This week, just eighty-seven out of two hundred and thirty-two Republicans in the House of Representatives voted for the Senate compromise reopening the government and raising the debt ceiling. Just before the shutdown, I looked at the geography and demography of the so-called suicide caucus of the eighty House Republicans who forced Speaker John Boehner into a strategy of trying to defund President Obama’s health-care law by threatening to shut down the government.

Not surprisingly, the House Republicans who voted for the deal—let’s call them the “survival caucus”—represent the left edge of the G.O.P. conference, to the extent that one exists. Obama carried seventeen districts in 2012 that also elected a Republican to the House. Members from fifteen of those seventeen districts voted for the compromise. Over all, Romney won those eighty-seven districts by an average of twelve points (versus a twenty-three-point margin for the suicide caucus). The suicide-caucus members won their districts by an average of thirty-four points, but survival-caucus members won by a more modest twenty-six points. (Still, these are landslide numbers.) But many of the Republicans in close races voted for the deal. The Cook Political Report lists thirty-one Republicans running for reëlection next year as having competitive general-election contests. Twenty of these thirty-one members voted to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling.

Interestingly, the survival-caucus districts are not demographically more diverse. On average, they are just as white as suicide-caucus districts (seventy-five per cent), and the percentage of minorities is roughly the same.

The biggest difference between the suicide caucus and the survival caucus is geography. While the suicide caucus is dominated by the South, and especially members from Appalachia and states like Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia, as well as Texas, the survival-caucus draws members more equally from the South (thirty per cent), the Midwest (twenty-seven per cent), the West (twenty-two per cent), and the Northeast (twenty-one per cent). There are no Texans, Tennesseans, South Carolinians, or Georgians in the survival caucus. In fact, the clearest divide between the two caucuses is also the oldest divide in American politics: North-South.