The House health care vote

Since people seemed to like my post on the Coburn amendment, here are some political science visualizations of the 220-215 final passage vote on the House health care bill.

First, here is Royce Carrol's auto-generated plot of the vote using Lewis-Poole optimal classification estimates:

The cutting line, which represents the best-fitting line separating yes from no votes, performs extremely well (414 of 435 votes are correctly predicted). Its orientation (not far from vertical) indicates that the vote was largely driven by the left-right ideological divide.

Similarly, here is a one-dimensional visualization of the vote from Simon Jackman's blog using Clinton-Jackman-Rivers estimates of member ideal points (members are arrayed from liberal to conservative as you move from left to right; click on the graphic for a larger version):

Jackman also created a nice plot of the relationship between Obama's vote share by House district and Democratic members' votes on final passage:

For more on the House Democrats who voted no, see this interactive graphic from the New York Times and this CQ Politics analysis.

Comments

[MartyB]

Interesting stuff Brendan.

What I find interesting is the level of bi-partisan support for "Nay" these graphs show.

And while the line in the first graph is certainly not close to horizontal I'm not sure it's appropriate to call it "not far from vertical" as it's off by at least 20 and perhaps 30 degrees. There is something significant going on here beyond the "left-right ideological divide".

[JP]

Great visualizations. Data-ink ratio nearly equal to one.

[Health Care]

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