{"id":273516,"date":"2010-02-03T17:43:14","date_gmt":"2010-02-03T22:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.35292"},"modified":"2010-02-03T18:16:34","modified_gmt":"2010-02-03T23:16:34","slug":"new-ppp-poll-suggests-dems-should-pass-health-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/273516","title":{"rendered":"New PPP Poll Suggests Dems Should Pass Health Care?"},"content":{"rendered":"

So what to make of the new PPP poll suggesting that Demcorats are marginally better off passing health care than not?  I take it seriously.  But not too seriously, for the following reasons:<\/p>\n

1.  It’s a national poll, but congressmen are running in local
\nraces.  The poll shows that Democrats say they are more likely to turn
\nout, and independents who like health care reform say they will like
\ntheir representatives better, if it passes.  But we don’t know where
\nthose base members and HCR-favoring independents live.  They probably
\nare not clustered in a state like Arkansas, where over 60% of the
\nvoters polled by PPP (a Democratic outfit) reported that they were
\nagainst health care reform.  Motivating the base in California in New
\nYork isn’t going to save Blanche Lincoln.<\/p>\n

2.  Polls are an okay
\nguide to public opinion about things (with the usual caveats about
\nframing).  They are not a good guide to what people will do.  Just ask
\nthe executives who brought you New Coke.  The customers they surveyed
\noverwhelmingly said they’d switch to New Coke.  They weren’t lying;
\nthey just didn’t know what they were actually going to do.  <\/p>\n

3. 
\nAnother round of health care legislating might drive its popularity
\ndown even further in the polls.  Which would make passing the
\nlegislation even more costly.<\/p>\n

4.  Passing HCR has opportunity
\ncosts.  Time spent negotiating this is time not spent passing some
\nother piece of legislation that might actually move your popularity
\nupward in November.  Nancy Pelosi doesn’t care about such fripperies;
\nher seat is safe.  But anyone in danger cares very much.<\/p>\n

5. 
\nPassing health care will refresh the public’s memory of it.  The longer
\nago an electoral initiative happened, the less salient it is.  In an
\nelection year, even three months matter.<\/p>\n

6.  Evidence from an actual election offers some counterevidence<\/a> to the PPP poll:<\/p>\n

\n

There were two controversial pieces of legislation that defined the
\nClinton Administration for Republican-leaning voters: the assault
\nweapons ban and the first Clinton budget (a.k.a. the tax hike). If we
\nlook at the fifteen Democrats who voted against both pieces of
\nlegislation, only one lost (she represented a district that gave Bush a
\n15-point win in 1992). In fact, about half of them saw their share of
\nthe vote increase or stay roughly the same from 1992!<\/p>\n

Let’s move on to Democratic incumbents who represented
\nRepublican-leaning districts who voted for only one of these two pieces
\nof legislation. There were thirty-seven such Democrats. The casualty
\nrate here is a little higher; thirteen of them, or thirty-five percent
\nof them, lost. And of the twenty-two Democrats from Republican-leaning
\ndistricts who voted for both<\/em> pieces of controversial legislation, ten of them (45%) lost.<\/p>\n

In other words, the problem for Democrats in 1994 was not that they
\ndidn’t support Clinton’s agenda enough. It was that they got too far
\nout in front of their conservative-leaning districts and supported the
\nPresident too much.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Maybe I’m a heartless econblogger type, but I’ll take revealed
\npreference over stated preference every time.  Now who is willing to
\ntake the other side and argue that it was no easier for Republicans to
\ncampaign against real, existing, hated<\/i> laws than to campaign against phantom ClintonCare?<\/p>\n



\n

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\n\"\"<\/a>
\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So what to make of the new PPP poll suggesting that Demcorats are marginally better off passing health care than not?  I take it seriously.  But not too seriously, for the following reasons: 1.  It’s a national poll, but congressmen are running in local races.  The poll shows that Democrats say they are more likely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}