Fox News Reporter Botches Speaker Math With Convoluted Claim that McCarthy Ally’s Absence Somehow Helps Him

Fox News senior congressional correspondent Chad Pergram engaged in some curious logic Thursday afternoon with his calculations for the math in the Speaker’s race, making the claim that the pending absence of one of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) allies could somehow help him in his increasingly messy quest to claim the gavel.

McCarthy has lost nine…no, wait, 10…it might be 592 when you read this…let’s just say “a heckuva lot of”…attempts to convince his fellow House members to elect him Speaker. So far, despite the Californian’s best efforts, he has failed to win over any of the Republicans voting against him, and actually lost two votes between the second and third rounds of voting, as Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) switched her vote from McCarthy to “present” and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) switched from McCarthy to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) to himself after some of the McCarthy opponents started voting for him.

With all 212 House Democrats voting for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the vote breakdown the last few rounds has been 200 for McCarthy, 20 for another Republican, and one voting present.

If all 435 members of Congress cast a ballot, it takes 218 votes to reach the required 50%+1 majority to elect a speaker. The GOP holds the House with a slim majority with 222 seats, meaning that McCarthy can only afford to lose four Republican votes.

So let’s try to decipher what Pergram meant on Thursday’s episode of Your World With Neil Cavuto when he told the Fox News audience that Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) had to go home and that absence of another ally could somehow help McCarthy:

There’s been a little bit of a development here. Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado, I just spoke to him on the phone. He is traveling to a medical appointment in Colorado. And he will not be here, if they continue to vote tonight. He will not be here tomorrow, at least until the evening, if they continue to vote until then. So this starts to change the universe.

We’ve been at this universe of 434 members-elect voting. It went down to 433 yesterday when Victoria Spartz, the Republican from Indiana, she began to vote present. So why does it go to 434 to 433? Because present votes do not count for Speaker, you’re not casting a ballot for somebody by last name, so we went to 433.

Now with Ken Buck not even here, that brings the universe down to 432. So the magic number right now, with 432 if Spartz continues to vote present, would be 217.

So, you know, in some respects, like I say with Spartz yesterday, this helps McCarthy in some respects, it hurts him in others. Because these are people that were supporting Kevin McCarthy but all of a sudden they are not here or voting present, Neil.

Pergram followed up his television commentary with several tweets about the vote calculations:

Pergram is right that it’s “about the math,” but your friendly neighborhood Mediaite contributing editor is having trouble seeing how McCarthy losing an ally from the room helps him at all.

Pergram is theoretically correct that if the overall number of voting House members goes down, the threshold needed to get a majority vote goes down but McCarthy cannot win the speakership by having his own supporters leave.

Let’s look at the numbers again to illustrate how this can unfold:

Democrats voting for Jeffries: 212
Republicans voting for McCarthy: 200
Republicans voting for someone besides McCarthy: 20
Members voting present: 1

McCarthy can only claim the gavel by (1) flipping recalcitrant Republicans, (2) striking a deal with Democrats and getting some of their votes, or (3) some combination of (1) and (2).

But there’s an added complication in that any deal he strikes to win over his GOP opponents like Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) makes it less likely he can get Democrats on board, and any deal he strikes with Democrats makes it less likely he can get the Republican rebels on board — plus risks alienating the more conservative members among his current supporters.

The other looming problem for McCarthy is that any newly absent Republican drops the threshold for a majority while Jeffries is still in the lead. It would be an incredibly unlikely and unusual situation for a slim-majority GOP House to elect a Democratic Speaker, but it is both legal and possible.

Multiple commentators have actually floated the idea that one of the GOP factions might try to have a few of their members vote for Jeffries in order to call the other side’s bluff and scare them into caving in order to avoid electing a Democrat as Speaker.

Regardless, any newly absent member cannot help McCarthy unless they are among the 20 anti-McCarthy votes. No other absence shifts the math to McCarthy’s benefit.

And with the Californian still about 18 votes away (his apparent eleventh loss is looming as this article is being written), nudging one or two votes falls fall short of the nudge he needs to win.

Watch the video above, via Fox News.

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