 ties in the first Trump administration. Dick Cheney broke eight in eight years under Georgie W. Bush. Al Gore only broke four in eight years under Bill Clinton. Then-Vice President Joe Biden didn’t have to break a single tie in eight years under Barack Obama, nor did Dan Quayle break any ties in George H.W. Bush’s four years.
But even the comparison between Vance and Harris isn’t really apples-to-apples. That’s because the largest Senate majority Democrats had on her watch was 51-49. The Senate was actually tied 50-50 for about half of the Biden-Harris administration, meaning they had much less room for error – and still required fewer tie-breakers.
The vast majority of the ties she broke were also on smaller-ticket votes. Twenty-seven of the 33 votes were on nominations for judges or other, lower-level positions – none of them as high-profile as a secretary of defense.
The major votes she had to break ties on were the Covid stimulus bill and the Inflation Reduction Act – both when the Senate was split 50-50.
The biggest items Pence had to break ties on were Betsy Devos’ nomination as education secretary and some procedural and amendment votes on Trump’s health care and tax cut packages – all when Republicans had just a 51-49 Senate majority.
To find a major tie-breaker before that, you have to go back to Cheney two decades ago. He had to break ties on tax-related legislation in 2001 and 2003, as well as on a deficit-cutting bill in 2005.
Of all these votes, only Cheney’s 2005 tie-breaker came when the party in power had as big a majority as Trump and Vance do now. The GOP at the time had 55 seats, but lost the votes of five more moderate members.
But that’s becoming the norm in the second Trump administration. On major votes, we’re basically seeing as many Republicans vote against it as possible, without defeating the bill.
The administration not only has no interest in bipartisanship, but it’s pursuing items that don’t even unify congressional Republicans – and often has to scrounge to win enough votes because of that.
It has gotten there. But it’s not exactly a sign of political strength that Republicans don’t feel comfortable voting yes.
The result: It looks like Vance will be quite busy in the coming months and years. Indeed, the former Ohio senator apparently had to leave the Senate to cast his most important votes in the Senate.
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