Senators and health care
Nate, Daniel, and I write:
Lawmakers’ support for or opposition to reform generally has less to do with the views of their constituents and more to do with the issue of presidential popularity. . . . For instance, Senator Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat who has been a less-than-strong supporter of the present health care bill, recently told The Times, “I am responsible to the people of Arkansas, and that is where I will take my direction.” But where does she look for her cue? Hers is a poor state whose voters support health care subsidies six percentage points more than the national average. On the other hand, Mr. Obama got just 40 percent of the vote there. . . ..
Public opinion is certainly relevant to the health care debate, but not in the direct senator-follows-the-state way that it is sometimes imagined.
Further discussion (including pretty maps) here.
Comments
It was fun to read this in the paper this morning. It’s better to see it online because the figures are much easier to process in color than they were in the print edition.
I’m not sure that the argument is correct, though. In 2004 health care was not as salient as it was in 2008. It could be that Obama’s 2008 margin of victory is a better proxy for 2009 health care attitudes that 2004 health care attitudes. So the Senators may have better information about their states than the 2004 data. It could be using Obama margin as a proxy or maybe Obama margin is correlated with some unobserved (by us) information that they have.
Once the 2008 data come out, it will be easy to see whether this is true. Does anybody know when they’re going to release the 2008 Annenberg? I can’t wait!
ANES 2008 probably can’t support state-level inference like this. I wonder if anybody had health care questions on the 2008 CCES that could answer this.
Posted by: John Transue | November 19, 2009 11:53 AM