Eric McGhee has a “somewhat dispiriting post”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/11/did_controversial_roll_call_vo.html at _The Monkey Cage._
Running a model on voting this Tuesday, he finds that Democrats’ votes for health care, TARP, cap and trade and the stimulus hurt their support. In some cases it hurt them quite a lot.
bq. What does this model tell us about roll call votes on these four bills? Simple answer: they mattered. A lot. A Democratic incumbent in the average district represented by Democratic incumbents actually lost about 2/3 of a percentage point for every yes vote. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s for incumbents in districts that voted 63% for Obama.
bq. For Democrats in the least Democratic districts (Chet Edwards of TX or Gene Taylor of MS), the model suggests a loss of about 4% for every yes vote. Does that mean poor Chet lost 16 points on roll call votes alone? No, because he wasn’t a big supporter of Obama’s agenda. But he did vote for both TARP and the stimulus. In fact, virtually every Democratic incumbent on the ballot yesterday supported at least one of these four bills. That support was costly.