With just over a week to go before an unprecedented default, the White House and Republicans still don’t have an agreement to raise the debt limit. That’s already imperiled the country’s credit rating, and will lead to an economic disaster if nothing changes in the coming days. But some in the GOP don’t seem particularly concerned. In fact, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel suggested Wednesday that while a default would likely be bad for the country, it would be good for her party politically: “This is a president that is failing the American people,” McDaniel said of Joe Biden in a Fox News interview Wednesday. “So I think that bodes very well for the Republican field.”

Others in the GOP, whose brinkmanship has brought the country to this crisis point, have spoken with more urgency about the negotiations: “I want to work as hard as we can and not stop,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Wednesday. But McDaniels’ political calculation seems to speak to a crucial dynamic of the standoff: Republicans appear to feel little compunction to back off their hardline demands—in part because they think Biden and the Democrats will pay the political price for a default, which some in the GOP, including their 2024 frontrunner, don’t even think would be that bad anyway.

“It’s not my responsibility to represent the socialist wing of the Democratic Party,” a high-and-mighty McCarthy told reporters Wednesday, deflecting blame for the crisis he precipitated onto the White House. “It is not my fault that the Democrats can’t give up on their spending."

But of course, the crisis is the fault of Republicans, who raised the debt ceiling three times under Donald Trump without any hardline spending conditions and have already laid bare the raw politics behind their standoff: During his CNN town hall earlier this month, Trump himself quipped there's no problem with using the prospect of default as a negotiating wedge "because now I’m not president.” If the GOP can indeed convince the public that it’s not their fault—that it’s Biden and the Democrats who are being “extreme”—they appear to think they can get the White House to blink first. 

And that tack may be working: A new Fox News poll suggests that the public would blame the GOP and Biden about evenly—and Biden maybe a little more—for a default. That’s generated some frustration among Democrats, who have increasingly questioned the White House's posture and are in some cases calling on the president to take a more aggressive public approach. “They don’t want to poison the well on negotiations, but Republicans are doing just that and it’s an asymmetrical game,” a member of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ leadership team told Politico of the White House strategy. “It’s not sustainable.”

The president, for his part, seems to be hoping that a more subdued approach will help bring about a deal—and there have been some cautiously optimistic signs that an agreement could be getting closer. But Biden and the Democrats, in seeking to avoid economic disaster without caving to Republicans’ outrageous demands, still need to come up with an answer to the biggest question hanging over these talks: How do you keep these negotiations from failing when some on the other side see that as a political success?