There have been indications that Republicans are going to be presenting legislation in the next few weeks to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Many Members of Congress have been met with vocal protests over this idea at their district town-hall meetings. This is not surprising given the widespread support for the ACA. The maps below show ACA support and current member by congressional district. For more information on how these support levels were calculated, please see our ACA white paper published earlier this year.

Haystaq has built national models predicting voters’ attitudes about 60+ different issues. These are based on large-sample phone surveys and are applied to all 200 million voters nationwide.

We’ve analyzed our national issue models and found that these are the top issue scores among the group of Bernie supporters less likely to turn out for Clinton this fall

• Support for marriage equality
• Support for marijuana legalization
• Environmental issues including support for renewable energy, opposition to fracking, and belief in human-caused climate change
• Pro-Choice
• Support for raising the minimum wage

They are also strongly against some of Trump’s signature policies such as a ban on Muslim immigration and a wall between the US and Mexico.

For a full list of issues important to this target group, contact info@haystaqdna.com.

See our full list of issue models.

You can’t turn on a tv without seeing someone talking about the weather and how it affects turnout.  Well, it turns out that as of 2:30 eastern, the weather is worse in counties that went for Romney in 2012.  Now you know.

HaystaqDNA has been conducting daily surveys in 35 states over the past two weeks.  This is part of a long-term research project to determine what survey questions are the best predictors of who will actually vote.  While we will have to wait awhile after the election to find out who actually voted, there are some interesting insights from the surveys thus far.

One of the questions we are testing asks voters if they feel more or less enthusiastic about voting compared to past elections.   Overall, 60% of the voters surveyed said that they felt more enthusiastic about this election than they did in past elections.  As one might expect, those who have strong opinions one way or another report being more enthusiastic about the election.  Conservatives and Republicans have lead Democrats and liberals in terms of enthusiasm, but the gap seems to have tightened as we got closer to Election Day.

Republicans have consistently held a lead in enthusiasm.  Democrats and independents were roughly tied two weeks ago, but, as we got closer to the election, Democratic enthusiasm increased while the independents remained steady.

A similar trend is apparent when we look at self-described ideology.  As of October 20^th, conservatives were more enthusiastic than either liberals or moderates.  Since then, liberal enthusiasm has increased while moderates have remained fairly steady.  People who support the Tea Party have shown a consistent lead in enthusiasm compared to those who are neutral or unfavorable toward the Tea Party.

In an election that has been described as a referendum on President Obama, enthusiasm is highest among those who disapprove of the President, followed closely by those who approve.  People who are undecided about the President are much less enthusiastic.  When we asked if voters viewed the election as being about the individual candidates or about sending a message about President Obama, those opposing Obama have had a consistent lead in enthusiasm up until Saturday, when their enthusiasm dropped, and the enthusiasm of people supporting the President or voting for specific candidates ticked up.

Details can be seen at http://viz.haystaqdna.com/2014-election-turnout-polls/

POLL RESULTS

• A broad cross-section of respondents supports U.S. military action against ISIS (86% support/14% oppose), including 57% who strongly support it.
• In fact, support for U.S. military action transcends ideological boundaries, with 91% support among self-described conservatives, and 78% support among self-described liberals.
• That said, it is important to note that while two-thirds of self-described conservatives (65%) consider ISIS to be the most significant threat to U.S. national security, just two in five self-described liberals say the same (39%), with a plurality (41%) citing global climate change as the most significant threat.
• By a margin of six-to-one, respondents who watched President Obama’s speech report that they are more likely to support U.S. military action against ISIS than they were prior to watching the speech (47% more likely/8% less likely).
• The President gets mixed marks overall, with respondents split on his handling of terrorism (48% approve/52% disapprove) and on the question of whether he has a strategy to deal with ISIS (46% has strategy/54% does not have strategy).
• Respondents are ideologically split on the question of Obama’s handling of terrorism, with 83% of self-described liberals approving of his performance, and 80% of self-described conservatives disapproving.  The President earns a thumbs-up from self-described moderates (57% approve/43% disapprove).
• Similarly, 76% of self-described liberals believe the President has a strategy to deal with ISIS, compared with just 20% of self-described conservatives.  Self-described moderates are split, with a narrow majority (53%) saying they believe the President does have a strategy.
• Among liberals, Obama’s natural base, there is a split on the question of whether the President has a strategy to deal with ISIS between those who watched the speech and those who did not.  Among self-described liberals who watched the speech, 85% believe Obama has a strategy to deal with ISIS, but just 63% of those who did not watch say the same.
• The survey finds a similar dynamic among self-described moderates, with 60% of those who watched the speech saying the President has a strategy, compared with just 44% among those who did not watch the speech.
• While self-described conservatives overwhelmingly believe that Obama does not have a strategy to deal with ISIS, there is a slight difference between those who watched the speech (23% believe President has a strategy) and those who did not watch the speech (16% believe President has a strategy).

The study finds that if mapmakers target risk-averse incumbents, they can encourage those incumbents to retire and potentially create a more competitive seat.

Previous research has focused either on partisan effects (Which party “won” the 1980s round of redistricting?) or on aggregate trends (Do more incumbents retire after redistricting?). Our study builds on the extant research by looking at specifically which members of Congress are more likely to retire when presented with unfavorable redistricting, and posits a causal mechanism behind this effect. By examining redistricting in the 1990s, 2000s, and the most recent round leading up to the 2010 election, test whether there are systematic differences in how incumbents react to the uncertainty created by redistricting.

Specifically, we look at “risk-taking” incumbents vs. those who are “risk-averse.” We identify this propensity for risk in two ways: members of Congress who originally ran for office by challenging an incumbent rather than running for an open seat, and those who originally ran for office in a district where voters are predominantly members of the opposing party ( > 57% votes for the opposing party’s presidential candidate). Members of Congress who originally ran for office under one of these two conditions have a greater tolerance for risk than those who ran when there was an open seat or a safe partisan district.

In the paper, currently being prepared for submission to a peer-reviewed journal, we look at a couple different facets of redistricting generated uncertainty.  As seen in Figure 1, the first is the redistricting “timeline”, or how early the plan is adopted before the election. If incumbents respond poorly to uncertainty, we’d expect to see more retirements when plans are adopted late in the cycle. We find that risk-takers are unaffected by when the plan is adopted, while their risk-averse counterparts are more likely to retire when the plan is adopted late in the cycle.

We also compare the type of redistricting plan – was this plan a friendly one (“in-party”), a hostile one (“out-party”), or an incumbent protection plan (“bi-partisan”)? And how do risk-takers differ from those who are risk-averse in reacting to partisan plans? Figure 2 presents the difference between the two favorable types of redistricting and out-party redistricting. The values are calculated by subtracting the probability of retirement in bipartisan/in-party plans and out-party plans. As we can see, the likelihood of retirement between the different types of plans is statistically indistinguishable for risk-takers, but non-risk-takers are significantly more likely to retire when they face a hostile redistricting plan (“out-party”) compared to either of the two more favorable types.

By looking beyond aggregate trends and looking at characteristics of individual members of Congress, we confirm that politicians do not react to redistricting and uncertainty in the same way. Those who have previously shown a propensity to take risks are less responsive to manipulations by partisan mapmakers, and are less affected by uncertainty than their risk-averse counterparts. These individual characteristics help give us a greater understanding of exactly how partisan mapmakers can affect the decision-making process of incumbent members of Congress, and give us greater insight into how redistricting affects choice in democracy.

A new study conducted by Haystaq Fellow and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Mary Washington Chad Murphy finds that Democrats in Congress are actually more negative about “Obamacare” than their Republican counterparts, while both parties view “healthcare” much more positively.

Derek Willis at The Upshot recently published an article about the decline in the use of the word “Obamacare” in congressional news releases, arguing that it seems to be “shrinking as a political issue.” He finds that this summer, members of Congress only used the word “Obamacare” 138 times this summer compared to 530 times during the same time period last year. He also noted on Twitter that Democrats are much more likely to use the phrase “Affordable Care Act” than “Obamacare” by a 16:1 margin. Does this gap in language between the two parties matter?

Many news organizations and polling firms have shown differences in survey responses depending on what people call the act, and there was of course Jimmy Kimmel’s take on this issue. But there is surprisingly little research into how politicians frame the healthcare law. So to answer this question, we used the Capitol Words API to download all congressional speeches in the most recent Congress. We then used DW-NOMINATE scores to rank the members in terms of ideology and divide them into five quintiles (most liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, and most conservative). Finally, we applied the HiDEx model to analyze the sentiment of each of these groups for “Obamacare” and “healthcare.” Our results were surprising.

In the graph, positive numbers represent positive sentiment toward the concept, while negative numbers represent negative sentiment. As the figure shows, when Democrats use the frame “Obamacare” they are actually more negative than Republicans, with the second most liberal quintile being the most negative about the word.

This doesn’t mean that Democrats are more negative toward the “Affordable Care Act,” instead it means that Democrats have potentially internalized the negativity of the frame, while Republicans are potentially more likely to use “Obamacare” as a colloquial title with less emotion attached to the word itself. While they label it “Obamacare” less frequently than their Republican counterparts, they do so more negatively, which would possibly help explain why the term has such power in public discourse. Democratic members of Congress dislike “Obamacare” even as they’re more likely to support the “Affordable Care Act”.

Most of the research on women’s representation looks at the types of policies Congress passes, and whether women vote for more “pro-women” policies than their male counterparts. Academic research on this topic is mixed, with some scholars finding overall differences between women and men in Congress, others finding differences on specific issues, and others finding no difference at all between the two groups. While this has been a hot topic in political science for several decades, we still don’t have a definitive answer for whether men and women represent their constituents differently.

This research typically relies on roll call votes – that is to say whether women are more likely to vote “yes” on legislation that men vote “no” on. Roll call data have a number of limitations, and just because they are the easiest data to access doesn’t mean they are the right data. To answer this unresolved question, we looked in a different place: speeches.

Speeches, specifically Senate floor speeches, give us better leverage on the question for  three reasons.

1. They can be on any topic the Senator chooses
2. They can be measured on virtually infinite dimensions rather than a forced “yes/no” dichotomy
3. Politicians speak far more than they vote, giving us bigger data

By looking at all Senate floor speeches in the 112^th Congress (2011-2012), and comparing men and women in a high-dimensional model of word co-occurrence called HiDEx, we were able to compute a “semantic differential” score for a number of different words representing women’s issues. We found a few significant differences between men and women.

We present our findings in the figure, and the full working paper is available on Academia.edu. We show that women were more likely to describe other women and healthcare positively than men were, while they were more likely to describe guns negatively. They were also more likely to describe abortion as being about “choice” than “life.” But most strikingly, women linked other more closely to “work” rather than “home.” This shows a fundamental difference in worldviews between men and women, and a fundamental difference in how the different genders view the role of women in the modern world. These findings hold even when controlling for partisanship.

By applying a novel analysis to an old question we were not only able to help bring new evidence to a debate in the academic literature, but we were able to learn more about the differences between men and women than we would have if we only looked where everyone else was looking. Finding a new dataset and applying a more sophisticated, high-dimensional analysis gives us the advantage and shows differences that weren’t otherwise apparent.

 

Read the article and see the map here –

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/haystaq-tea-party-interactive-map-favorability

For a dynamic map of runoff results see:  http://viz.haystaqdna.com/mississippi-runoff/