Recent polling shows broad national support - 77% - for the "choice" of a public option. To diffuse arguments that this wide support may not necessarily translate to support in a majority of states - perhaps due to huge majority support in the very "blue states" - we need to arm ourselves with the statistics of how those numbers stack up state by state.
By knowing what the percentage support is for a public option in each state, Senators who are not strongly supporting the public option can be targeted and identified as not representing the will of their state's constituents. Campaigns can then be mounted to take advantage of this electoral vulnerability and hopefully persuade the Senators to abandon their misguided lack of support for it.
Also, in states that are on the borderline, as far as majority support for a public option goes, information campaigns can be mounted in those states or regions where they will be most useful.
It's easy for Senators Baucus, Conrad and the like to be arguing that they have every right to wield power that is disproportionate to the small population they represent - that is the role of the Senate and is the reason it was set up with 2 Senators per state - regardless of each state's population. However, that argument will be pretty hard to make if they are not even representing the will of their own (over-represented) constituents.
They would truly have to answer for their actions and their dubious motivation for them, and unless they changed course, by supporting the public option, could relegate themselves to earning a title that the Australian Prime Minister (the progressive, good one, before John Howard) once bestowed on his recalcitrant Senate - labeling them, "unrepresentative swill".