How the Tea Party movement is causing problems even for conservative Republicans
There's an interesting story in today's New York Times about Senator Robert Bennett's (R-Utah) troubles in winning his own party's nomination for re-election this year. Ordinarily, an incumbent like Bennett, with normally strong conservative credentials, no scandal, and lots of seniority, would have no problem, especially in receiving his own party's (re)nomination. But this is not an ordinary election cycle:
The dissatisfaction with Washington sweeping through politics is not only threatening the Democratic majority in Congress, it is also roiling Republican primaries. The Tea Party movement and advocacy groups on the right are demanding that candidates hew strictly to their ideological standards, and are moving aggressively to cast out those they deem to have strayed, even if only by participating in the compromises of legislating.
While I have my doubts that the Tea Party insurgency will lead to a significant number of Republican Senators losing their seats, one has to wonder at the strategic effects of all this - one of the problems of the 'Class of '94' was that they campaigned on a program of opposition, and once they actually held the reins of power they were either unable to implement policies or simply emulated the practices that they were elected to eliminate. While it seems unlikely (at this point) that the GOP will wrest control of either chamber as early as this election cycle, it's easy to see a similar fate befalling a Republican majority elected on a tide of Tea Party enthusiasm.
The Economist and ObamaCare counterfactuals
At lunch yesterday a liberal friend from Boston offered the comment that it was Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts Senate race that snapped the Democrats to attention and enabled yesterday's vote.
More Americans support the health care reform than oppose it
I'm a day late on this, but Gallup is reporting that 49% of Americans support the health care reform as passed by the House, with 40% opposing. Margin of error was ± 4%:
The health care vote will not help the GOP
From David Frum, via Joshua Tucker:
Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.
It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:
(1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.
(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.
So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson:
A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.
At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.
Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.
This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.
Frum 'gets it', in that he understands two key points:
- It's the economy that drives voting behavior, not specific pieces of legislation. Conservatives might be mad at the Democrats for 'ramming reform down the peoples' throats', but conservatives were hardly going to vote Democratic in the fall elections anyway.
- Once enacted, social welfare legislation is difficult, almost impossible to repeal. Social welfare programs create their own constituencies that are independent (no pun intended) from partisan identification. This is why Republicans have been so unsuccessful at dismantling New Deal or Great Society social welfare legislation. It's also why European countries with right-wing cabinets still have most of their welfare states largely intact.
The Democrats might lose a lot of seats in November, but if they do it's the economy that will be the cause.
Partisan differences and the 'public option'
I thought it would be interesting to look at historical patterns in partisan attitudes to government-sponsored health insurance. I looked at responses to the American National Election Survey question on self-placement on a seven-point scale, where a 'one' indicates the respondent favors an entirely government-run health insurance system, while a seven indicates the respondent supports only private health insurance.
What I found is that Americans, regardless of party identification, generally favor a mixture of both private and government health insurance. To be sure, Republicans are more favorable of private plans and Democrats more in favor of a government plan (with Independents somewhere in the middle), but there is surprisingly not a great deal of difference between the parties.
The first of the two graphs shows the mean value for members of each party, along with 'Independents' (N.B., 'leaners' were coded as partisans) on the seven-point ANES scale. What we see is a strong degree of consistency in attitude, especially among Democrats and Independents. Starting in the early 1990s Republicans became less favorable to the so-called 'public option', although this trend seems to have stopped to a large degree.
What I found is that Americans, regardless of party identification, generally favor a mixture of both private and government health insurance. To be sure, Republicans are more favorable of private plans and Democrats more in favor of a government plan (with Independents somewhere in the middle), but there is surprisingly not a great deal of difference between the parties.
The first of the two graphs shows the mean value for members of each party, along with 'Independents' (N.B., 'leaners' were coded as partisans) on the seven-point ANES scale. What we see is a strong degree of consistency in attitude, especially among Democrats and Independents. Starting in the early 1990s Republicans became less favorable to the so-called 'public option', although this trend seems to have stopped to a large degree.
The second graph shows the differences in mean position for each of the three groups. For example, the red line shows the mean difference in opinion between Republicans and Democrats. Two things are immediately notable:
- The differences in the average position between Democrats and Republicans has grown larger over time and continues to do so. The average difference between Democrats and Republicans during the 1970s was roughly one point on the ANES scale. In the 30 years between 1978 and 2008 it doubled. Clearly the divide between partisans, not party elites, has increased and in today's partisan environment, will probably continue to increase. This divide might help explain the seemingly great animosity between sided on the health care reform issue.
- The difference between Democrats and Independents was much greater in 2008 than in 1992. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama campaigned on health care reform, and on some sort of government-provided health care ('socialized medicine', if you will) as important parts of the platform. For each it was the dominant focus of their freshman year legislative agenda. Yet Obama was successful while Clinton was not. Why? One answer might be that the Democrats have larger majorities now than they had in 1992. Another reason might be that Democrats are now much more ideologically similar than they were in 1992, largely caused by the 1994 Congressional election all but decimating the Democratic Southern Caucus.