Ali Vitali on Speaker Vote: No One Else Can Get to 218

EXCERPT:

VITALI: "So, 99% of the members that I’ve been speaking to and who will go to the Capitol today to vote for the speaker believe that Johnson should be fine, but they also know that there’s a permission structure for chaos, as predicated by, two years ago, the last time we did this, only with Kevin McCarthy at the helm and not Mike Johnson. So there is an incentive structure for being a holdout, but I think — and Congressman Gabe Amo and I were having this conversation on 'Way Too Early’ — we will see a lot just by the way that this process actually goes, because they vote alphabetically. You know that when you get to M, you are going to lose one. That is the only one that Johnson actually can lose. But we will see members like Burchett at 'B,' Crane at 'C,' and if any of them vote present, that means that the number is no longer 218 for Johnson, it lowers the threshold. If they vote no, then you know the entire round is moot and that Johnson is not going to get it on that balloting round. Hakeem Jeffries, of course, will stay at the 215 hard votes that he has in his corner because Democrats have shown consistency and their willingness to go along with leadership as a united front. But Republicans, the alphabet is actually going to be quite instructive here. And we'll see, do they let him twist in the wind for a round or two? Do they instead just get this whole thing over with? Because the prevailing view at the end of the day is that no one else can get to 218, but that's the conventional wisdom until it's not."