Selecting on the Dependent Variable – Voting for Healthcare Edition

by Henry Farrell on November 5, 2010

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.

This obviously doesn’t mean that Democrats _shouldn’t_ vote for unpopular-but-worthy bills such as healthcare (my feelings on TARP are complicated). But it does mean that there is no electoral free lunch. Also, it means that some of the “suggestions”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/11/how-is-that-voting-against-health-care-reform-working-for-you.html “floating”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/11/crushed.php?ref=fpblg around that Democrats who voted against health care suffered for it suffer from selection bias (sadly, the correct answer to the rhetorical question of “How Is That Voting Against Health Care Reform Working for You?” is “On the Balance of Probabilities, Rather Better than a Vote for Health Care Would Have, Thanks for Asking.”)

Most obviously – Members of Congress who voted against health care (or other big ticket items) are more likely to come from conservative districts (where support for health care is lower) than other districts. They are therefore more likely to lose their seats if there is a big swing against the Democrats. More speculatively – there is usually a lot of horse-trading that goes on over bills like this. When the party has the numbers to get a bill through, it often gives tacit permission to some members to vote against. I don’t know whether this happened in health care, not spending any time on the Hill, but if it did, those members who were successfully able to press for this concession were probably just those members who could plausibly argue that they were in trouble in Nov 2010, and really needed it. Again – this would tend to select for members who were at unusual risk of losing. So too would any decision by Members to defy the leadership on a major bill (which carries some costs, albeit not as many as perhaps it should).

Again, if you want health care, you can surely still maintain that losing some seats was worth it. Politics is really about making good policy – winning elections is a means to this end and not the end in itself. But the claim that voting for health care was _both_ the right thing to do _and_ would have left you better off in electoral terms seems here to be based on presuppositions and selection error rather than good data.

{ 71 comments }

1

Healthy 11.05.10 at 3:01 pm

” if you want health care” “that voting for health care ”

Gosh, I’ve never seen anyone voting “against health care”, puppies or rainbows for that matter.

Now if you are claiming that the bill that passed congress, loaded with concessions for the marginal congressmen in marginal districts was voting “for health care”, that is an interesting debate. I know few people who actually think the bill, as passed, will significantly improve health care efficiency or access in this country. If you are on the left, single payer would have been the way to go, if you are on the right, a high deductible policy would have been the way to you. In the end, we got neither, and the result will continue to be the same as before …

2

Red 11.05.10 at 3:20 pm

I am not terribly surprised by these data. Two things to remember, in my view. All of this info is based on the particular section of the population that went to the polls on Tuesday; and that electorate was spectacularly ill-informed. So?

3

Bruce Baugh 11.05.10 at 3:27 pm

I’m pretty sure that at least two or three of those votes could have been assets rather than liabilities if the results hadn’t sucked so much. And if they’d been sold in a way more consistent with observed results – talking about the stimulus as a great boon to an economy with 10% unemployment and all the rest is obvious bullshit, while “this just about offsets state losses and keeps things from getting even worse” wouldn’t be, since (as I understand it) that’s its real net effect.

I can sympathize with the administration and party wanting to talk in “we made it good” rather than “we sort of held the line against some of the worst collapses” language. But too many people’s lives are too badly screwed for the optimistic self-congratulatory version to work well.

4

Anderson 11.05.10 at 3:31 pm

And if they’d been sold in a way more consistent with observed results

Particularly on health insurance reform. Given a hostile news channel and a complacent MSM, the Dems had to work overtime to explain and defend the law. Instead, they ran away from it.

5

soru 11.05.10 at 3:37 pm

Stating the obvious, isn’t this just a Prisoner’s Dilemma?

Cooperate to maintain the line that a policy is a good idea, and the baseline support for it will be higher.

Defect, loudly question it, and support for it drops, but you pick up some votes from those who don’t like it. Generally, without losing any from those who do, due to lack of alternative.

I bet you can set up a model where there are 10 policies that all have 70% public support, and you still get more net votes than others in your party by voting against some, but not all, of the measures.

To put it another way, on a phone in quiz where two callers have to estimate some number, with the winner being the closest. The optimal strategy for the second caller is not to say their best guess, but to go one higher or lower than the first caller.

6

Steve LaBonne 11.05.10 at 3:37 pm

Given a hostile news channel and a complacent MSM, the Dems had to work overtime to explain and defend the law.

Would’ve been easier if they’d written a more defensible bill. It doesn’t come within a parsec of addressing the real problems of the system.

7

Zamfir 11.05.10 at 4:21 pm

Can someone explain how the US got this very loose party discipline? Internationally, party voting mostly en-bloc seem to be the rule, with only exceptions for special cases.

8

DK 11.05.10 at 4:39 pm

Entirely obvious. E.g., Feingold lost essentially only because of his support for bailout and his support for Obamacare. Without these two, even with the bad economy and high unemployment, he would still have the job. The contempt for the opinions of the electorate can be tolerated only to a point.

9

h 11.05.10 at 4:41 pm

Zamfir at 6. I’ve always assumed it’s a difference between parliamentary and geographically representative govt.

In a parliamentary system a politically ambitious 25 year old begins to work within the party appartus and carves out some niche of actual policy expertise, and (if lucky) gets the attention of the party and is promoted into leadership and gets to run for a safe party seat.

In the US a politically ambitious 25 year old begins to work in a specific state or district. He or she can succeed in politics only by first getting elected within that district. So typically (I’m certain someone can find exceptions) both the Democrat and the Republican running in a district with a lot of dairy farms support dairy subsidies. And R and D in a rustbelt district both oppose NAFTA. So on each issue, an incumbent needs to consider: will the people of my district agree with my party, and if not do the people of my district care enough about the issue to influence my reelection. (So conceivably, dairy farmers as a group don’t care much about Guantanamo Bay, so you can vote with your party or with your conscience; but don’t vote against dairy subsidies.)

10

Zamfir 11.05.10 at 4:44 pm

But the UK has much stronger discipline too, I thought.

11

mds 11.05.10 at 5:05 pm

One question I have about this analysis is, how many of the Republicans who voted for TARP were endangered by that vote in 2010? Heck, Blunt (MO), Boozman (AR), and Kirk (IL) voted for TARP and were punished by election to the Senate, in two cases when running for an open seat. John Boehner voted for TARP, and is going to be Speaker in January. Meanwhile, Republican politicians had no problem bragging back in their districts about all the good stuff the stimulus provided, even if though they voted against it. If they’re telling their electorate how good it is, why no consequence for a “no” vote?

12

Castorp 11.05.10 at 5:18 pm

“But the UK has much stronger discipline too, I thought.”

True, but beyond the geographical factor mentioned above, there is the fact that the government in a parliamentary system is made up of a coalition or party in parliament. If the government loses a vote the government could fall, something a member of the governing party does not want to happen. Thus there is more of an incentive for a party to vote together and for party leaders to enforce party discipline.

Even though the US system does not have these features you can see a difference between the House and Senate, with the latter having norms giving individual Senators power and a culture that does not enforce partisan voting to the degree that other Houses do. Though the Republicans have been changing the incentive structure and you can see an increase in partisan voting there too.

13

christian_h 11.05.10 at 5:18 pm

Correlation – causality?

14

mpowell 11.05.10 at 5:18 pm

The biggest problem with the health care bill is that a lot of the benefits don’t come online for a few more years. This was done primarily to improve the 10 year budgetary outlook. I think the bill would be a lot more popular if people without health care currently suddenly found themselves with affordable health care. You can probably blame blue dogs for this strategic decision, but that’s not completely obvious.

15

politicalfootball 11.05.10 at 5:26 pm

If they’re telling their electorate how good it is, why no consequence for a “no” vote?

Did they face political opposition that was anti-TARP? In cases where they did, they may well have suffered for their vote.

16

Keith 11.05.10 at 5:51 pm

Zamfir: The UK also has more than 2 parties. The US has what are in effect two very large coalitions made up of what would in any European country be a half dozen different parties. That’s why the lack of party discipline: The Dems have to wrangle greens, lib dems, social dems, conservatives and a handful of weirdo independents on any given issue. The GOP has a bit more party discipline but that is even starting to crack, with the disparity between the libertarians, tea party, social cons, neocons, crypto-theocrats and a handful of weird independents.

Herding cats doesn’t even begin to cover it.

17

piglet 11.05.10 at 6:28 pm

In fact, virtually every Democratic incumbent on the ballot yesterday supported at least one of these four bills. That support was costly.

This is funny. Of course they did, that’s why they are in the same party. What I have a hard time believing is that voters actually know what their representatives have voted for. Given how clueless they are about everything else (e. g. 52% believe that Obama raised their taxes when the opposite is true), that would be quite surprising. Of course there are those attack ads that tell them. But then I would suggest factoring the ads into the model rather than the votes. It’s not the actual votes that hurt them, it’s the perception.

Other issue, how many of the losing candidates were actually incumbents and how would that model explain the defeats of the non-incumbents?

Also, thanks for mds 11.

18

Anderson 11.05.10 at 6:43 pm

Would’ve been easier if they’d written a more defensible bill. It doesn’t come within a parsec of addressing the real problems of the system.

The bill is quite “defensible” if you don’t pretend it’s something it doesn’t try to be. ONE of “the real problems of the system” has been a lack of health insurance, and hence in practice a lack of health care, for millions of people. THAT is what’s addressed by PPACA.

Other problems, like rising health care costs, need to be addressed, but there is nothing wrong with fixing one thing at a time, and when millions of people can’t even *get* health care, that seems a more immediate priority.

Costs are going to be a very difficult issue, and the GOP is not even close to seriously addressing it other than by letting people die. There is no quick fix. We need a series of compromises to lower physicians’ salaries, rein in the overuse of expensive diagnostics, and do lots of other things. Increasing the # of physicians (and providing assistance/credits for tuition) and finding an alternative approach to malpractice (as opposed to the hugely inefficient tort system) offer some hope/compromise here.

19

Anderson 11.05.10 at 6:45 pm

You can probably blame blue dogs for this strategic decision, but that’s not completely obvious.

I think that’s where the blame lies; the GOP early on complained the bill was unaffordable, and when the GOP howls, the Blue Dogs bark. Obama was of course trying to bring a few Repubs on board as well, because he’s so bipartisan and shit.

20

mpowell 11.05.10 at 7:08 pm

@19: Right- I think that’s plausibly true. My conclusion would be that ‘moderating’ the bill in this way did more to hurt centrists who voted for the bill than all the negative press around the bill’s passage. So, yeah, some of the blame falls on those idiots, but I think Obama also deserves some blame for choosing this particular method of mollifying them.

21

Anderson 11.05.10 at 7:47 pm

20: OTOH, implementing PPACA requires setting up the insurance exchanges and getting ’em going, and that is going to require a learning curve, and confuse the heck out of a lot of voters for a while (or so I fear).

Had we been doing all that in 2010, the election still would’ve been tough. Indeed, there is doubtless a tactical as well as a fiscal reason for setting most of the deadlines in 2014 (midway of potential Obama 2d term).

22

mds 11.05.10 at 8:07 pm

Did they face political opposition that was anti-TARP?

But since most of the postmortems I’ve seen have indicated that Dem turnout was depressed relative to Republican turnout, that’s not the appropriate question. It’s why those who have been shrieking nonstop about the Bush-enabled, passed-with-Republican-votes “bailouts” didn’t sit on their principled thumbs and refuse to turn out for all those remaining Republicans who voted for it. Or mount primary challenges. Why do difficult roll call votes only depress Democratic turnout?

Sorry for having such a kneejerk aversion to the premise of this article, but it seems to be at least implicitly attempting to reinforce the whole “center-right” nation meme, that well-informed voters registered their disapproval for policies that they consider too liberal. Whereas piglet @ 17 seems to take a more plausible tack that voters weren’t reacting knowledgably to a list of their rep’s votes, but reacting ignorantly to a bunch of complete horseshit about them. Otherwise, we’re asserting that the reason Jim Oberstar lost in Minnesota 8 to a know-nothing teabagger clown was because the local electorate suddenly received conclusive evidence that their 18-term congressman was actually a Democrat.

23

Tom M 11.05.10 at 8:48 pm

Most of the electorate doesn’t know that the US is the highest cost health care system in the industrialized world by a substantial margin. They believe what they hear and got fired up by the most egregious of the news media, Fox. Of course, the remainder are so bought and paid for that good reporters don’t work anymore. Maybe, if people had better information available, those votes that are good policy would coincide with the electorate’s opinion.
Uninformed voters pulling the lever for candidates who have legislated against their interests, ala 2001-2008, get what they deserve.

24

mpowell 11.05.10 at 9:08 pm

@21: Well, another option would have been to include a minor stimulus package in the health care bill and provide financial support to ‘ease transitions’ while making everything shake out as quickly as possible. It would have helped the economy and people would have appreciated the benefits, short term deficit be damned. There’s smart politics and then there’s what the Democratic party did from 2008-2010. About all you can say for them is that at least they got it passed.

25

piglet 11.05.10 at 9:30 pm

mpowell: that would be plausible if it weren’t for the fact that those same people voted against the stimulus.

I have a tentative theory: people just wanted to get mad at somebody and since Obama didn’t give them another outlet – didn’t tell them to get mad at the Repubs, or at the banks, instead so annoyingly kept his cool, pretended everything would be fine – he became the outlet by default. That theory is not intended to let either the administration (which screwed up big time in many respects) or the voters off the hook but knowing what we now know, I can’t imagine how anything Obama might have done in terms of policy could have made a difference. I think his main strategic mistake was to not go populist. All he wanted was go back to business as usual. He tried to be a competent administrator. That wasn’t what people elected him for – although they will regret it once they have replaced him with another incompetent.

26

Henry 11.05.10 at 9:39 pm

bq. Sorry for having such a kneejerk aversion to the premise of this article, but it seems to be at least implicitly attempting to reinforce the whole “center-right” nation meme, that well-informed voters registered their disapproval for policies

Crashing on a deadline so I can’t respond at length, but where on earth are you finding the ‘implicit’ stuff about well-informed voters etc etc. These are the preconceptions that _you_ are bringing to the article – there is nothing in either my blogpost or in the article to suggest them. The political science literature on voter ignorance makes for uniformly depressing reading (nb though that this too can cut both ways).

27

ScentOfViolets 11.05.10 at 9:44 pm

The bill is quite “defensible” if you don’t pretend it’s something it doesn’t try to be. ONE of “the real problems of the system” has been a lack of health insurance, and hence in practice a lack of health care, for millions of people. THAT is what’s addressed by PPACA.

Other problems, like rising health care costs, need to be addressed, but there is nothing wrong with fixing one thing at a time, and when millions of people can’t even get health care, that seems a more immediate priority.

But that is not what Obama ran on. He ran on doing something about the cost of health care. Your thesis was trotted out by candidate after candidate, the voting public rightly saw it for the bait-and-switch that it was . . . and voted accordingly. Oh, here’s a little something on the effect the whole health care imbroglio had Congressional elections:

Virtually every House Democrat from a swing district who took a gamble by voting for the health law made a bad political bet. Among 22 who provided crucial yes votes from particularly risky districts, 19 ended up losing on Tuesday. That included all five members who voted against a more expensive House version last November and then changed their votes to support the final legislation in March.

And:

If the health care bill was amazing and brave policy reform, it might be (as Saletan says) worth suffering such staggering losses. But if it was in fact all of those things, people would be experiencing the benefits and Democrats would have had the ability to point to those individuals they helped to justify their votes. Instead, the bill was poorly written and overly influenced by insurance industry lobbyists, such that even those who were supposed to have receive relief by this time haven’t. Of the 375,000 people who were supposed to have been covered by high risk pools by now, only 8011 have enrolled due to both the high cost and the overly high bar to entry, something the insurance industry lobbied heavily for.

When you’re up for re-election in a tough climate, it’s generally considered that “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” is not a good ploy.

28

Phil 11.05.10 at 10:17 pm

Obama was of course trying to bring a few Repubs on board as well, because he’s so bipartisan and shit.

This is something that puzzles me about Obama – that he doesn’t seem to have been able to give up on bipartisanship as a lost cause & get an only slightly watered-down healthcare bill passed on Democratic votes alone. Because, of course, the end result of the strategy he did adopt was a homeopathically-dilute healthcare bill, passed on Democratic votes alone. Doesn’t he realise that they hate him?

29

Brett Bellmore 11.05.10 at 11:30 pm

“It’s why those who have been shrieking nonstop about the Bush-enabled, passed-with-Republican-votes “bailouts” didn’t sit on their principled thumbs and refuse to turn out for all those remaining Republicans who voted for it. Or mount primary challenges. Why do difficult roll call votes only depress Democratic turnout?”

If you think there weren’t primary challenges, some of them successful, you weren’t watching the same country’s politics I was. Of course, once the primary challenge fails, you face the same old “lesser of two evils” arguments, which is why somebody shrieking about a Republican voting for TARP wasn’t exactly going to vote for a Democrat who only missed voting for it because he wasn’t in office at the time…

30

piglet 11.06.10 at 12:51 am

“Virtually every House Democrat from a swing district who took a gamble by voting for the health law made a bad political bet. Among 22 who provided crucial yes votes from particularly risky districts, 19 ended up losing on Tuesday. ”

Here’s how the story continues:

“Indeed, among 49 Democratic incumbents who lost on Tuesday, 32 had voted for the health care law and 17 against it.”

Which proves what, exactly? That Democrats from vulnerable districts lost. No matter how they voted. Can we stop this nonsense now?

31

piglet 11.06.10 at 1:07 am

“When you’re up for re-election in a tough climate, it’s generally considered that “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” is not a good ploy.”

And what did their lying eyes tell them? Death panels and taxes going through the roof, that’s what. You profoundly misjudge voter motivation. The guys voting Repubs were not the uninsured desperate to find affordable insurance and disappointed they still couldn’t. They were middle class people who have insurance and who are scared that they’ll end up paying more if those time-tested cost-saving devices cherry-picking and rescission are outlawed. The Repub voters are not the unemployed. They are resentful that their tax money was used to help pay unemployment benefits and create stimulus jobs. What baffles me is that you consistently refuse to take seriously what those people are saying. There wasn’t a single Republican campaigning for doing more to create jobs or make health care affordable. They were campaigning on the promise to stop these “socialist” practices, and they won. Take these guys goddamit seriously.

32

nick s 11.06.10 at 1:13 am

the claim that voting for health care was both the right thing to do and would have left you better off in electoral terms seems here to be based on presuppositions and selection error rather than good data.

That’s probably true. It’s also probably true that the districts where Democratic incumbents were punished at the polls this week for their votes on the healthcare bill are also districts with higher numbers of (potential) voters who are uninsured or get fucked over by the healthcare-industrial complex on a regular basis. The mobility scooter keep-government-out-of-our-Medicare vote is potent.

33

Sebastian 11.06.10 at 1:22 am

Whoa, whoa, whoa. This seems like a horrible misuse of statistics. I have to agree with piglet, it looks like Democrats in vulnerable seats lost, *no matter which way they voted*.

34

Joshua Holmes 11.06.10 at 2:38 am

The thing I don’t understand is this: if the Democrats developed and passed a healthcare bill creating a sensible, well-administered, easy-to-understand national healthcare system, they’d be enormously popular. They could campaign on it for decades, like they did with Social Security, which is basically untouchable. Instead of all the horse-trading, strategery, and what-not, if they had just passed the bill and said, “You can’t lose your healthcare. Ever.”, that would be enormously more influential than death panel talk.

And I say this as someone who doesn’t support national health care. It just baffles me.

35

geo 11.06.10 at 2:48 am

Tom @23: Uninformed voters pulling the lever for candidates who have legislated against their interests, ala 2001-2008, get what they deserve

Perhaps, but since the rest of us also get screwed, we have little choice but to keep on trying to inform the uninformed. Or are you suggesting that the informed all move to Vermont or Oregon and try to secede?

36

Anderson 11.06.10 at 3:20 am

Scent, you’re kidding, right? Obama DIDN’T run on covering uninsured citizens? Au contraire.

Running on A and B, and enacting A but not B, is not “bait and switch.”

37

Tom M 11.06.10 at 3:46 am

Or are you suggesting that the informed all move to Vermont or Oregon and try to secede?
Not in the least. I’m trying to make a point about how informed voters are not being informed watching the “news” or reading corporate rags including the NYT and WaPo Kaplan. There were few stories that started by explicating the high cost of US health care. It’s no small thing when everyone I run into who would consider themselves informed Republicans have no idea how much US health care costs compared to every other industrialized country.
We do get screwed along with the uninformed voters, especially when informing them of fairly basic stats is easy. But telling them about the egregious costs of US health care is not in the interests of the companies buying ads.

38

Charles Peterson 11.06.10 at 3:53 am

#34

There were some principled Congressional Democrats who fought tooth and nail for something better. But that doesn’t get you to the required 60% in the Senate. The rest look first to their corporate handouts figuring they can either buy votes or retire. Speaking of retirement, most critters make far more per annum in lobbying afterwards than they did before serving in the chamber, even little critters you’ve never heard of. So why would they want to kiss that off, at any price?

39

David 11.06.10 at 4:33 am

This is bogus on the face of it and in light of emerging data. The people who were going to vote against Dems — whether they supported these policies or not — voted. A sufficient amount of the badly maligned and disabused “base” did not. In most cases, end of story. Selling out and poor messaging is not a good strategy.

40

Kaveh 11.06.10 at 5:13 am

As noted above, part of the problem was the actual bill that was voted on. Things might have been very different if there were a public option. On the other hand, if the conclusions presented here are correct, I think characterizing this as a kind of prisoner’s dilemma is exactly right. And one could make a case for Democratic voters’ punishing Dems who don’t tow the party line on important votes. It might seem to be the wrong thing to do just looking at the races individually, or in the short term, but in the long term, it makes the policies as a whole stronger and more popular by taking away the incentive for Dems in tough districts to try and snag a few extra votes by voting against party.

41

Seth 11.06.10 at 5:32 am

I appreciate the effort to be all scientific ‘n all, but these simple-minded linear regressions do not a science make. “Best” linear approximations to phenomena that are not even approximately linear are a waste of brain cells. Think outside the stats box.

These Dems lost because the economy is in the crapper. Given that voters get to pick R or D, what is their likely course of action? In aggregate do they “want” to say “good job, Team D! Have another term!” Or do they want to say “bad Dog, bad!” and hand the bone to Team R? It isn’t as if they get a whole questionaire to fill out. It’s just ‘R’ or ‘D’ (or some form of ‘blank’)?

Loyal D’s act on this impulse by staying away from the polls, largely. Not all of them, but enough of them. Or like the woman who so famously accosted Obama at a “town hall” meeting with the phrase “I’m exhausted from defending you” perhaps they just *stopped* defending Team D against their neighbors’ and friends’ skepticism.

Loyal R’s have the anger and hunger for “taking it back” that motivates grassroots activists — against all rational arguments — to dump their time into the cesspit called volunteer activism. So they turn out and persuade others to turn out.

In 2012, it will again come down to “who is motivated?” One can speculate about that, but I’ve gone on long enough :)

42

Guido Nius 11.06.10 at 10:58 am

So, what do we need to do to win the next elections? What do we need to do to get more voters? And of those voting, how do we increase the percentage of informed voters? Or – do we just give up on democracy?

It should be clear by now that this process is biased against social progress. The problem is that a couple of people can buy many votes in a sophisticated way, & that lots of people can get away with not voting. This should be top of the agenda. I’m sure you can run a populist campaign on both items. As you can on the ‘too big to fail’-theme.

43

politicalfootball 11.06.10 at 1:45 pm

This is something that puzzles me about Obama – that he doesn’t seem to have been able to give up on bipartisanship as a lost cause & get an only slightly watered-down healthcare bill passed on Democratic votes alone.

Obama got something resembling the best bill that 60 Senate Democrats would accept. When you have to travel to the worst Democrat, you’re somewhere in the neighborhood of the best Republican anyway. Might as well see if you can cut a deal.

Plus, the pose of bipartisanship is politically useful to “moderates” like Ben Nelson, and it helps encourage them to do the right thing.

44

Anderson 11.06.10 at 2:03 pm

The people who were going to vote against Dems — whether they supported these policies or not — voted. A sufficient amount of the badly maligned and disabused “base” did not.

This may well be the most incisive analysis.

My neighbors and I all reported record turnout at our polling place in central (suburban, affluent, white) Mississippi … many older voters … all there to vote against the Dems, tho ironically there WAS no meaningful Dem to vote against (3d district for those who know). They’d just been psyched for months by the election, so they were voting, by god. No wonder Gene Taylor got voted out in such conditions.

Dem turnout will be better for the presidential election, but my best hope right now is that the Repubs are structurally incapable of nominating a moderate candidate. If the 2008 primary had been held in 2010, I don’t see how McCain could’ve won.

(Mississippi is surely not the only place where, during the 2008 election, people trimmed the “McCain” off their “McCain-Palin” stickers? Those are still riding the roads.)

45

Brett Bellmore 11.06.10 at 2:03 pm

“So, what do we need to do to win the next elections? What do we need to do to get more voters?”

Well, you could pick some high profile issue on which the public already has an established, sustained opinion, and take, (I know this is a stretch, but stay with me.) the popular side of it. For once. Surely there must be SOME issue where the popular side is also the right side, even in the opinion of liberals.

Alternatively, you could take some high profile issue on which liberals already have an established, sustained opinion, and persuade the public to agree with you, PRIOR to implementing your existing views.

This whole “Forge ahead in the teeth of public opinion, and expect the public to thank you” strategy is a bit of a loser, don’t you think?

46

ScentOfViolets 11.06.10 at 2:59 pm

Scent, you’re kidding, right? Obama DIDN’T run on covering uninsured citizens? Au contraire.

Ya got me; I didn’t say my words right. People voted for Obama on this particular issue because they thought he would do something about the cost of medical care. Not because they wanted him to do something about guys who weren’t like them who didn’t have insurance. As usual, the interests of those less fortunate than themselves did not and do not concern the common clay.

Running on A and B, and enacting A but not B, is not “bait and switch.”

And that is exactly the sort of argument that turns off voters, in fact, angers them even more. As lots of commenters noted in the months leading up to the mid-terms. You just don’t tell people how they’re mistaken and that you really have done a lot for them when they are grumbling that you’ve done nothing of substantial benefit.

So yeah, running on A and B, winning on B, and then enacting A but not B is indeed bait and switch. Trying to tell the voters otherwise isn’t going to help your chances for reelection.

47

ScentOfViolets 11.06.10 at 3:01 pm

Well, you could pick some high profile issue on which the public already has an established, sustained opinion, and take, (I know this is a stretch, but stay with me.) the popular side of it. For once. Surely there must be SOME issue where the popular side is also the right side, even in the opinion of liberals.

The public had a sustained opinion that the public option should be part of health care reform. Now that ship has sailed, well, a majority of the public also wants to raise taxes on those making over $250 K/year.

Was that what you had in mind.?

48

Guido Nius 11.06.10 at 3:05 pm

45- Not a stretch for me, there are enough winners out there as was demonstrated in 2008. But you still have to deal with fraudulent rich people who are corrupting right wing politicians into not having the slightest intention of representing their voters.

49

ScentOfViolets 11.06.10 at 3:14 pm

Obama got something resembling the best bill that 60 Senate Democrats would accept. When you have to travel to the worst Democrat, you’re somewhere in the neighborhood of the best Republican anyway. Might as well see if you can cut a deal.

A: “The votes just weren’t there for a public option. That’s why Obama didn’t waste any political capital trying to get it included in health care reform.”

B: “Recent evidence has come to light that what really happened is that Obama made a back room deal with the hospitals not to include the public option.”

A: “See? That proves that the votes weren’t there. Obama would never have made that sort of deal otherwise.”

B: “Then why did Obama maintain the public pretense that he was all for the public option and that he would like to see it included in the final bill?”

A: “You just don’t understand how politics works.”

See, the problem with this meme that “Obama did the best he could” simply doesn’t have any evidence backing it up. It’s just an unprovable and – to some – soothing narrative. The only way to really test these sorts assertions is when the effort is made to go up against this supposedly broad and deep opposition.

Again, as many commenters have noted, if Obama had fought visibly and loudly for the public option, taking his case to the airwaves, punching people who didn’t get in line, and then he failed to get it included, well, people – the public that is – would have been a lot more understanding about the lack of substance to health care “reform”.

You don’t get points with the public for not even trying on the basis that any attempt was doomed. What’s funny is that even casual sports fans know this really well: if their team is down 24 with four minutes left in the fourth quarter, they still expect them to give 110%. The do not want their guys to just throw in the towel and stroll off the field because the players know they’re going to lose.

50

Guido Nius 11.06.10 at 3:54 pm

I guess I would bring in some substitutes to avoid injuries. Whatever happened this game is no reason to jeopardize losing the next game. A lost cause is a lost cause and shouting: “Banzaï” is helping nobody but the Hollywood script writers.

51

Substance McGravitas 11.06.10 at 6:52 pm

What’s the difference between a pro TARP Demo, and pro-TARP GOPer?

I dunno man.

52

ScentOfViolets 11.06.10 at 10:36 pm

I guess I would bring in some substitutes to avoid injuries. Whatever happened this game is no reason to jeopardize losing the next game. A lost cause is a lost cause and shouting: “Banzaï” is helping nobody but the Hollywood script writers.

This makes no sense. I’m guessing that you don’t watch football or basketball?

53

logern 11.07.10 at 12:14 am

The opposition didn’t want the public option; they wanted more private competition, to sell across state lines, etc., (or to simply not do anything is what I think). The GOP leaders aren’t interested (so they say) in doing anything but trying to repeal as much as possible, or defund it.

They aren’t unhappy that it doesn’t have a public option. They are unhappy that it exists at all.

54

John Quiggin 11.07.10 at 4:53 am

I’d read the results from the study rather differently. Roughly
(1) These votes were popular with Democrats and unpopular with Republicans – note that, in the median Dem district, the adverse effect was small
(2) Republicans had better turnout and were more mobilised for reasons discussed above, including both the state of the economy and Obama’s poor performance in mobilising Dem support
So, the net effect was that supporting these bills cost votes. But, if the Democrats had been winning in general, the bills would also have been winners.

55

Guido Nius 11.07.10 at 10:57 am

54- I thought we were watching politics.

56

James B. Shearer 11.07.10 at 1:46 pm

11

One question I have about this analysis is, how many of the Republicans who voted for TARP were endangered by that vote in 2010? …

Some Republicans were hurt badly. Bob Bennett in Utah for example. See here .

57

LFC 11.07.10 at 2:38 pm

Just looking quickly at The Monkey Cage post, it says at the end: “the roll calls may be capturing some other aspects of the political climate.” (close paraphrase) This seems to be an admission that his regression model shows an apparent effect of “yes” roll call votes, but cannot prove that it was each “yes” vote that actually caused a candidate in the “average” district to lose a certain percentage. Highly suggestive correlation(s), but not proof of causation. Or am I misunderstanding something?

58

ScentOfViolets 11.07.10 at 3:19 pm

54- I thought we were watching politics.

I did too. And you’re still not making sense. If you followed football, you’d know that the players aren’t suffering crippling injuries because they refuse to stop playing hard even there’s just two minutes left to go and they’re down 20 points. You’d also know that if the team does start to really slack whenever they’re in this situation, the fans will not take it kindly, nor think of it as some sort of strategery. To the point that attendance drops off.

59

ScentOfViolets 11.07.10 at 3:33 pm

I’d read the results from the study rather differently. Roughly
(1) These votes were popular with Democrats and unpopular with Republicans – note that, in the median Dem district, the adverse effect was small
(2) Republicans had better turnout and were more mobilised for reasons discussed above, including both the state of the economy and Obama’s poor performance in mobilising Dem support
So, the net effect was that supporting these bills cost votes. But, if the Democrats had been winning in general, the bills would also have been winners.

I’d go with a weaker version of what you say. This doesn’t seem to be very well done, or at least (as often happens, sigh) after the model was constructed it appears to have been pushed past it’s operating parameters.

But in any event, your interpretation has certainly not been disproven.

60

Guido Nius 11.07.10 at 4:19 pm

61- I think that the attendance did drop off and that that’s the reason for the 2010 result – but in the case of politics, luckily it’s not just about emotion and intention. Luckily we’re not in Rome, even if there’s clearly still too much drama politics around.

(and I’m sure that you rarely think somebody that disagrees with you makes sense so: that is all right)

61

LFC 11.07.10 at 6:01 pm

TARP was a Bush-initiated program that Obama continued, not an Obama-initiated one (something most voters seemed not to know). In any case the govt made money on it, and without it the situation probably would have been worse.

62

LFC 11.07.10 at 6:04 pm

“made money” in the sense that the loans were paid back w interest

63

Salient 11.07.10 at 6:26 pm

Beauregard, I can’t tell whether your post-dash comment there was meant to be ironic in a post-ironic sense, or just good-ol’-fashioned genuine sexism.

Probably calling a miscellany of thunderbolts on myself by saying this, but could you take a moment to spell out your particular opposition to TARP? Given that I support nationalization and deprivatization of many industries (banking and utilities/energy industries in particular), I have my own reservations about TARP; in a naive ‘what could possibly go wrong with this’ sense, I’d have preferred to nationalize the banks, wipe out shareholders, fire the executive boards wholesale^1^ and reset the largest banks up as a massive nonprofit organization. But I’d kind of like to hear you out on your own objections, if you’d care to drop the shtick for a moment and speak plainly.

It’s not like your MSN .com link is doing the work for you…

^1^to be filed under “if Reagan could credibly threaten to fire all those air traffic controllers, then surely…”

64

ScentOfViolets 11.07.10 at 6:29 pm

@ 61:

61- I think that the attendance did drop off and that that’s the reason for the 2010 result – but in the case of politics, luckily it’s not just about emotion and intention. Luckily we’re not in Rome, even if there’s clearly still too much drama politics around.

So to continue the analogy, if the Obama administration had fought hard for the public option but failed to get it, then attendance (voting) would not have slacked off. Instead of not even trying to win, which did cause voting to slack off.

(and I’m sure that you rarely think somebody that disagrees with you makes sense so: that is all right)

Er, no. I rarely think that, actually. But I’m a math guy and I expect a certain amount of accuracy and rigor in an argument . . . even if the argument itself is wrong (that actually happens to me several times a day.) Your argument lacked both, to the point where I wondered if you followed any sort of organized sports. It’s as if you were arguing that since a number is not even, it must be divisible by three.

65

LFC 11.07.10 at 9:51 pm

The problem was less the ‘saving’ of the banks from failure and more the fact that really stringent conditions on their post-salvation behavior (in terms of lending etc.), were not attached. Lowering interest rates also helped banks, but does that mean, given the circumstances, that the Fed should not have done it? Answer: no, the Fed acted with an eye to the economy as a whole; banks benefited from lowered interest rates, but that’s not why the Fed lowered them. I don’t think it takes tremendous insight or training as an economist (neither of which I can claim) to understand that there are moments when no good or even palatable choices exist and it becomes necessary to do the least awful thing, lest something more awful happen.

66

LFC 11.07.10 at 9:56 pm

I meant banks probably benefited on balance from lower interest rates, because they didn’t have to pay as much in interest to savers and depositors.

67

Guido Nius 11.08.10 at 8:13 am

69- and you think I’m not a math guy? (I though you were a girl, by the way, and that is quite a compliment) I do think you suffer of overapplying the excluded middles. Sure – Obama did not fight the public option AND the attendance slacked but this does not entail that had he fought it THEN the attendance would not have slacked.

mpowell has it right upthread: what failed to materialize is concrete benefits to concrete people, so in the case he would have fought for something that could not possibly be carried it would’ve been in all probability materially the same as when he fought for something that failed to bring a noticeable impact.

Now, I am one of those few that actually think they knew in 2008 that they would loose in 2010 so they went with that half-time loss and constructed a strategy to turn it around at full-time – in 2012.

In the meantime US healthcare spending outspends easily that of most countries with an actual universal healthcare policy; so I’d suggest that there is a lot that can be done in US politics such as to convince US citizens of the fact that better healthcare correlates with cheaper healthcare.

68

ScentOfViolets 11.08.10 at 2:42 pm

69- and you think I’m not a math guy? (I though you were a girl, by the way, and that is quite a compliment[1]) I do think you suffer of overapplying the excluded middles. Sure – Obama did not fight the public option AND the attendance slacked but this does not entail that had he fought it THEN the attendance would not have slacked.

“ScentOfViolets” comes from a famous 19th century problem in statistical mechanics – molecular diffusion or “the scent of violets”. Uncork a vial of perfume in one corner of a room. Someone on the other side can’t immediately detect the odor. A short while later, they can. Why is that? In 1839, no one really knew. Then along came Boltzmann and his kinetic theory of gases and his pesky insistence that his “atoms” were real physical entities. Bear in mind that distinguished folk from Maxwell to Mach pooh-poohed the existence of atoms, and that their existence wasn’t generally accepted until something like the mid- to late-1900’s. People these days seem to believe that we’ve known about the existence of atoms for, well, centuries when in fact this has only been known for about a hundred years. So much basic science came out of the 20th!

In any event, that’s not exactly what I’m claiming in this subthread. The claim was that no real effort was made to get a public option because “the votes just weren’t there.” I’m saying that you can’t really know this unless an actual effort is made to get them, and fails. And to those who say that not getting some sort of health care bill enacted even if it’s a terrible bill is preferable to no bill at all, I’m pointing out that no, it was and is a terrible bill, most people know this, and what they would have preferred was a hard-fought campaign for good health care reform which failed to pass as opposed to the atrocity that we actually got.

mpowell has it right upthread: what failed to materialize is concrete benefits to concrete people, so in the case he would have fought for something that could not possibly be carried it would’ve been in all probability materially the same as when he fought for something that failed to bring a noticeable impact.

That’s possible. But if you look elsewhere, you would see people making predictions a long time ago based upon the theory of the Democrats lack of stomach for a down-and-dirty gut fight over the issues the working class care about . . . and they were 100% right. Bearing in mind that theories can never be proven, this is about as good as it gets.

[1]Why would you think I’m a girl, and why is that a complement?

69

dj 11.09.10 at 8:56 am

I’m just a poor lurker, but it sure seems to me that Beauregard is the Troll of Sorrow.

The Editors: We concur in the diagnosis. Beauregard is no more.

70

piglet 11.09.10 at 5:23 pm

A lot of the explanations thrown around about this election result sound like cognitive dissonance to me. It just doesn’t make sense to explain voter motivation in terms of a consistent policy preference (against TARP, against health care reform). The administration has made huge mistakes both in terms of policy and in terms of how to communicate policy but that alone can’t explain this without taking into account the effectiveness if the right wing propaganda machine. Voters didn’t reject the actual policies, however imperfect they are, they rejected what they have been told about those policies. How else do you explain that the group most opposed to HCR are the retired who are already covered by Medicare and who are hardly at all affected by the reform?

Obama’s biggest blunder was not to go populist. The times, the voters called for populism. Obama felt he was above that and so made himself the target instead of guiding the populism. Apart from that there is no logic in the behavior of the voters. Populist anger against banks became a tool skillfully used by those same banks’ lobbyists. The manipulative skill of these people is admirable but trying to interpret the result in policy terms is pointless. The other factor that I think has been consequential, and it is a factor that liberals always forget to reckon with, is the tendency of people in bad economic times to fall back on dog eat dog social darwinism. Not so much the unemployed, uninsured or homeless but the middle class people afraid of becoming unemployed, uninsured, and losing their house. We like to think that people in that situation should support liberal, social democratic policies. In fact the worse it gets the more are they pushed in the opposite direction. They are afraid of falling but that doesn’t make them sympathetic to those who have already fallen; it makes them want to pull away from the unlucky ones, pull away from the common good, and take care of number one. A few years ago, solid majorities of Americans supported universal health care. Those who think health care reform is so unpopular because it’s not progressive, not universal enough are deluding themselves. It is unpopular because the worst effects of the existing system are not felt by most people.

71

Red 11.10.10 at 12:28 am

Piglet @ 76 is absolutely right. In fact, that is what I was going to say @2, had it not been for a deep sense of ennui, melancholia, and, let’s face it, acedia. Whither, ignorant republic?

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