Nate Silver, proprietor of the fascinating 538.com blog, takes me to task for suggesting in
my July 22 Examiner column that, in his words, “health care reform is not very popular in the Blue Dog districts.” I think his quarrel here is not with me, but with the Blue Dogs and/or their constituents. He cites polling data that suggests that three-quarters of non-liberal Democrats agree with the statement, “it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure that everyone in the United States has adequate health care.”
As I think Silver would acknowledge, it’s a jump from these polling numbers to the proposition that three-quarters of this segment of the electorate supports what they understand to be Obama’s (or, more accurately, congressional Democrats’) health care bills. Moreover, non-liberal Democrats are not necessarily the critical voting bloc in Blue Dog districts. By my count, 35 of the 52 Blue Dogs represent districts that voted for John McCain, while 17 represent districts that voted for Barack Obama.
Of the 40 Blue Dogs who signed the July 9 letter opposing the (then emerging) House Democrats health care bill, 29 represent districts that voted for McCain and 11 represent districts that voted for Obama. The critical voting bloc in at least the McCain districts is more likely to be Independents rather than non-liberal Democrats. And as we know from national polling, the Democrats’ health care bills are not polling well with Independents at the moment. In contrast to the situation in 2005-08, Independents on many though not all issues look a lot more like Republicans than Democrats these days.
Silver seems to be channeling Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? here. After listing several issues on which Democratic stands may not be popular in Blue Dog districts—the carbon tax, the bailout (I’m not sure which one he’s referring to), repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act—he tells the Blue Dogs, “You’re going to start having to find at least a few things to vote for.”
Perhaps—I’m guessing here—he’s saying a health care bill promises to give something, to bring some economic benefit, to the relatively modest-income voters who live in Blue Dog districts. The problem is that the polling evidence suggests that Blue Dog district voters suspect that the health care bill may not bring economic benefit but is just, in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s phrase, boob bait for the bubbas.
Silver entertains the possibility that this is the case, that the Blue Dogs were just elected out of opposition to George W. Bush, and that nothing in the Obama Democrats’ program is going to help them win reelection in 2010 or 2012. In which case, one might argue that Obama and the congressional Democrats are misinterpreting their mandate: they’re only in because George W. Bush came up with the surge strategy two years too late. Silver paints a bleak outlook for the Blue Dogs in that case: “Maybe you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. But the only world in which you’re popular enough to get reelected is one [in] which this bill is popular enough for you to vote for.”
I can imagine other political worlds and unlike Silver am old enough to remember them: the world in which relatively conservative Democrats, or Democrats who convincingly painted themselves as such, got reelected often enough to maintain Democratic House majorities from 1974 to 1994. It was a world in which, if there had been no incumbents running, Republicans would probably have won House majorities in at least three or four of ten elections, but which, with canny Democratic incumbents running, Republicans won zero out of ten.
Perhaps that world is not reconstructible now, with more straight-ticket voting starting circa 1994 and more cohesive congressional majorities which leave voters more likely to hold members responsible for the deeds or misdeeds of their party leaders. But the Blue Dogs may be acting rationally in their self-interest by trying to reconstruct that world rather than leaving their fate dependent on their voters’ response to Henry Waxman’s health care bill. They might say to Nate Silver what I have heard many elected officials say to campaign consultants who urge them to take what they consider unpopular stands: “My name is on the ballot.”
If the Blue Dogs, or many of them, seem to have made the judgment that the House Democrats’ health care bill is unpopular in their relatively non-affluent districts, another group of House Democrats have apparently made the judgment that the supertax on high earners in Waxman’s bill is unpopular in theirs. These are the 21 freshmen and one sophomore who signed Boulder, Colorado, Congressman Jared Polis’s July 16 letter opposing the supertax—a letter I also referred to in my column. Five of the 22 also signed the Blue Dog letter, but the interesting thing is that 12 of the 22 Polis letter signers represent districts carried by Obama, including Mike Quigley’s who was elected to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Obama assembled a top-and-bottom economic coalition in 2008; he carried voters with incomes under $50,000 and those with incomes over $200,000, and ran (not far) behind among those in between. The Polis letter is the first sign I’ve seen that raising taxes on high earners has the potential to split the Obama top-and-bottom coalition.
Nate Silver begins his post by writing, “Michael Barone tends to be either very right or very wrong.” I take that as a high compliment. I admire Nate Silver’s work, though I sometimes disagree with his conclusions, and invite him, in the spirit of Barack Obama, James Crowley and Henry Louis Gates, to share an adult (or non-adult) beverage with me, though outside the precincts of the White House.
