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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The state level seems too coarse a level of analysis to determine if there is a forclosure rate effect on votes, especially for large and diverse states such as California, Texas, or Florida.
It would be interesting if the results continued to not be statistically significant if we refined the level of analysis to the representative’s district, not just the state the district is in.
Rather than strong-arming representatives to vote for a crappy bailout, why not come up with a better one? How about a plan that actually recapitalizes the banks, protects taxpayers and does something to help homeowners. The Paulson plan is absurd. The amendments the Dems are crowing about are weak and many are non-binding.
At the very least, how about holding some hearings with testimony from economists and not just Bernanke and Paulson.
So.
It appears that they way to getr what we want is to get off our *sses quickly and get recall petitions fired up for every “not at risk” pol?
That’s not a half-bad idea.
Post 10 is correct. This $700B plan just does not pass the smell test to those of us in the trenches. Several other more reasonable and rational plans are out there, from the WSJ (Chile’s banking crisis)to this blog which certainly appear to create less heartburn than what is proposed. Why not a simple plan similar to what Warren Buffett has done with Goldman and GE.
However that still means there are 81 ‘No’ Democrats and 45 ‘No’ Republicans in non competitive races who could change their votes (or not).
I think the way to get a rescue plan passed is to switch to Krugman’s plan (buy the banks) and away from Paulson’s (buy the banks’ most toxic assets).
I don’t want this bill passed, period. Let the people who created the mess pay for it. I didn’t buy a house I couldn’t afford, I didn’t create a bad adjustable rate loan, I didn’t package the high risk deals and sell them off, and I didn’t profit on any of these transactions. I don’t have any money invested in the stock market because I live paycheck to paycheck.
When the “bailout plan” includes seizing and liquidating property bought with the profits from these crooked lending practices, then I’ll write my Congressman to endorse it.
I can’t afford to spend more than $10 a day to feed myself, I’m NOT paying to save crooked rich bankers. LET THEM FALL.
first: joebloww has quite self-destructive tendencies I hope he can overcome.
A usually forgotten fact is that the framers of the Constitution did not envision Senators and Representatives being elected to do exactly what the majority of their constituents said. The are elected to do what is best for the country. We would be better off if our elected officials kept that in mind – even at the risk of being voted out of office.