ObamaCare and 2010: Are Dems suicidal?

posted at 12:02 am on November 24, 2009 by Karl

Folks like National Review’s Rich Lowry look at the Democrats’ drive to pass ObamaCare, despite its unpopularity, and see lemmings headed off the political cliffs:

They’ve talked themselves into the ludicrously self-delusional notion that what ails them and the president is that they haven’t yet passed the hundreds of billions of dollars of tax hikes and Medicare cuts that finance (albeit incompletely) ObamaCare.

This will long be a case study in the annals of abnormal political psychology. Tax hikes undid George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton (Bush lost his presidency, Clinton his congressional majority), and Medicare cuts undid Newt Gingrich (taking the air out of his “Republican revolution”). Obama’s Democrats are prescribing themselves a strong dose of both, in an exercise in self-destructive quackery.

What causes this mindset? Prof. Larry Sabato suggests that Democrats view the results of the 2009 elections as showing that if they do not hang together, they will hang separately. They believe this because they have Democratic pollsters telling them so. Mark Mellman and Geoff Garin told Sentors this directly. We don’t have access to their polling, but we do have the latest from Democratic firm Public Policy Polling on the topic:

The political repercussions for Congressional Democrats of not passing a health care bill could be severe. Our newest national survey finds that Democrats lead 46-38 on the generic Congressional ballot. But asked how they would vote if no health care bill is passed respondents split 40-40 between saying they would vote Democratic or Republican in next year’s election.

In some sense the Democrats may be in a damned if you don’t or damned if you do position on health care. Asked how they would vote for Congress next year if a health care bill with a public option is passed respondents said they would go Democratic by a 46-41 margin, still more narrow than before any hypotheticals about health care outcomes were introduced into the questions.

(BTW, if you read the accompanying .pdf, you won’t see hypotheticals about health care outcomes, which means PPP probably has some data still tucked away that is just too scary for public consumption.) The sample for this poll is probably a bit off. The initial generic ballot numbers lean toward the optimistic side for Dems, based on recent polling of Registered Voters (PPP’s sample). On the other hand, this sample voted for Obama over McCain by a margin of only 47%-45% (though respondents have been known to “misremember” their prior votes, based on current popularity). Regardless of my opinion of this particular poll, its general thrust represents the logic behind the current Democratic calculations about ObamaCare.

The flaw in this logic is that the United States does not conduct national elections — it conducts them in House Districts and in states for Senators. While there is a general statistical relationship between the generic ballot and House seats, it is the Blue Dogs and New Dems that are most in danger in 2010. Indeed, according to TIME, Mark Mellman told Dem Senators a similar tale about the 1994 GOP tsunami. But Sean Trende’s regression analysis of the 1994 midterms shows that election was about throwing out Dems who voted too liberally for their districts — the more liberal bills they supported (the Clinton budget, the assault weapons ban, etc.), the more likely they were to lose.

Generic numbers are no comfort to people like Rep. Vic Snyder or any number of previously safe Dems eyeing a brutal struggle next year. Six-term Rep. Dennis Moore (D-MO) has already seen the writing on the wall, and announced his retirement. Blue Dogs and New Dems hoping to keep their jobs need to remind themselves that all elections are local.

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