Iraqi Election Goes Down to the Wire

Tomorrow morning, the final results of the parliamentary election in Iraq will be announced. As it stands now, at least 9 coalitions will earn seats, and no clear leading party. With about 95% polling stations having reported, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki's State of Law coalition has about 25.8 percent of the national vote, while challenger Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya list holding just barely more, with 25.9 percent nationally.



As we previewed back in January, several major fault lines in Iraqi society are made clear through the political polarization. "Moderate" Shia voters, many associated with leading cleric Ali al-Sistani have generally voted with the State of Law coalition. More radical Shia voters, mostly from the southern Baghdad slums and south eastern border provinces with Iran, have tended toward the National Iraqi Alliance, who are headlined by the populist junior cleric Moqtada al-Sadr (known better for his well-armed militia than his Islamic learning).


Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya (Iraqi nationalism) coalition is intended as a secular party that cuts across sectarian and ethnic bounds. In effect, it is supported by Iraq's Sunni population, and a small minority of Shias who have been disaffected by the sectarian and southern-focused State of Law or the more religious and radical National Iraqi Alliance. Finally, three Kurdish parties -- led by the main Kurdish List -- continue to dominate the Kurdistan region and continue to grow in influence over Kirkuk.



While the system as a whole is based on proportional representation, most seats are distributed proportionally at the provincial level. In 2005, distortions caused by this system were mitigated through a set of 45 compensatory seats that were allocated at the national level to parties whose seat totals at the provincial level underperformed their national vote share.

The passage last December of a new electoral law, however, resulted in the reduction of the party-based compensatory seats from 45 to 7, with an additional 8 seats reserved for national minorities. As a consequence, the potential for distortion is somewhat higher, especially in favor of parties that outperform at the individual provincial level, something that harms the near-even split the Iraqi National Alliance and State of Law have achieved in the south compared Iraqiya’s domination in the north.

With results this close, it is likely that the negotiations for the new government will be quite extensive. Reports of multiple high level meetings between various party and coalition leaders have been made, with only a few parties completely incompatible in terms of building a governing coalition. The Sadr faction of the National Iraqi Alliance has ruled out working with an Allawi government, but State of Law, the Kurds and Iraqiya are in close negotiations.

In the near term, these negotiations may be hampered by the accusations of fraud that have flown in all directions. Early on, members of Allawi’s coalition accused the electoral commission and local officials in Baghdad of engaging in fraud to help Maliki’s State of Law Coalition. Similar accusations were made by the Iraqi National Alliance and State of Law at one another in the south. In turn, now that Allawi's returns have improved, State of Law has accused him of fraud and demanded a national recount.

As a result, the electoral and governing situation remains in flux, particularly as the United States endeavors to play an increasingly low profile role in the country. The Obama administration and military officials are looking for a resolved and stable government to emerge from this election, securing the way forward for a phased withdrawal through 2011.

On the other hand, further accusations of fraud, a failure to build a governing coalition or the unhinging of various extreme elements of the Sunni Arab and Shia communities could together prompt much of the progress of the last several years come undone. As such, much rides on this election, based on peaceful negotiation and principled transfer of power.
---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

Research assistant Dan Berman provided quantitative and writing contributions to this article

There's More...

Contract Post

Are Democrats Better Off for Having Passed Health Care? Yes -- and No.

More polling data is starting to pour in on health care reform and it generally contains decent, but not great, numbers for Democrats. Most of the polls show a bump of some kind in approval for health care reform -- but it's not as large as that implied by the USA Today/Gallup one-day poll that was released on Tuesday. If we take an average of the four polls that have been conducted entirely after the health care bill passed the House, rather (those from Gallup, Rasmussen, Quinnipiac and CBS), they average out to 43 percent in favor and 46 percent opposed. Those are numbers that I think Democrats would gladly take relative to where health care has been in the past, but it's not exactly as though the bill has become wildly popular -- nor is it likely to do so in advance of the midterms.

Of the polls that have come out so far, I would most recommend the one from Quinnipiac, who in essence did two separate large surveys just before and after the health care bill was passed. Quinnipiac's is by far the deepest of the post-health care polls, both in terms of the sample size and the breadth of the questions that were asked. And unlike some of the other pollsters, they used the same question wording when talking to both the befores and the afters.

Quinnipiac found about a 4-5 point bump in support for the health care bill itself, although a larger bump (8 points) in Obama's handling of the issue. Obama's overall approval rating, on the other hand, was little changed.

What's a bit more surprising is that Quinnipiac also found a decent-sized bump in approval of the Democrats in Congress: from a pathetically low 30 percent to a not-quite-as-awful 36 percent. And most of the bump came from independent voters, among whom approval increased from 19 percent to 33.



Perceptions of Republicans in Congress also improved somewhat -- from 31 percent to 34 percent -- but almost all of the bounce came from Republicans themselves:



These results parallel those found in February by Public Policy Polling, whose poll showed that health care reform was actually thought of more highly by swing voters than by voters (mostly Republicans) who had already picked a side.

What I think we're seeing are sort of two competing frameworks for how voters evaluate the performance of the Congress. One is more literal-minded: do we like the policies that the Congress has enacted or tried to enact? And the Democrats don't score so well there -- the numbers on health care are perhaps marginally improved, but they still aren't very good and perceptions of the Democrats in Congress remain poor overall. On the other hand, voters may also be responding -- perhaps more at a subconscious level -- to the extent to which each party in Congress looks effectual or not. There, the numbers seem to be a bit better for Democrats -- they've at least managed to do what Democrats with large majorities are supposed to do. Moreover, the gains may be coming from relatively important groups, such as independents who would still consider a vote for the Democratic party Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, have also gotten some credit for their valiant goal-line stand -- but most of it seems to becoming from Republicans themselves, who were already highly motivated to turn out to vote.

There is arguably a similar dynamic with respect to President Obama: the numbers on his handling of health care have improved more than the numbers on the health care bill itself. Voters are certainly not enamored of the policy, but at least he appears to have some follow-through. On the other hand, Obama's overall approval ratings have not improved much -- although could also reflect the fact that health care reform actually isn't quite that essential in voters' minds as compared to things like the economy.

On balance, I think if you polled Republican strategists right now and they were being honest, they'd probably concede that Democrats are better off for having brought health care to completion after having invested so much energy in it before. The Democrats have a case they can make now -- we're making the tough decisions and getting things done -- which may not be horribly persuasive to much of the electorate but is at least marginally better than the complete directionlessness they seemed to be exhibiting a few weeks ago.

On the other hand, I think if you polled Democratic strategists and they were being honest, they'd probably concede that -- electorally-speaking -- Democrats would have been better off if they'd found a different direction last year, focusing perhaps on financial reform and then only turning to health care if their numbers warranted it. One of the risks in undertaking health care in the first place, indeed, is that there was essentially no exit strategy: no matter how badly the electorate reacted to the policy -- and they reacted quite badly -- Democrats would probably have been even worse off if they'd abandoned it somewhere along the way.

There's More...

Contract Post

Healthcare Goes South

I try to raise non-southern strategy arguments from Whistling Past Dixie as infrequently as possible. But blame this post on two colleagues, each of whom sent me a recent link about healthcare and the South I now feel compelled to mention in tandem.

The first was from Chris Kromm. Chris is executive director of the venerable Institute for Southern Studies. Although we have had some public disagreements about whether Democrats should invest resources to win elections in the South--you can intuit his position if you know mine--he does not hesitate to report and opine about how decisions made in the South or by southern politicians affect the progressive movement, of which he is a key leader in the region.

Here is an excerpt from his recent analysis of the votes on healthcare reform:

...whether or not HR 3590 should be put on the same level as, say, the Civil Rights Act, one point is indisputable: Yesterday, as in 1964, the South ended up on the wrong side of history.

The numbers tell the story:

*Out of 140 House members in 13 Southern states, only 31% voted "aye" to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which passed 219-212.

*Only one Southern state had a majority of its House delegation vote on the winning side: West Virginia (two out of three).

*Two Southern states--Alabama and Louisiana--had zero "yes" votes; Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi each only had one representative voting with the majority.

The reluctance to embrace reform included Southern Democrats, whose stubborn opposition--and vacillation--gave [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and the White House fits in their frantic push to secure votes last week.

Overall, 70% of Democrats hailing from Southern states voted for reform, delivering 43 votes crucial to the bill's passage.

But it was a shortage of votes from Southern Democrats that put the bill in jeopardy, forcing Democratic leaders into last-minute negotiations to win over abortion opponents led by Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan.

Maybe those Southern legislators were listening to economists in their respective states/region?

That may sound silly, but this blog post, sent to me by a journalist friend, is an analysis by Menzie Chinn of Econbrowser of the regional breakdown in public positions taken by university or think tank economists on reform. Same pattern.

For those unfamiliar, my argument has never been that Democrats should try to lose seats in the South or aim for a de-southernized coalition. And, of course, African American and Hispanic Democrats in the South vote pretty reliably with the majority and/or for progressive legislation. My point is only that if Democrats had a majority coalition of, say, 250 seats, they'd want the share of those seats from the non-South to be as large as possible--and for precisely the problems of coalition-building and stalemate Chris talks about.

My related point is also that a non-southern majority is more likely to survive a political downturn for Democrats. I will be writing about that at some later point--and we will get a key test of that proposition this November.

There's More...

Contract Post

Senate Forecast Update, 3/24

Democrats now project to hold an average of 54.0 seats when the Senate convenes in January, 2011, according to our latest forecast, and Republicans 46.0. This reflects a roughly one-seat improvement for Republicans since our previous forecast on March 10th.

Republicans now have about a 10 percent chance of taking an outright majority of Senate seats, according to the model, up slightly from before -- and about an 18 percent chance of getting to at least a tie. Democrats still have about an 8 percent chance, on the other hand, of recovering a 60-seat majority -- although obviously this would require a substantial shift in the national political environment. None of our analysis directly reflects any potential impact from the Democrats' passage of their health care bill.



The slight gains the Republicans have made have both general and specific causes. On the one hand, whereas two weeks ago it appeared as though there might have been a slight bounceback in the Democrats' polling, it looks flat instead now (although it is probably not still declining across the board.) Because our model incorporates a "trendline adjustment", it will be sensitive to these subtle movements. Meanwhile, the Republicans have made specific gains in California, where the vaunted Field Poll now shows the two leading Republican candidates in highly competitive races against Barbara Boxer, and Wisconsin, where Tommy Thompson has had a couple of good polls and seems to have become more interested in a potential race against Russ Feingold. There are few states, on the other hand, where Democrats' fortunes have tangibly improved over the last two weeks; Colorado, where Jane Norton has proven to be unappealing to some voters and where Republicans might not nominate her anyway, is probably the closest.

One word of warning: this is a forecast based on purely objective evidence. Subjectively, I think the model probably overstates the likelihood of a Republican takeover in Wisconsin (because of Tommy Thompson's lobbying problems) and understates it in Illinois (because of Alexi Giannoulias's banking problems).

Detailed results are below.

There's More...

Contract Post

Constitutionality of Mandatory Insurance

A few months ago I wrote a post about the types of "constitutional chicanery" that certain political advocates utilize to confuse debate over key issues. And here we go again...

This time we have state attorneys general declaring that they are going to use the courts to challenge healthcare reform as unconstitutional because it constitutes a mandatory direct tax. A short while ago on Fox News I saw a segment that included one "expert" who claimed that healthcare reform would do something "unprecedented," namely, requiring citizens to purchase some commodity.

Unprecedented? Really?

Let's start with the direct part. I would encourage anyone who believes such claims to pull out his or her most recent paycheck. Someplace on there you will see FICA deductions that (in theory at least) are set aside to fund Social Security (OADSI) and Medicare programs. These are the two biggest government-sponsored insurance programs administered by the feds, and two of the largest line items in the federal budget. These paycheck deductions are not optional, and for all but the self-employed they are taken out immediately.

Put another way, you are already required by law to buy the commodities we might simply call "retirement insurance" and "medical insurance." You can't opt out of either program and you can't delay the payments--which we may as well think of as "premiums"--until April 15 each year. (I suppose you can opt out of taking the benefits later.) Moreover, you only see in your paycheck the true impacts of half your premiums, because the other half is hidden by being "contributed" by your employer--although this also ought to be considered lost income and thus a mandatory direct tax because employers account for this tax obligation when setting salaries or wages. Although there's no payroll deduction for unemployment insurance, employers also must consider these "premiums" when setting those wages and salaries, so let's classify that a mandatory but indirect tax.

As for mandatory, although there is some debate about whether the insurance mandate will actually be enforced--and strong evidence that it won't be because there are no criminal penalties for people who fail to buy insurance--it is clearly less mandatory given that it requires citizens to actively go out and buy it instead of having it taxed automatically from their paychecks.

In sum, the newly legislated insurance tax is at least as indirect as unemployment insurance, more indirect than either Social Security or Medicare taxes, and less mandatory than any of the three. And yet it will be challenged as unconstitutional on mandatory direct tax grounds? One's head spins.

Now, the kicker: In a related segment moments earlier, Fox News' Bret Bair was reporting on how the healthcare reform would entail "raiding" Medicare to pay for the new healthcare programs. That is, there was an attempt to scare seniors by alluding to the possibility of touching a mandatory health insurance program that comes with a mandatory direct tax provision--but without so much as a pause to consider whether that programs fails the very constitutional standard raised in the next segment about the new healthcare law.

I'm sure there are many Americans who would like the government to get out of the business of providing insurance altogether. Fine. But if opponents want to object to healthcare mandates on constitutional grounds, they ought to at least be internally consistent and come out against Social Security, Medicare and probably unemployment insurance too. For they are the obvious and (as yet) constitutional precedents here, and they are all at least as direct and more mandatory than what the healthcare legislation requires.

Update: Reader Steve J. below raises a good point about being forced to buy a commodity in the private market v. from the government. I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but it seems to me that (other than the income tax constitutionalized by the 16th Amendment) the imposition of a direct tax AND the requirement that that tax be paid to the government would be less constitutional than simply mandating one buy something from a private company or entity. The point is that Social Security/Medicare/UI premiums would seem to be less constitutional than the healthcare tax, at least by this standard. My point is that there is an inconsistency here in what constitutes constitutionality, with a stricter taxing protocol regarded (not by everyone, of course) as constitutional.

Update 2: Those commenters below who raise the example of mandatory car insurance are correct in terms of a general precedent, of course, but I think constitutional lawyers (and/or conservatives) would say the key distinction here is these are state laws, not federal.

There's More...

Contract Post

If There's a Bounce, Will it Hold?

Democrats are understandably thrilled about a USA Today/Gallup poll that came out a few hours ago and which shows a fairly sizable 49 percent plurality in favor of their health care bills, against 40 percent opposed. The +9 net score in the poll, conducted in its entirety yesterday after the House passed its health care bill, is the best observed in any individual health care poll since October.

If I were a Republican, then I'm sure I'd have a little pang of fear right now. Any scenario in which health care reform actually turns out to be somewhat popular is an utter nightmare for them: they'll have conceded a huge policy victory to the Democrats without improving their situation at the ballot box. Even the best case scenarios for Democrats, mind you, are not exactly great: perhaps a loss of 15-20 seats in the House and 2-4 in the Senate -- about what a party usually loses at its first midterm. (I don't think Democrats can do much better than that unless there's also an unexpectedly robust recovery in the employment picture.) But it sure wouldn't feel very good for Republicans, especially if the emergent narratives were that (i) the Republicans can get only so far with a strategy of obstructionism and (ii) Democrats benefit when they band together to pass major agenda items.

But -- hold your horses. This is just one poll, and even if the bounce is real, it may very well evaporate. Let's first put the Gallup results into a little bit more context, and then consider how likely the bounce is to stick.

Gallup's poll shows 79 percent of Democrats, 46 percent of independents and 14 percent of Republicans saying that passage of the health care proposal was a "good thing". In comparison to an average of other polls since Scott Brown's election that provided a partisan ID breakdown, these reflect considerably improved numbers among both Democrats and independents but hardly any gain among Republicans:



What about in comparison to other Gallup polls, however? Gallup has generally shown relatively good numbers for the Democrats on health care -- their most recent poll on March 7th showed 45 percent in favor and 48 percent opposed. Unfortunately, this doesn't make for an apples-to-apples comparison either, since Gallup has changed their question wording: instead of their previous methodology, in which they asked whether the respondent was more likely or less likely to vote for a Congressman who supported health care reform, their newest poll simply asks whether the bills were a good idea or not.

Gallup's new phrasing is actually a little bit closer to that employed by most other pollsters -- nevertheless, house effects can result from many things other than question wording (such as construction of the sample), so a comparison to past Gallup polling is worthwhile as well. Here, we see a bounce that is somewhat smaller and a little bit lopsided -- the number of people in support of health care reform increased by just 3 percent as compared with an average of Gallup's five most recent polls, but the number opposed decreased by 8.



Again, however, none of this really matters unless some of the bounce actually sticks. It's not unusual for a candidate or cause to see its numbers improve after it wins a couple of high-stakes news cycles -- but the bounce usually evaporates after a couple of weeks.

In this case, however, I think the bounce would have some chance of sticking:

1. Some of the opposition to health care reform, as we've emphasized repeatedly, came from the left. But these people didn't necessarily prefer the status quo -- they were holding out for single-payer, a bill with a public option, or some other more "radical" alternative. Now that those grass-is-greener alternatives are essentially off the table, however, and now that they've seen Democrats really go to bat and take a risk to achieve one of their long-term goals, they might be brought back into the fold.

2. Some of the objections to health care may have stemmed from process rather than the contents of the bill itself. Now that the process part is basically over, with the climax coming from a relatively straightfoward up-and-down vote in the House, those negative optics may be minimized. Democrats were wise not to have used the deem-and-pass strategy (and stupid to have thought about it for more than 5 minutes), and a bit fortunate that the climactic nature of the House vote will take attention away from the Senate, where the reconciliation process could be much messier. Either way, while the cross-party fighting over health care reform has just begun, the Democrats' internecine wars are mostly over, and most stakeholders in the party will be fully on board for the remainder of the year with selling the bill to the public -- rather than being circumspect as they try to stake out a negotiating position.

3. Lastly, now that a bill has actually been passed, there is less ambiguity about its contents. Voters may have been justified not to give the bill the benefit of the doubt so long as there were several different versions of reform floating around.

ON THE OTHER HAND, the Gallup poll also detected a fairly positive emotional reaction to passage of the bill -- and some of that will fade. I don't think the Republicans did a very good job of making their case on Sunday night: their bellicose rhetoric, compelling in the context of a tea party or stump speech, looked out of place on the House floor. Nor were they helped by the very small minority of protesters outside the Capitol who behaved like imbeciles. But most of that stuff will be forgotten about in a couple of weeks.

Here's my best guess: I think most of the bounce among Democrats will actually stick, but that most of the bounce among independents (and Republicans) will fade. If, for example, we take the average of the Gallup bounces as determined from the two methodologies outlined above, then wipe out one-third of it among Democrats and two-thirds of it among Republicans and indies, and then append it to the pre-passage Pollster.com average, we show the numbers eventually settling in at 45-47: about an even split.



But -- we will see. Although it will be interesting to see whether other polls show a bounce of a similar magnitude to Gallup (the only other post-passage poll out so far is from Utah -- it actually does show a slight bounce), the only thing that really matters is what the numbers will look like in November.

EDIT: There's also a Bloomberg poll out that shows pretty much the same ol' numbers -- 38 percent support, 50 percent opposed, but 3/4 of the interviews were conducted before passage of the bill. Just be patient guys: I'm sure there will be plenty of polling out later this week.

EDIT x2: Just to be clear: there certainly is some chance that the Gallup poll will prove to be a mild outlier -- I don't want to undersell that possibility too much, especially since the Gallup poll was in the field for just one day -- although the Bloomberg poll doesn't really provide much evidence either way. Probably going to take about a week before we really know whether there was a bounce or not, especially since the bounce could have several different potential triggers -- e.g. the vote itself versus the signing ceremony, etc.

There's More...

Contract Post

A Closer Look At Inflation

Inflation is a very important issue because high inflation would force the Fed's hand with monetary policy (forcing them to raise rates) whereas low inflation allows the Fed to keep interest rates low for an extended period of time.

First, let's start with a definition of inflation. This is from my econ text in college -- the 12th edition of Paul Samuelson's Economics Text on page 226:

Inflation occurs when the general level of prices and costs is rising....By deflation we mean that prices and costs are generally falling.

A little inflation is healthy because it indicates there is sufficient demand or cost push to increase prices. For example, if there are enough people who want a television, retailers can increase the TV's cost knowing someone will buy the item at a higher price. Think of this like a trading pit on the NYSE.

Deflation, on the other hand, is perhaps one of the scariest developments an economy can face, largely because of the impact of a deflationary spiral. This starts when people really slow down their purchases of everything. This leads retailers to drop their costs to attract shoppers. But lower sales and lower prices means lower profits for retailers and manufacturers which leads to increased lay-offs. Higher unemployment leads to lower consumer spending and the cycle continues.

Let's start with import prices:

All Imports: In February, import prices decreased for the first time since a 0.6 percent decline in July, falling 0.3 percent. The February downturn followed a 1.3 percent advance in January and was driven by a turnaround in fuel prices. Despite the February decline, import prices advanced 11.2 percent for the year ended in February after decreasing 12.7 percent for the February 2008-09 period.

Fuel Imports: Import fuel prices countered an upward trend in February, falling 1.9 percent following a 4.9 percent rise in January. A 2.2 percent decline in petroleum prices was slightly offset by a 2.6 percent increase in natural gas prices. Over the past year, the price index for petroleum increased 81.3 percent and natural gas prices rose 16.3 percent, driving overall fuel prices up 70.8 percent for the same period. The 12-month increase in fuel prices followed a 49.8 percent drop for the February 2008-09 period.

All Imports Excluding Fuel: Prices for nonfuel imports rose for the seventh consecutive month, advancing 0.2 percent. The increase was led by higher prices for nonfuel industrial supplies and materials. Lower prices for foods, feeds, and beverages, capital goods, and consumer goods mitigated the overall advance. Over the past 12 months, nonfuel import prices increased 2.0 percent.

Take a look at this chart of USO - the ETF for oil prices:



Note that a year ago prices were at extremely depressed levels which explains the 81% increase in fuel prices.

Here is a chart of the import price data:


These numbers are well-contained and don't point to any inflationary possibility. The year over year numbers are influenced more by the low readings last year.

Let's deal with the producer prices data by looking at the stages of production. The reason why is producer prices are best thought of as a time series. If prices increase at the beginning of production (crude goods) they typically work their way through to the end of production at some point. But it's also incredibly important to remember there is a tremendous amount of price arbitrage with production -- meaning, the price difference between inputs and outputs can be very large, giving manufacturers a fair amount of flexibility. Let's start with crude goods:



Note the fairly high rate of volatility in these numbers. The crude numbers increase at higher rates one month and then barely increase the next month. This is the result of fairly volatile commodity prices as seen in this chart of the DBC -- the ETF for the overall commodity price index:



Also note that the year over year numbers are high because of low year over year comparisons. This will exist with all the year over year data we're looking at.



Note the volatility with intermediate prices as well. This volatility is good as it allows manufacturers to "catch their breath" from a price increase. For example, suppose input prices at the crude production level increase .5% in January. Manufacturers will have to perform calculations to figure out how to deal with these price increases. But if prices only increase .1% in February, then they have an additional month to factor in the January increase.


Finally, finished goods -- which include by definition the previous month's crude and intermediate numbers -- have been bouncing around as well. Here is a chart of the monthly and 12 month change in the PPI. Note that negative readings are typically associated with large drops in either food or energy prices (which are explained by the commodity price chart above):



Here is a chart of the year over year percentage change in producer prices:



While the number has recently spiked, it has done so because of the incredibly low year over year reading earlier this year. Also note the year over year number is hardly extraordinary.

Finally, with PPI there is little chance of inflation increasing because of the current low levels of capacity utilization in the system. Here is a chart of capacity utilization from the latest industrial production report which shows a large amount of excess capacity that can absorb production increases and thereby prevent unwanted inflationary pressures.



Also note that with a high unemployment rate there is no inflationary pressure from wage increases.

Now to to CPI:

On a seasonally adjusted basis, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) was unchanged in February, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the index increased 2.1 percent before seasonal adjustment.

The unchanged all items index was the result of a decline in the energy index being offset by slight increases in the indexes for food and for all items less food and energy. Within the latter group, declines in the indexes for apparel and household furnishings and operations were more than offset by continuing increases in the indexes for medical care and used cars and trucks. The 12-month increase in the index for all items less food and energy now stands at 1.3 percent, the lowest since February 2004.

The food index also edged up in February. The food at home index rose slightly, the net result of the major grocery store food group indexes posting a mix of modest increases and decreases. In contrast the energy index declined in February. Decreases in the indexes for gasoline, electricity, and fuel oil more than offset an increase in the index for natural gas.

Let's go to the charts:



These are not levels that should scare anyone.



The year-over-year numbers are also well-contained, as shown by this longer YOY chart of the percentage change in CPI:



Finally, let's look at possible monetary causes of inflation. Sometime over the last year, Art Laffer argued the explosion in the nation's monetary base would lead to unprecedented inflation. First, here is a definition of monetary base:

In economics, the monetary base (also base money, money base, high-powered money, reserve money, or, in the UK, narrow money) is a term relating to the money supply, the amount of money in the economy. It is highly liquid money and includes currency and vault cash. The monetary base consists of coins, paper money, and commercial banks' reserves with the central bank.

Here is the current chart of the year over year percentage change in the monetary base:



As the chart shows, at the height of the financial panic, the Fed injected a large amount of liquidity into the system. But, as the chart also shows, that number is also now decreasing at a substantial rate. In addition, here are the year over year percentage change charts of M1, M2 and MZM:







None of them show any inflationary pressure from the massive liquidity injection by the Fed. The reason is the decrease in credit which has occurred over the last year or so. A massive liquidity injection will become inflationary if it is turned into credit. However, credit has contracted:



The bottom line is clear: inflation is not an issue right now.

There's More...

Contract Post

The Fourth Branch

This is response to the numerous critics who have suggested that the Democrats were somehow unethical, anti-democratic or even tyrannical to enact their health care policy at a time when it polls poorly in most opinion surveys. I find this argument to be exceptionally weak. You can certainly argue that the health care bills are bad policy and that enacting them in spite of what seems to be substantial opposition is foolhardy -- and it absolutely is unusual for Congress to enact bills of this magnitude with such tenuous public support.

But unethical? Was the "will of the electorate" breached? I think any such framing has to contend with the following 14 arguments:

1. That Obama and Democratic Congress were democratically elected by very robust majorities on a platform which expliclitly included health-care reform and has since time immemorial.

2. That the voters have almost immediate recourse in the form of midterm elections that will take place in eight months and a Presidential election that will take place in two years -- both of which come before the most substantial parts of the legislation are enacted.

3. That polls show the overall concepts of reforming the healthcare system and providing for universal coverage were popular at the start of the process and remain reasonably popular now.

4. That polls show that the specific details of the Democratic plan are (mostly) popular, and that when a neutral and accurate description of the contents of the bills are read to the respondent, support usually increases to plurality or majority levels.

5. That substantial elements of the public lack basic knowledge about verifiable facts of the bill, sometimes because of deliberate misrepresentations on the part of the bill's opponents.

6. That history suggests that endeavors of this nature (Medicare, Social Security, Romneycare) generally become popular and are appreciated by the large majority of voters at some point after they become law.

7. That a tangible percentage of those who register as opposed to the bill oppose it from the left -- probably enough to form a majority with those who support it -- and may nevertheless prefer it to the status quo (the more explicitly a poll compares the current proposals with the status quo -- see Question 25 here -- the more favorable the results tend to be).

8. That opinion polling is an inexact science -- especially on complex questions like health care -- and that it is sometimes conducted by those with perverse incentives.

9. That maniuplating the opinions of voters in order to affect instantenous public opinion surveys has become a more-or-less explicit goal of all parties in a legislative negotiation, and that the winner of the "game" of manipulating public opinion will often simply be the most skilled craftsman/technician (of course this is also true to some large extent of electoral politics).

10. That the polling is impacted by the fact that the health care bills tend to help a small number of people greatly (the uninsured) while potentially hurting a larger number of people slightly (such as through higher deficits and taxes) -- and that these inequities stem not from the "state of nature" but from arbitrary policy decisions made by past U.S. governments that benefited certain groups (such those employed by large businesses) at the expense of others: Is this also a kind of 'tyranny of the majority'?

11. That the groups who would benefit the most from health care reform tend to be politically disenfranchised and may not have their views reflected by polls, especially those of registered or likely voters.

12. That only a relatively small minority of the public wants the Congress to give up on health care reform, but that there are few obvious alternatives to the current proposals that are both politically tenable and fiscally responsible.

13. That the United States is a constitutional republic rather than a direct democracy.

14. That were the Congress closer to a direct democracy -- such as by having proportional representation of Senators, non-gerrymandered congressional districts, and a norm for majority-rules procedures in the Senate -- health care reform would have been signed into law months ago and would likely be substantially more liberal and sweeping than the reforms that have in fact been enacted.

***

But never mind all that. The three branches of government are no longer enough for the electorate to express itself: the pollsters, it seems, should get a veto too.

There's More...

Contract Post

Trading Markets See Ambiguous Impact from Health Care Passage

A lot of pundits are out with columns today in which they express with certainty that the passage of health care reform last night will doom -- or save -- the Democrats. But Intrade, the largest political betting market, sees considerably more ambiguous effects.

The chart below tracks the daily close of the 'Obamacare' contract at Intrade -- which has been live since January 21st -- and compares it against the contract representing a GOP takeover of the House. The correlation is positive (and statistically significant) but the magnitude of the effect is small: Intrade infers that Republicans would have had a 40 percent chance of taking over the House had the Democrats not passed Obamacare, but about a 47 percent chance now that they have.



Correlation, of course, is not causation, and there have been other news stories that broke during this period -- as well as the impact of fresh polling, etc. Nor are these markets especially liquid. So this is just one piece of data -- out of many -- to consider. But it suggests that health care -- or at least, the Democrats' decision to continue pushing health care following Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts -- may be a relatively minor factor in terms of the midterms. Actually, check that -- it does not necessarily mean the impact is minor so much as that it is uncertain. Passage of the bill might have been a high-risk, high-reward strategy, possibly affecting a large negative impact on the Democrats but also potentially a large positive one.

In any event, if you told the Democrats that the price of passing their health care bill was to go from having a 40 percent chance of losing the House for two years to a 47 percent chance, do you think they would have done it? I think they almost certainly would have; that implies just a 1 in 14 chance of losing the House when they wouldn't have otherwise.

The markets do not reveal any relationship between the passage of Obamacare and the GOP's chances of taking over the Senate (although the regression line slopes downward, it is not at all statistically significant.)



Looking at the Senate data is more problematic because the GOP's path toward a takeover is so tenuous that the contract may be substantially impacted by 'shocks' in the form of news from individual Senate races. Still, over the course of the past 10 days -- when Obamacare has gone from about a 50 percent chance of passing to near 100 percent -- the chance of a Senate takeover has actually declined some in the market's estimation. It's not necessarily impossible that the Democrats could experience differential effects in the House and the Senate, since the House has had the tougher vote to cast (and gotten nearly all the attention) post-Scott Brown. Moreover, several Democrats in tough districts had to flip from no to yes in order for the House to pass its bill; this won't be true when the Senate votes on its reconciliation package, since the Democrats already maxed out with 60 yea votes for health care in December.

The market also shows some correlation between the Obamacare contract and the Democrats' chances of retaining the Presidency in 2012, which it implies have declined from 59 percent to 55 percent as a result of the bill:



One last caveat: we should probably separate out the Democrats' decision to push forward with health care from their success in actually managing to pass it. If, for instance, the Democrats had pushed on health care, had seen several vulnerable House members commit or re-commit to a yes vote, and then had seen the effort collapse at the last minute, it seems a hard case to make that they would have been better off. But if you want to make the electoral case that the Democrats should have mothballed health care after Massachusetts and given up on comprehensive reform to focus instead on more popular measures, that's a different story.

There's More...

Contract Post

On the Appeal of Repeal

This is the 160th article that we will have written on health care reform over the course of the past year. As nice as it might be to move on to another subject, the debate over health care reform isn't going away any time soon, as the bill the Democrats passed last night will undergo a variety of political and legal challenges before the bulk of its provisions go into effect in 2014.

The sexiest of these challenges is the threat of repeal, which is the subject of an editorial in seemingly every conservative news outlet today. But it's also one of the least likely to threaten the bill. Repeal is not impossible -- not by a long shot -- but it's unlikely.

For starters, although repeal may certainly be an important rhetorical force in campaign-trail debates later this year, the first point at which it will be a substantive threat to the Democrats is January 20, 2013, at which point they are no longer guaranteed to control the White House. Until that time, because of the President's veto pen, it's not just figuratively but literally impossible for Republicans to amass enough manpower in the Congress to override a veto from Obama.

But the Republicans will have a small window of opportunity in 2013. To have a chance, they'll need:

(i) A majority of the House. Even if a handful of Blue Dogs were willing to sign on to the effort, it's unlikely that such measures could be pushed to the floor so long as the Democrats controlled the chamber. So an outright majority is probably needed. But this is the relatively easy part -- the Republicans may very well already have taken over the House in 2011.

(ii) 60 senators. Remember that filibuster thing that the Democrats hate? Now it can be their friend! Of course, some narrow parts of the bill could be excised through reconciliation or budget bills, which require a simple majority. But the problems with trying to repeal the broad thrust of the legislation through reconciliation are parallel to the ones that would be realized in trying to pass the bulk of legislation through reconciliation. Changes to the things like the creation of the insurance exchanges, or the new regulations imposed on insurers, would violate the Byrd Rule. The Republicans' options would be further constrained because legislation passed under reconciliation is supposed to be deficit-reducing. Although the Republicans could certainly make some surgical strikes via reconciliation, we're still probably talking about a 60-vote majority in order to repeal its most impactful provisions.

But 60 seats is not totally impossible. The Republicans could conceivably get to about 50 Senators this year. And then 2012 presents them with more opportunities for gains, since it's the echo of the 2006 cycle in which Democrats won nearly all of the competitive seats. Say that Republicans get to exactly 50 Senate seats later this year; they'd have to win 2012 races in, say, Nebraska (Ben Nelson), Virginia (Jim Webb), Missouri (Claire McCaskill), Montana (Jon Tester), Florida (Bill Nelson), Ohio (Sherrod Brown), West Virginia (possible Robert Byrd retirement), Wisconsin (possible Herb Kohl retirement), California (possible Diane Feinstein retirement), and Washington (Maria Cantwell). Although the Republicans also have a couple of tough defenses (Scott Brown, John Ensign, perhaps Olympia Snowe), 60 is doable if the political climate remains fairly toxic for the Democrats in 2012.

(iii) A Republican president. Of course this is doable as well, although the Republicans are not the favorites and whatever problems Obama might be having now tell us very little about what his standing will be in two years. In addition, Intrade thinks that there's roughly a 50 percent chance that the Republican nominee will be either Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin, either of whom is problematic because Romney probably can't win on a message of repealing Obamacare when it's so similar to Romneycare, and Palin probably can't win, period.

Basically, the likelihood of these three things happening is concomitant with the chances of there being a Republican wave election in 2012 -- enough for them to win almost every competitive Senate seat and enough to drag what might be a fairly weak Presidential candidate across the finish line -- as well as winning enough Senate seats later this year to put them within striking distance. It's hard to know what the chances of that are -- 10 percent perhaps? Recall that the economy is liable to be at least somewhat better in 2012, and that some voter anger may be quashed by any gains that Republicans are able to make in 2010. Although Republicans would clearly need to win a lot of Senate seats in November to bring them within striking distance of 60 in 2012, I'm not actually sure it helps them in terms of 2012 to win control of the House later this year, since they'd lose some of the advantages of anti-incumbency and since Boehner, et. al. would have a difficult time getting much done in a divided government -- they'd either be spitting into the wind or would wind up compromising with Obama on a lot of issues, which might tend to entrench the status quo (Obama keeps the Presidency, Republicans keep the House.)

It's also important to recognize that the Republicans will not necessarily have public opinion on their side in the repeal debate -- even though Obamacare is unpopular. As Matt Yglesias reminds us, even those polls that show a solid majority opposed to Obamacare (and many polls don't) have some of that opposition coming from the liberal end of the spectrum. CNN's latest poll, for instance, has just 43 percent opposing Obamacare from the right -- another 13 percent oppose it from the left but they'll want improvements and almost certainly not repeal. This FOX News poll, if you're willing to excuse its major issues with question ordering, shows something similar: although 55 percent oppose Obamacare, only 45 percent favor a repeal, with some of the opposition breaking off to want an expansion of the bill instead.

The Republicans could hope to capture some of these voters with a message of reform rather than repeal, but that could quickly get muddled: are they admitting that some parts of Obamacare are good? Could they keep the popular parts and banish the unpopular parts in a way that was remotely fiscally responsible? (Answer: no, or the Democrats would have tried to do the same.)

Although it's difficult to predict whether Obamacare will become more popular or less so prior to its implementation, the safest assumption based on the way public opinion is formulated right now is that the repeal message will have a lot of appeal to the 40 percent of the country or so who oppose the health care bill from the right (almost all of whom do so strongly), but will fairly quickly encounter diminishing returns as it tries to struggle up to 50 percent. In a midterm cycle like 2010, where turnout can be lopsided, this could nevertheless be a net benefit to the Republicans. It's less likely to be so in 2012 when turnout will be more robust -- but 2012, not 2010, is the cycle upon which repeal actually depends.

If Republicans do want to maximize their chance of making good on their repeal window, then, they probably ought to (i) redirect 2010 resources from House races to Senate races and (ii) work behind the scenes to promote a non-Palin, non-Romney Presidental candidate, particularly someone like Paul Ryan who has some street cred as a fiscal conservative and a policy wonk and (iii) think carefully about how everything they do right now will reverberate not just later this year, but also in 2012.

There's More...

Contract Post

Good Timing: The Role of Quantitative Political Science and Political Reporting in Shaping Perceptions

As you may have heard, the Democratic Congress just passed a big health care bill on a close-to-party-line vote, the Democratic President is about to sign it, and--oh yeah--the Democrats are expected to get slaughtered in the upcoming November elections.

But, as the timing of the above links reveals--the 2010 election prediction was made in September, 2009--it would be a mistake, when November 2010 rolls around, to attribute a Republican sweep to the events of March, 2010. During all those months from September through Feburary, a period when passage of the heath care bill was far from certain, the Republicans maintained their lead in the polls and thus their anticipated midterm election gains.

And I think that, when November rolls around, the pundits will realize this. Sure, one or two might say something about how the voters were punishing Obama and the Democrats for going too far in March, but then the more clueful pundits will get on their case and say: "No! Remember, the Republicans were expected to do well in the midterms, with authoritative predictions being made as early as September, 2009."

One thing that interests me here is the role of the political science profession in this story. By laying out our 2010 predictions early, we short-circuited what could otherwise have been a popular narrative about the election. This is something I've been thinking about for over 20 years--ever since Michael Dukakis's election loss was attributed (inappropriately, according to our research) to campaign strategies rather than to general economic and political conditions.

It feels good for once to be ahead of the story. And I think we as quantitative researchers should be proud of this, whether we're happy or sad about the new health bill, and whether we're happy or sad about the possibility of a Republican takeover in November.

Quantitative research is not just about making predictions; it's also about changing the storyline.

P.S. Here's the key graph (from Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien):



Follow the first link above for more discussion of the research.

P.P.S. In response to the first comment below: The above assumes that the 2010 election goes roughly as expected. If things are much different, one way or another, then, sure, it might make sense for the events of March 2010 to be part of the story.

P.P.P.S. In response to commenter #2: I hope we short-circuited the wrong narrative. I'm somewhat optimistic about this short-circuiting because I think that posting at 538 does have some effect!

There's More...

Contract Post

Obama's Share Determined Dems' Votes on ObamaCare

What was the single biggest determinant of whether a Democrat voted yea or nay on the health care bill yesterday? Actually, it isn't too hard to figure out:



This reflects the breakdown in the roll call based on the percentage of the vote that Barack Obama received in each congressional district in 2008. Members who are retiring from politics are excluded; those who are vacating their seats to run for statewide office are listed by the percentage of the vote that Obama received throughout the state, rather than their home district. Those technicalities aside, the trend is pretty clear. All 12 Democrats running in a place where Obama received less than 40 percent of the vote decided against the bill, whereas 195 of 202 running where he received a majority voted for it (including 64 of 64 in places where Obama had at least 70 percent of the vote). The swing votes tended to come from those districts in which Obama received less than 50, but greater than 40 percent of the vote two Novmebers ago. (Although it makes only the slightest bit of difference, the Obama vote share alone was a better predictor than PVI, which accounts for the results of the last two elections.)

By contrast, the competitiveness of a Democrats' 2010 race, as determined by a consensus of the four major forecasters, made much less difference:



Although there is a trend there as well, it isn't nearly as definitive. Of the 22 Democrats running in races that are classified as toss-ups (or lean Republican), 14 in fact voted for the bill. Moreover, the likelihood that a member's race is competitive is of course related to Obama's standing in the district; once both variables are accounted for simultaneous in a regression analysis, the competitiveness of a race basically turns out to be irrelevant. There are a handful of Democrats, like Dan Boren of Oklahoma, running in heavily anti-Obama districts but who nevertheless have only token opposition; they were almost uniformly unwilling to vote for the bill. On the other hand, members running in some very tough races in places where Obama did even modestly well were usually willing to back it. At the end of the day, the explicit appeal the White House made -- that Obama's presidency depended on the outcome of the vote -- may have been persuasive to many Democrats, except those for whom Obama is unambiguously a liability.

This is not to suggest, however, that Obama was the only variable that mattered. Ideology -- as measured by DW-Nominate scores, mattered some too:



Roughly the 110 most liberal Democrats all voted for the health care bill; Stephen Lynch was the most liberal member not to do so, and his track record is actually closer to the midpoint of the Democratic party than to its left flank. This ideology variable still qualifies as statistically significant even if Obama's vote share is accounted for along with it.

Even though Democrats picked up enough "Stupak bloc" voters to get them across the finish line, a Democrat's position on abortion also made some difference:



This variable holds up as being modestly statistically significant even if an overall ideology score is included as well, and you do even better with more sophisticated metrics on a member's abortion position like his Progressive Punch score. In other words, the concerns that pro-life Democrats had about the bill appear at least to have been reasonably sincere.

Some other interesting variables, however, did not matter very much. For instance, the percentage of uninsured in each district had no systematic impact:



And the magnitude of campaign contributions from insurance-industry lobbying groups mattered only at the margins:



Basically, each Democrat's vote determined by two things: a member's confidence that Obama could be an asset to them (he tended to get the benefit of the doubt on this -- but only up to an extent) and frankly their conscience -- as it regards both health care overall and the side issue of abortion. Each Democrat wrestled with these things in his own way and there were certainly a few exceptions and surprises -- like Lynch or Mike Arcuri voting against the bill, or Betsy Markey (who was a no-to-yes flip) or the two pro-life members from West Virginia voting for it. But in retrospect, the vote might not have come at such a high price for Democrats if Obama had invested more political capital in the bill earlier in the process and made more explicit moral appeals for it -- as these were the things that seem to have been most persuasive to Democrats at the end.

There's More...

Contract Post

Health Care Finale Liveblog

12:06 AM: Actually, per Chuck Todd, two Democrats -- Lynch and Lipinski -- voted for the reconciliation bill but against the Senate's package. But one Democrat -- Jim Cooper of Tennessee -- flipped the other way.

11:44 PM. Ken Bazinet says that it's Lynch who flipped -- one of my two guesses. Take that, Bowers!

11:41 PM. Chris Bowers thinks that Costello was the most likely person to vote yes on reconciliation but no on the Senate's bill. Could very well be. Either way, it's likely to be someone who doesn't face a tough re-election campaign.

11:35 PM. Reconciliation bill in fact gets one extra vote to bring it up to 220. I'd put my money on Berry first, then Lynch.

11:30 PM. The reconciliation bill has 217 votes and has passed, with 5 Democrats yet to vote.

11:29 PM. The reconciliation/fixes bill will be passed in a few moments here. This is the one the Senate needs to vote on too -- although the Senate's original bill still becomes law with the President's signature regardless of what happens there. Also quite likely that the reconciliation bill itself will be amended in the Senate (such as because of Byrd Rule problems), in which case the House will actually have to cast another vote to approve the changes.

11:24 PM. If anyone flips to vote yes on the reconciliation package after voting no on the Senate bill, I'd look first toward Lynch or one of the five Dems who voted yea on the rules package earlier (Altmire, Berry, Kissell, Peterson, Teague).

11:19 PM. Nice touch to have Dingell ask for a recorded vote on the reconciliation package.

11:18 PM. Motion to recommit fails 232-199.

11:14 PM. Another moderately specious argument that I'm hearing: that Pelosi had a few spares and therefore should have released some vulnerable members. The problem is that she needed commitments from some of those vulnerable members -- like Markey -- in order to persuade others to get on board. And once someone like Markey made a very public commitment to vote for the bill, it wasn't going to do her much good to walk it back. With that said, if there hadn't been this Stupak variable -- or people like Lynch being unhelpful -- she might not have had to ask for some of those commitments in the first place.

11:09 PM. The motion to recommit (a.k.a. kill the bill) unsurprisingly fails. Already 224 votes against (all Democrats). Next and last up is the vote on the reconciliation package. Wouldn't be totally shocking if the Democrats got 1-3 votes for the reconciliation package that they didn't have for the Senate bill.

11:06 PM. Essentially no surprises in the roll call. All 218 yesses from the New York Times whip count in fact voted yes, plus the undecided Jerry Costello.

11:00 PM. Stupak speaks out against the motion to recommit, which the GOP is trying to cast as a pro-life vote.

10:53 PM. As much as it's tempting to say: see, they really needed those Stupak votes and that's very probably true, it's not completely dispositive since (i) the votes aren't cast independently of one another -- some Democrats who voted no might not have if their votes were needed; (ii) some individual members of the Stupak coalition might have been picked off had a deal not been struck.

10:48 PM. All Republicans and 34 Democrats vote against. 219 Democrats vote for. Health care reform becomes law with the President's signature later this week.

10:47 PM. 219 Democratic yeas. Two Republicans yet to vote, although unless one of them is Cao, that won't change anything.

10:45 PM. Ballgame.

10:43 PM. Dems are at 210-31. Pelosi needs 6 of last 12 for passage.

10:42 PM. Why are there still more than a dozen Republicans who haven't voted yet? Now 209 for passage, still just 27 nays.

10:41 PM. Up to 203 for passage -- 27 Democratic nays.

10:38 PM. There doesn't seem to be that much motion/activity on the floor, another sign Democrats feel pretty comfortable about their total.

10:34 PM. The key thing to watch, of course, is the number of Democrats nays. They have 22 so far -- in the neighborhood of 35 are expected.

10:33 PM. Record ratings for C-SPAN tonight?

10:33 PM. Votes coming in surprisingly fast. About half of the Congress voted in the first 45 seconds.

10:32 PM. They're voting now. This first vote is the most important -- the Senate's bill.

10:22 PM. One lucky (?) break for the Democrats: since tonight's House vote has been so close and become the vote to watch on health care reform, and since Obama will have to sign a bill if/when the House approves the Senate bill, that's going make the Senate vote on the fixes -- where the optics are much worse because of the use of the reconciliation procedure -- feel like an anticlimax.

10:19 PM. Democrats did not use the entrepreneurship/self-employment argument enough during the course of the health care debate. Of course, I'm a little self-interested in that regard.

10:17 PM. Pelosi should probably be Time's Person of the Year for getting this done. Recall that Person of the Year by no means always go to someone who is universally liked. But, she's very, very good at her job.

10:16 PM. Didn't Boehner also imply that the cap-and-trade vote the most important vote the House had cast? Too tough to search through Congressional Record.

10:14 PM. Relatively tame for Boehner after a very confrontational start. Sustained GOP applause. He's not bad as a speaker in this relatively narrow context.

10:10 PM. Boehner wants a roll call vote -- which would be fine by me. One of the frustrating things about watching the House vote is that there's almost no way to know the yeas and nays until it's over.

10:04 PM. We're nearing the finish line here. I'm not sure if I'll have all that much to say, but you're welcome to continue yelling at one another in the comments section.

There's More...

Contract Post

Rules Vote Points Toward ~220 Yeas On Final Passage

The House has already cast one important vote on health care reform today, agreeing by a 224-206 margin on a vote establishing the rules for floor debate as they proceed to the two key votes on final passage later tonight.

All whip counts show between 216 and 218 yesses on the votes for final passage, although most account for a few undecideds which could push the total higher. Comparing against the New York Times's whip count -- we find that among those Democrats projected to vote NO on final passage, five voted YES on the procedural vote: Jason Altmire, Marion Berry, Larry Kissell, Collin Peterson, and Harry Teague.

Among the four Democrats that the Times listed as undecided, Jerry Costello voted YES, but Rick Boucher, Dan Lipinski and Lincoln Davis (whom other sources regard as a solid no) voted NO. Bobby Rush, who was technically undecided as of this morning but was not listed by the Times that way, voted YES.

Harry Mitchell, projected to vote yes on final package, voted NO on the rules bill.

Otherwise, all the votes were consistent with those projected on final passage, including NOs from Stephen Lynch, Mike Arcuri, Joseph Cao, and YES votes from Loretta Sanzhez, Paul Kanjorski, Pete DeFazio, Mike Michaud, and Jim Cooper, who made their decisions somewhat late in the process.

My guess is that in addition to the 218 YES votes that the Times lists, Costello will also vote YES, as will one of the five "surprise" yesses on the procedural vote -- although bear in mind that it's not uncommon for Congressmen (particularly those in party leadership positions) to vote yes on process votes and no on final passage. That would bring the Democrats' total to 220. But Mitchell, in a tough race in AZ-5, should also be watched for a potential defection.

It's also important to remember that there are two important votes on substance that the House will cast tonight: one on the Senate's bill and the other on the package of reconciliation fixes. The reconciliation bill -- relatively more popular with the rank-and-file -- could conceivably pick up a couple of yes votes that the Senate bill does not.

There's More...

Contract Post

UPDATED: Whip Counts Now Show Democrats With 216+ Solid Yes Votes

Lots of action in the last 20 minutes or so, so let's go ahead and start a fresh thread.

David Dayen: listed 215 yes votes earlier, but did not account for Paul Kanjorski or Joe Donnelly, who have announced their intentions to vote for the bill in the last half-hour or so. That would bring his count to 217. Dayen's total does include Bobby Rush, who still insisted on calling himself undecided as of this morning and to my knowledge has yet to revise that position. So call it 216 if you want to be conservative.

New York Times: This appears to be the most up-to-date count. They list 218 yes votes, counting Rush, or 217 without him.

CBS News: They also list 216 yes votes, not counting Rush -- but also not counting Kanjorski. So this should be read as 217.

The Hill: lists 214 yes votes -- but three of their four undecideds -- Kanjorski, Cooper, Sanchez -- have since come out in favor of the bill, which would bring their total to 217 as well.

[UPDATED] Washington Post: 216, not counting Rush, but they've also not yet counted Sanchez -- so this is also 217.

Lastly, the White House has said it expects to get about 220 yes votes. That's my best guess too, although there will be two different dynamics pulling on legislators once the roll call is taken. On the one hand, if passage looks assured, anybody who had an objection to the bill will have the opportunity to vote against it without seeming to kill it; on the other hand, some other legislators might want to be on the "right side of history", yadda yadda, and will get caught up in the momentum. It still wouldn't completely surprise me if representatives who would suffer little electoral consequence from voting no -- such as John Tanner, who is retiring, Mike Arcuri, who is highly vulnerable to a primary challenge, or Stephen Lynch, who comes from a quite liberal district, wind up voting yes on the bill after all. The vote of the lone Republican to support the bill in November, Joseph Cao, could also come back into play now that a compromise on abortion language has been reached. But there could also be one or two surprise nos.

There's More...

Contract Post

Passage Almost Certain, But Number of Votes Unclear

UPDATE: Sorry -- this information is already out-of-date and comments have been shut off. Please see the new thread.

The New York Times currently lists 217 218 votes for passage of health care reform, with 6 4 legislators undecided. Of the 217 218 yes votes that they count, one is at least a little tenuous: Loretta Sanchez, who has been flaky, and Bobby Rush, who still insisted on calling himself undecided as of this morning. They also list Tennessee's Lincoln Davis as undecided, who said earlier he'd vote no. On the other hand, they list Republican Joseph Cao as a no, but he could be brought back into the fold after the compromise on abortion language.

David Dayen, meanwhile, had 213 yes votes, although that total did not account for Indiana's Joe Donnelly or Pennsylvania's Paul Kanjorski, who has since been revealed to be on board with the bill. Technically, then, passage is not assured by Dayen's count, although he believes that several of the 7 undecideds that he list are likely to come on board.

CBS News splits the difference by listing 215 confirmed yes votes and 8 undecideds; like the New York Times, they count Lincoln Davis as undecided, Joseph Cao as a no, and Sanchez as a yes, although they do keep Rush at undecided.

The Hill, whose whip count has been somewhat deceivingly pessimistic throughout the health care debate, lists 214 yes votes and 4 undecided; they classify several lawmakers as no or leaning no that most other sources regard as undecided.

Lastly, the White House has said it expects to get about 220 yes votes. That's my best guess too, although there will be two different dynamics pulling on legislators once the roll call is taken. On the one hand, if passage looks assured, anybody who had an objection to the bill will have the opportunity to vote against it without seeming to kill it; on the other hand, some other legislators might want to be on the "right side of history" and will get caught up in the momentum. It still wouldn't completely surprise me if representatives who would suffer little electoral consequence from voting no -- such as John Tanner, who is retiring, Mike Arcuri, who is highly vulnerable to a primary challenge, or Stephen Lynch, who comes from a quite liberal district, to wind up voting yes on the bill after all.

There's More...

Contract Post

What We Learned

Healthcare reform is expected to pass later today. After years—nay, decades—of failed attempts by various presidents to restructure our hodgepodge, post-war, employer-based insurance system, President Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress have finally broken through. The legislation is imperfect and will hardly solve all of America’s problems, but it’s a start.

Putting the policy and its implications aside, what political lessons can we takeaway from the past year? Plenty, some of them rather disconcerting.

1. Non-incremental policy change is never easy. Presidents since Harry Truman have been trying to solve our healthcare problems. Following Scott Brown's tectonic election in Massachusetts, President Barack Obama was correct when he reminded the nation how politically risky and damaging it was for him to tackle healthcare reform in the first place. But whatever credit he deserves for taking that risk must be leavened by the fact that the White House at times did not seem ready to prosecute a message and campaign commensurate with such a major policy reform--as both David Axelrod in a fantastic recent New Yorker piece by George Packer and the president himself conceded in his State of the Union speech this year. Non-incremental change, especially on this contentious and complex issue, required a full-on assault by the Administration using every weapon in its arsenal.

2. The presidential pulpit doesn't bully by itself. The Washington Post recently ran a Sunday "Outlook" cover piece about how Obama's cool, dispassionate, intellectual, bridge-building style would be more amenable to service on the Supreme Court than in the White House. I like to think Obama's style is suitably presidential too, but until recently it seemed like the president was unable to get tough--that his conciliatory tone was not helping him or his fellow Democrats that much. If you presume there are votes to be gained across the aisle (or even within your own party) but reaching out a hand, fine. But given that the GOP was clearly signaling its obstinance no matter what--see Senator Jim "Alamo" DeMint; see also #7, below--Obama may as well have thundered away from the start. Say what you want about George W. Bush, but he always "asked for your vote" in campaigns and managed to move the public and the Congress on far less popular and necessary agenda items via stubborn insistence on his position. Obama's belief that his election was somehow a tonic for the type of politics played in Washington was, in the end, a fantasy. He should have asked Americans to rally on behalf of reform--and bullied those in his way.

3. Misinformation is more easily disseminated than debunked. Washington is overtaking 20 percent of the economy! Grandma's survival will be decided by "death panels"! This will end Medicare as we know it! To misinform is to recognize and exploit the asymmetries of political warfare, and reform opponents understood this well. The Administration was not always good at explaining what was in the legislation (see #1, above), especially since there never was a White House bill in the first place (see #4, below). But having to explain what the legislation does not contain only made explaining what it does contain tougher. Misinformation works.

4. Have an Administration bill. Given the respective outcomes for Clintoncare and Obamacare, I'm least certain of this lesson, but it still seems to me that letting the Congress lead the process made it more confusing and delayed the outcome. At one point last summer, it seemed like Max Baucus was running the entire show, rather than the White House. And it was hard for proponents to defend reform because it was impossible to say what exactly the Administration supported. Multiple versions of legislation also invited legitimate complaints from opponents that it was difficult to respond to "healthcare reform" as proposed because it was in fact a moving target of bills and amendments in both chambers. I understand the need to defer and respect Congress. But this is politics in the modern, presidential-centered era, not the 19th century.

5. Proxying process for policy works. You know that old legal maxim about arguing the facts when the law is against you, and arguing the law when the facts are against you? The political equivalent is to focus on process when a policy's popularity works against you. Rather than engage in point-by-point debate about healthcare costs or access, Republicans and conservatives very smartly pointed to congressional deal-making (Cornhusker Kickback!), transparency (televised hearings in Congress), bipartisan inclusion (We want a summit!), and, most galling yet effective, bemoaned that a policy reform which was six decades in the making, discussed for two years during the last presidential campaign, and debated for the past year or so has somehow been "rammed through." I don't remember these arguments, or debt-minded Tea Party "patriots" making these arguments during the debates over Bush tax cuts or Medicare Prescription Part D legislation. But give credit where credit is due: Focusing on process was very, very smart politics by the GOP because it's always easier to sway busy, rationally ignorant voters seeking informational shortcuts for understanding a complex policy proposal by redirecting their attention to an easily-understood deal cut by a Louisiana senator as proof that the policy proposal itself is rotten.

6. It pays to hold out. Ben Nelson, Olympia Snowe, Joe Lieberman, Mary Landrieu, Bart Stupak, Dennis Kucinich, Eric Massa--need I say more? OK, we can scratch Massa, but you get the point: In this town, the squeaky wheels get the political lube jobs.

7. Bipartisanship is a waste of time—except as a tactical feint. After the Scott Brown rebuke, Obama basically said, "Fine, I'll meet publicly with my Republican opponents." He proceeded to spank them pretty solidly. But in the end, as it was from the beginning, he wasn't going to get any support from them. And frankly, as I have long maintained, it didn't make sense for the GOP to sign on to the Administration's efforts anyway, because they would get no credit and stand to benefit considerably from playing the blame game if the public hates reform. However, the recent lip service the Administration paid to bipartisan cooperation, from the meeting in Baltimore to the health care summit, did help because it provided a patina of procedural fairness and gave the media a counter-story that focused on befuddled GOP elites instead of Tea Partiers. But there were never any votes to be mined from reaching out the hand of bipartisanship, and hopefully the Administration will remember that next time.

There's More...

Contract Post

Stupak to Vote Yes?

4:08 PM. Indeed, Stupak says they have a deal. Pop the champagne. The text of the White House's Executive Order is here.

3:51 PM. Several press accounts now say a deal has been reached and will be announced at the 4 PM conference.

3:35 PM. Stupak will hold a presser at 4 PM. Henry Waxman sounded some pretty optimistic notes in an impromptu interview with CNN -- but not much longer to wait now.

3:05 PM. A CNN producer caught up with Stupak about 15 minutes ago as he was headed back to his office -- he was somewhat hesitant to speak with her, and suggested that he was "getting there" and "trying to get it done" -- but there's still no deal yet. Keep in mind that, while the CW is to speak of the Stupak voters as a "bloc", the 8 or 10 representatives in this group have different incentives and might want somewhat different language out of the White House ... some wanting nothing more than the thinnest leaf of cover to vote for the bill and others probably looking for any excuse not to vote for it.

2:02 PM. CNN's Dana Bash providing a little bit more clarity on her earlier reporting -- saying that Stupak had told her that he was very close and was negotiating directly with White House lawyers -- but no new news, really, and until we hear something from Stupak himself, there are no guarantees.

1:43 PM. FOX's Major Garrett, confirming CNN, reports (via Twitter) that Stupak's office tells him that they have not yet reached a deal over executive order language.

1:35 PM. CNN is also reporting that John Tanner, another retiring Democrat who voted no originally, will maintain his no vote -- making it more important for Democrats to pick off some members of the Stupak bloc.

1:23 PM. Indeed, there's some contradictory reporting on this, with Politico also saying that Stupak is a yes but CNN saying they've heard from his office that he's not there yet. What's less ambiguous is that Marcy Kaptur and Brian Baird have now said they'll vote for the bill, which would bring the Democrats pretty close to their target even without Stupak.

1:12 PM. At this point, we're sort of out of the period in which any kind of arm's-length analysis is going to do very much good and it's mostly up to the reporters -- one of which I am not. On that front, MSNBC is reporting that Bart Stupak will in fact vote for the bill, probably in exchange for an executive order which would be issued by the White House to clarify the scope of the bill's abortion language. If Stupak votes for the bill, it's a safe bet that several other members of his "bloc" (which had already been whittled down some) will too, and that the bill will pass with a margin of a few votes to spare -- probably giving Democrats enough of a cushion to avoid any last-minute shenanigans on the floor. Still, Stupak has not yet confirmed this himself.

It looks very, very good, in other words, but stranger things have happened...

There's More...

Contract Post