Health care reform shorts: Nate Silver has advice for Blanche Lincoln

This is about the politics, not the substance, of this thing that we may get that may (or may not) that do something to make health care more available and more affordable for more of us. Thanks Five Thirty Eight.



This graph shows what happens when a Senator takes a high profile role in the health care reform discussion. Montana's Dem Senator Jon Tester is no liberal and his state is more Republican than Democratic (barely). But he signed on to "reform" early on and shut up. His Dem colleague Max Baucus of the Senate Finance Committee fame tried to be the "hero" who brokered a "bipartisan" bill -- and he got hammered from right and left.

Senator Blanche Lincoln of Republican leaning Arkansas has the potential to cast the deciding vote on whether this thing passes. Silver says to her: look at the Montanans.

...the path of least resistance would seem to be committing to voting for cloture, so that the Democratic base, your colleagues in the Senate, and the national media don't go nuclear on you -- but against the underlying bill, which is unpopular in your state. Dithering, on the other hand, gives pretty much everyone the opportunity to be unhappy with you. And the polling evidence shows that if you give your voters an opportunity to be unhappy with you on health care reform, they probably will be.

Let's hope she prefers being re-elected to being the center of attention which is what holding out against the bill will get her.

Then there's the noxious Joe Lieberman whose sole discernible purpose in life is being the center of attention...