Hillarysworld

The Health Care Bill Is Political Suicide

Health reform is shuffling toward its endgame, and even though the bill's popularity resembles George Bush's circa 2007, Democrats seem determined to push the bill through. Browse through certain liberal blogs, or listen to Democratic leadership speeches, and you'll read the same justification again and again: However bad passing this bill might be, politically speaking, not passing it would be much, much worse.

I've been skeptical of this line of argument for quite some time. This summer, I showed that Democrats from Republican-leaning districts who supported President Clinton's agenda fared significantly worse in the 1994 midterm election than those who did not.  It seems almost certain that an additional vote for Clinton's then-wildly-unpopular healthcare bill would not have helped these Democrats any; passing ClintonCare almost certainly would have made 1994 even worse for the Democrats.  Likewise, after taking tough votes on the stimlulus package and cap-and-trade, it seemed unlikely that a vote on the then-mildly-unpopular health care bill would help Congressional Democrats.

Nothing has changed my mind since then. Rather, as events have unfolded I've become increasingly convinced that there is little political upside for Democrats in passing this bill, and much, much downside. For one thing, the "failure is not an option" argument makes little sense at a very basic level. It's the equivalent of arguing that what the GOP really needed to do to save its majority in 2006 was to sign an immigration bill that deported illegal immigrants; maybe it should have pushed through private accounts for social security, just to show the country that the GOP was capable of “governing,” and to give the base something to get excited over. The problem is that the public doesn't want to see a party simply “governing” or pushing through major legislation. They want to see a party “governing well,” and pushing through major legislation that the public wants.

The 2009 elections showed that the public does not equate "governing well" with "moving the agenda to the left."  Democrats have convinced themselves that the 2009 elections somehow showed that the Democrats really need to push through more of Obama's agenda to win, much as some Republican partisans convinced themselves that the GOP lost in 1996 because it cut a deal with President Clinton over the government shutdown. As Kos wrote to his party the Wednesday following the elections, “[t]he choice is yours. Give us a reason to vote for you, or we sit home. And you aren't going to make up the margins with conservative voters. They already know exactly who they're voting for, and it ain't you.”

But the biggest problem in 2009 was not really that liberals didn't turn out to vote. The problem was that the Democrats lost Independents and moderates. Take Virginia. There was a substantial drop-off in Democratic performance from 2008 to 2009.  But the real change this year is how Independents voted (as was the case in 2006). Independents in Virginia voted 49%-48% for Obama in 2008, but gave Bob McDonnell a 66%-33% landslide win in 2009.

To put this a different way, if Creigh Deeds had run to the left and managed to increase Democratic turnout to 2008 levels, without changing the way Independents split, he would have closed the gap with McDonnell, but still would have lost by more than five points, 52.25%-46.5%. If, however, Deed had persuaded Independents to vote for him at the same level as they did in 2008 without increasing Democratic turnout, he would have fared better, losing by a slim 51%-48% margin. Indeed, this is exactly how Jim Webb won in 2006; even though his electorate had the rough composition of the 2009 electorate, he managed to take a 12-point win among Independents and win the election.

Democrats may object to this analysis on the grounds that many Republicans took to calling themselves Independents during the post-Bush years. But running the same experiment using liberal/moderate/conservative splits instead of partisan identification doesn't change the result. Deeds barely loses (losing 50.8%-47.9%) in an electorate with 2009's composition where he performs as well as Obama did among moderates. If he recreates the 2008 electorate, but doesn't improve his performance among moderates, he loses by a larger margin (53.5%-46.4%).

We see the same effect up I-95 in blue New Jersey. Recreating the 2008 electorate without changing voting patterns would have actually given Jon Corzine a narrow 51%-49% win over Chris Christie. But taking the 2009 electorate and having Independents vote as they did in 2008 would have expanded Corzine's win to a substantial 55%-44% clobbering of the former U.S. Attorney.

This illustrates another difficulty with the left's argument. Jon Corzine did exactly what liberals suggested Creigh Deeds should have done: He cleaved unto his President, and he still lost. New Jersey had a slightly smaller drop-off in Democratic participation than did Virginia (3 points versus 4 points), but the rightward swing among Independents was even more pronounced (21 points versus 16 points).  This suggests that the 2008 turnout was a phenomenon that owed more to Obama's highly personal candidacy than any particular set of domestic initiatives he may have been espousing.  It might simply be impossible for anyone not named "Obama" to recreate the Obama coalition.

Polling for the House of Representatives further demonstrates little upside for having vulnerable members vote for the health bill. If the best way for Democrats in swing-to-conservative leaning districts to keep their seats is to bet on the base turning out in record numbers, then we should see Democrats who are supportive of the President's agenda outperforming those who oppose it.

More . . .