Ezra Klein notes that coal state Democrats voted against the Waxman-Markey climate bill at a higher rate than non-coal state Dems, but not that much higher. About one-in-four of the coal state Democrats voted no, compared to only a little over one-in-10 of everyone else:
Even so, that means only one-in-four of the coal state Democrats voted no. I’d like to see those results drilled down to coal-dependent districts, but still, that’s quite a bit less parochial defection than one might imagine.
….Another way of putting this is that the evidence suggests that this vote was less about parochial interests than partisanship and ideology. Plenty of Democrats from coal states made the judgment that they could defend this legislation to their constituents.
I think I’d look at this a little differently. Sure, partisan politics was the main divide, but that’s the main divide on everything. What’s more interesting is that a quarter of the coal state Dems voted against the bill even though it had already been massively watered down to reflect coal state interests. In its current state, Waxman-Markey has very little effect on coal state interests for at least the next decade, and possibly for more like 20 years. But even so, lots of coal state Dems voted against it despite the fact that passage is a major goal of the party leadership, it’s a major goal of the president, and it’s the right thing to do. I’d call that pretty damn parochial.
