How much is health care hurting the Democrats?
Brendan Nyhan | January 21, 2010
Topics: health care , Health Care Reform
Via John Sides, David W. Brady, Daniel P. Kessler, and Douglas Rivers have published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that is likely to fuel Democratic panic in Washington over health care:
The majority party normally loses seats in midterm elections, but the Republican resurgence of recent months is more than a conventional midterm rebound. How can a little known Republican run a competitive Senate campaign in Massachusetts? The culprit is the unpopularity of health reform, and it means that Democrats will face even worse problems later this year in less liberal places than Massachusetts.We have polled voters in 11 states likely to have competitive Senate races in November on how they feel about health reform and how they might vote in November...
Health reform is more popular in some of these states than in others. Where it's popular, Democratic candidates don't have too much of a problem, but where it's unpopular--and that includes most states--the Democratic Senate candidates are fighting an uphill battle...
Support for the Republican Senate candidates in these races is closely related to voter opposition to the health-care Senate bill...
How do we know that it's the health-reform bill that's to blame for the low poll numbers for Democratic Senate candidates and not just that these are more conservative states?
First, we asked voters how their incumbent senator voted on the health-care bill that passed on Christmas Eve. About two-thirds answered correctly. Even now, long before Senate campaigns have intensified, voters know where the candidates stand on health care. And second, we asked voters about their preference for Democrat versus Republican candidates in a generic House race. As in the Senate, the higher the level of opposition to health reform, the greater the likelihood that the state's voters supported Republicans.
Brady and Rivers are highly respected political scientists (I'm not familiar with Kessler), but I'm not sure we can draw strong conclusions from these data. Since health care passed on a perfect party line vote in the Senate, it's relatively easy to know where an incumbent stands on the issue. And given the salience of the health care debate, the correlation between state opposition to health care reform and support for Republican senate candidates is (a) not surprising and (b) not necessarily causal (especially given that those are aggregate measures).
I tend to think that much of the health care fallout is an expression of economic discontent, but there's certainly an argument to be made that it has exacerbated the public's predictable turn away from liberalism. In either case, however, disentangling these factors is extremely difficult.
Update 1/21 8:25 PM: Matt Blackwell makes a similar argument at the Harvard Social Science Statistics blog.
[Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com]
By Brendan Nyhan | January 21, 2010 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)
Comments
Well, that seems unlikely now that the Supreme Court has authorized corporations to literally purchase candidates straight out...
LordMike, how is that any different than the $500 million the unions were allowed to give Obama under the unconstitutional law? How much do you think they will give now? Especially after Obama gave them the auto companies. Now they can give union money and corporate money both.
I wonder how much the MA discontent for health care reform is related to the fact that they have some of the important aspects already through state law (near-universal coverage, subsidies, mandate, etc.)? I vaguely remember that someone wrote about how HCR in MA is seen as "better than before" but still not that highly approved of. But it also might mean that MA voters don't care much for the federal proposal, since they don't get much additional benefit from it.
@ "GARY WAGNER" - please don't bring in other issues arbitrarily, since it pushes things off-topic and is rather irritating. I know I'd personally prefer the comments to be on-topic and about analysis and interpretation of polling, not a place for just any random political commentary.
My conclusions come from a different perspective. I don't know of one single person who wants this healthcare bill put into law. There are some that used to support it before the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Hustle, and the $60 billion union give-away. This is bigger than the healthcare bill but that is the focal point. Anyone who voted for this monstrosity voted to continue the corrupt out of control tactics of congress. It isn't the bill people hate nearly so much as the corrupt and manipulative way it was shoved through.
We might be starting a power ping pong that will shift control from one party to the other until either another party emerges to take over or until either the democrats or the republicans reform congress when they get the chance.
Posted on January 21, 2010 1:34 PM