The Washington Post published a very nice table with information on contributions by the Health industry and number of uninsured in the districts of each one of the house representatives who voted for or against yesterday’s Health Care Reform bill.
Washington Post Health Care Reform Vote
I ran some statistical analysis on the numbers (logistic regression, t tests,etc). What I found wasn't always that surprising or perhaps the numbers are in the eye of the beholder. However it got me thinking about the group of 23 Dems who voted for Stupak and against the Health care bill.
In short, the answer is that no, you cannot make a "statistical" prediction based on campaign contributions (P-value=0.172). Basically, the evidence is not strong enough to be able to claim that health industry contributions are predictive of the vote. The average contributions for the NO vote are higher though, at $ 439121, and for the Yes vote $ 380489.
What is more, the number of uninsured people in a congressman’s district is not at all predictive of the vote outcome (p=0.510).
I then ran a logistic regression on contributions and #of uninsured and party affiliation. Here, the result showed that the health industry money contribution is predictive of party affiliation (P-value=0.0532), but not the number of uninsured (P=0.6306).
That means that one party gets significantly more money from the health industry than the other. Not a surprise for anyone, right? And who got more? The Republicans, of course.
How much more on average? Well Republicans got $460,037 on average while Democrats got $374,775. A t test, which only compares the contributions by party affiliation returned a significant P-Value (P= 0.0480, 2- tailed).
Conclusion: Health industry contributions did have a minor effect on the outcome of the vote. The number of uninsured in a district had no effect on the outcome. And the number of uninsured people are not predictive of having a Democratic or Republican representative. But yes, Republicans receive on average $86,000 more in contributions per member than Democrats.
What does that mean? That the vote of house representatives was not influenced by the number of uninsured in their districts. I would guess that some representatives don’t even know how many uninsured they have in their districts. Perhaps these people are not worth being represented since they are already too poor or unemployed. But neither did campaign contributions matter that much.
I guess what mattered was plainly and simply: politics and idiology.
Now, this got me thinking about another test that would be way more interesting. How about the blue RATS? Let’s not call them "dogs", dogs are such loyal animals that you can’t call these traitors dogs. Here again is the list of the 23 democrats who voted for Stupaks ammendment and against the health care bill :
Jason Altmire (PA-4) 202-225-2565
Bobby Bright (AL-2) 202-225-2901
John Barrow (GA-12) 202-225-2823
John Boccieri (OH-16) 202-225-3876
Dan Boren (OK-2) 202-225-2701
Ben Chandler (KY-6) 202-225-4706
Travis Childers (MS-1) 202-225-4306
Artur Davis (AL-7) 202-225-2665
Lincoln Davis (TN-4) 202-225-6831
Bart Gordon (TN-6) 202-225-4231
Parker Griffith (AL-5) 202-225-4801
Tim Holden (PA-17) 202-225-5546
Jim Marshall (GA-8) 202-225-6531
Jim Matheson (UT-2) 202-225-3011
Mike McIntyre (NC-7) 202-225-2731
Charlie Melancon (LA-3) 202-225-4031
Collin Peterson (MN-7) 202-225-2165
Mike Ross (AR-4) 202-225-3772
Heath Shuler (NC-11) 202-225-6401
Ike Skelton (MO-4) 202-225-2876
John Tanner (TN-8) 202-225-4714
Gene Taylor (MS-4) 202-225-5772
Harry Teague (NM-2) 202-225-2365
Unfortunately, while this whole number crunching procedure was a good practice for me, the data from the Washington Post is not ideal to reveal if my hypothesis is true. The blue RATS took almost exactly as much health industry money as the regular democrats (Just $15,000 more on average). You cannot differentiate them by that (disclaimer, 23 is a small sample size). We should monitor how much money they will be getting after their vote.
So what was my hypothesis? While crunching the numbers and rearranging the data I realized that the problem we have is that the Blue RATS are not really blue, they are not democrats!
Blue RATS are REPUBLICANS! Why did they ran on the democratic platform? Because the Democratic Party allowed them to promote rightwing ideals and of course, to get OUR MONEY! It was a very smart strategy to lull Democrats into believing they have a majority, when in fact, THEY don’t. (Although of course as someone pointed out, it allows us to have Pelosi and not Boehner as the speaker of the house, but a simple majority with true Democrats would do that too)
Some of the blue RATS have not been in congress long enough to study their vote record, but unless I have other data, all I have is an unproven hypothesis that these blue RATS are actually Republicans who registered democrats to get more independent votes.
Then yesterday askew had a Diary that showed that we have 15/44=34% democrats voting NO on the Health care bill among the democrats elected in 2008 and 2009 when Van Hollen was the head of the DCCC and 2/35=6% among the democrats elected when Rahm was DCCC head, if we count retained seats in both cases.
I can tell you that that there is a highly statistically significant difference in those percentages (P-value=0.0023, Fisher Test).
For the Stupak bill it's 20% voting yes in the Rahm group and 18% in the Van Holle group. About the same. 20% democrats on the side of religious obsessed pro-lifers and against women rights are too many though!
Conclusion: A significant higher number of Van Holle democrats betrayed us when it comes to Health care. The difference is so significant that we should look at the criteria used to pick the Van Holle democrats. I agree with Kos that our next candidates should not be conservadems and that our money should not go to them. Let's make sure in the future we elect less of the recent Van Holle and pro-Stupak type democrats.