There have already been a number of good newspaper articles providing descriptive statistics that members with at-risk seats are more likely to vote against the House bill on Monday. Of the 19 most vulnerable house members, 13 voted against the bill. A Washington Post blog said, “The list of the 228 nays reads like a virtual target list for the two parties.”
Congressional Quarterly provides these charts making the same point:
Alice Shih and I ran a simple (logistic) regression which confirms this result. We found that at-risk candidates were 16 percent more likely to vote against the bill than safer seats (and that Republicans were 33 percent more likely to vote “no” than Democrats).
But there were a few surprises. After we controlled for the foreclosure rate and the other variables, black representatives were 18 percent more likely to vote against the bill than white representatives. Representatives who were not running for re-election were 60 percent more likely to vote in favor of the bill.
This seems like further evidence that representatives freed from the constraints of being re-elected were more likely to follow their party leaders and support the bill. All of these results are statistically significant (p. < .05).
We also found that representatives in states with higher foreclosure rates were estimated to be more likely to vote against the bill, but we were a bit surprised that this result was not even close to being statistically significant. The median voter in the polls doesn’t seem to support the bill, but the level of disapproval doesn’t seem to be statistically related to the local level of foreclosure.
Here is the raw output from the regression:
(At-risk data are taken from Cook Political Report. State foreclosure rate data are taken from RealtyTrac.)
So as we quickly move toward another House vote, how can McCain or Obama turn some of these nays to yeas?
It’s hard to offer a representative who’s fighting for his or her political life an incentive to flip-flop — especially when “challengers and open-seat candidates were the quickest to denounce the package.”
At the end of the day, it may be necessary to get the at-risk incumbents and their challengers to agree to take this issue off the table. If McCain and Obama jointly reached out to both sides in these close races, it might be possible for both contenders for a House seat to simultaneously agree to support the package. This will not be easy. Adversaries in tight races are loathe to cooperate when there is political advantage to be had in clinging to the popular position. But the alternative is to ask some incumbent members to engage in probabilistic political suicide.
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And herein lies the problem with politicians. They are always putting their own self-interests ahead of the great good of the country.
Maplight.org deserves kudos for revealing the key variable in this vote: how much the congressperson received from banks in their last campaign.
http://maplight.org/map/us/bill/72675/default/votes/vote-351995
Given all the warnings about the impending doom we would face if we didn’t do anything soon, I was a bit surprised when the House voted against the bill. It appears that Congressional members from both parties don’t think doom is as impending as they would like each other to believe. I think a lot of the noise coming from the administration and from party leaders if a way to manipulate where the final bailout bill will be on the left-right spectrum.
http://www.quantitativepeace.com/blog/2008/09/how-urgent-is-u.html
I got a suggestion as how to change minds: Come up with an actual plan.
If I were a candidate facing a tough race and I was a previous “no” vote. Then after changing my vote I’d pitch it to my constituents by saying “I voted against it because it wasn’t good enough. I fought to make it better and now it will help ordinary Americans, not just Wall St.”
Since my representative voted no-the only solution seems to be to vote no on his continuing to be able to vote against his constiuents best interests
Our government has used fearmongering too much already to convince us to do things it wants but we don’t. Now when there really is a potential for doom and gloom we’re all just to tired of hearing them cry wolf to care.
Well, now their adds can truthfully say “Voted no on bail outs for fat cat money lenders.” and they should get on with business.