One Vote Out of Step? The Effects of Salient Roll Call Votes in the 2010 Election

• Author: Eric McGhee,John Sides,Seth Masket,Steven Greene,Brendan Nyhan
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X11433768
• Published date: 01 September 2012
• Date: 01 September 2012
• Subject Matter: Articles

433768APR40510.1177/1532673X114337
68Nyhan et al.American Politics Research
© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
American Politics Research
40(5) 844 –879
One Vote Out of Step?
© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
The Effects of Salient
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1532673X11433768
http://apr.sagepub.com
Roll Call Votes in
the 2010 Election
Brendan Nyhan1, Eric McGhee2, John Sides3,
Seth Masket4, and Steven Greene5
Abstract
We investigate the relationship between controversial roll call votes and
support for Democratic incumbents in the 2010 midterm elections. Consis-
tent with previous analyses, we find that supporters of health care reform
paid a significant price at the polls. We go beyond these analyses by iden-
tifying a mechanism for this apparent effect: constituents perceived incum-
bents who supported health care reform as more ideologically distant (in
this case, more liberal), which in turn was associated with lower support for
those incumbents. Our analyses show that this perceived ideological difference
mediates most of the apparent impact of support for health care reform on
both individual-level vote choice and aggregate-level vote share. We con-
clude by simulating counterfactuals that suggest health care reform may have
cost Democrats their House majority.
Keywords
Congress, elections, health care
1Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
2Public Policy Institute of California, San Francisco, CA, USA
3George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
4University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA
5North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA
Corresponding Author:
John Sides, George Washington University, 2115 G Street NW, Suite 440,
Washington, DC 20052, USA
Email: jsides@gwu.edu

---

Nyhan et al.
845
Can one wrong vote end a legislative career? The answer is interesting, and
not just for the members of Congress who are kept awake at night by this ques-
tion. The relationship between roll call votes and election outcomes speaks to
how voters make decisions in congressional elections. If individual roll call
votes affect how constituents view their representative, then voters are not
merely drawing on their partisan affiliation or responding to the presence of
a competitive challenger in their district. Instead, they are relying, at least in
part, on more specific information about how, and how well, they have been
represented by the incumbent. Thus, voter responses to roll call votes have
implications for the quality of democratic representation: if individual votes
in Congress factor into voter decision-making, then representatives are being
held more accountable for their actions than we might otherwise expect.
Political science suggests that legislators have reason to be concerned.
Members with high rates of party loyalty (Carson, 2008; Carson, Koger, Lebo,
& Young, 2010), ideologically extreme voting records (Canes-Wrone, Brady,
& Cogan, 2002), and unpopular positions on controversial pieces of legisla-
tion (Ansolabehere & Jones, 2010) appear to pay a price at the polls. However,
previous studies have not systematically connected micro- and macro-level
evidence to analyze the mechanisms by which members are held account-
able for controversial votes. To better understand this process, we examine
three salient roll call votes—the votes for health care reform, the economic
stimulus, and cap and trade during the 111th Congress—and their impact in
the 2010 election.
Our analysis addresses three important questions. First, did these roll call
votes matter in 2010? Our previous analyses and those of other scholars have
suggested that support for these initiatives hurt incumbent Democrats in the
House, especially in competitive districts (Brady, Fiorina, & Wilkins, 2011;
Jacobson, 2011; Masket & Greene, 2010; McGhee, Nyhan, & Sides, 2010).
These findings are most robust for health care reform. Using statistical match-
ing techniques, we isolate a more comparable set of members and districts and
demonstrate that Democratic incumbents’ support for health care reform was
associated with lower vote share.
Second, and more importantly, how is it that roll call votes come to affect
election outcomes? Previous work has demonstrated an association between
support for certain pieces of legislation and vote share but has not identified a
causal mechanism. We propose such a mechanism: support for controversial
legislation causes voters to see their representatives as more ideologically
distant. We find support for this hypothesis among individual voters. We then
show that this perception of ideological distance actually mediates much of

---

846
American Politics Research 40(5)
the apparent impact of support for health care reform on both individual-level
vote choice and aggregate-level election outcomes.
Third, could support for health care reform have cost the Democratic
Party not only votes but seats? We simulate the Democratic seat share in the
House of Representatives in a counterfactual scenario in which all Democrats
in competitive districts opposed health care reform. In this scenario, Democrats
would have retained an average of an additional 25 seats and would have
had a 62% chance of winning enough races to maintain majority control of
the House.
Our account benefits from new methods and survey data that have only
become available to political scientists in the last few years. It thereby pro-
vides a methodological template and accompanying inferential standard for
future efforts of this kind. Our account also constitutes one of the first efforts
to trace the entire process of electoral accountability: from specific incumbent
behavior to voter attitudes to election results. In the 2010 election, health care
reform appeared to cost Democrats a large number of votes, primarily by mak-
ing them appear more liberal, and may have cost them control of the House.
Roll Call Voting and Electoral Accountability
Given voters’ lack of attention to day-to-day events in Congress, it may seem
unlikely that they could hold legislators accountable for their voting records.
In fact, early research on congressional elections emphasized the visibility
of challengers more than the substance of incumbent behavior (Mann &
Wolfinger, 1980). However, members of Congress seem to think that their
votes matter. Although most of them are reelected even in “anti-incum-
bent” years like 2010, they act as if reelection depends on avoiding mistakes,
consulting extensively before casting votes on controversial issues (Kingdon,
1973).
Members do have some reason to worry because their voting records
appear to affect their electoral safety. For instance, members with more ideo-
logically extreme records (Canes-Wrone et al., 2002; Carson, 2008; Erikson,
1971; McGhee & Pearson, 2011) and higher party unity scores (Carson, 2008;
Carson et al., 2010) attract less support at the polls than do more moderate
members, although the penalty for ideological extremism is most severe in
competitive districts (Griffin & Newman, n.d.; Montgomery & Nyhan, 2010).
But can specific roll call votes matter over and above a member’s overall
record? There is certainly anecdotal evidence that voters punish members who
cast controversial votes on salient issues. For instance, Rep. Jeannette Rankin

---

Nyhan et al.
847
(R-MT), the first woman to serve in the House of Representatives, lost her
seat after just one term because of her vote against U.S. entry into World
War I (Lopach & Luckowski, 2005; Smith, 2002). The same fate befell her in
1942 after she was elected to Congress again and voted against entry into
World War II. Similarly, Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (D-PA) was
defeated after casting the deciding vote for President Clinton’s 1993 budget
(Heidom, 1994).
More systematic analyses have also highlighted the electoral perils of spe-
cific votes. Heidom (1994) finds that support for key initiatives of President
Bill Clinton—the 1993 budget and NAFTA—hurt Democratic incumbents in
the 1994 election. Canes-Wrone, Minozzi, and Reveley (2011) find that
Democrats who cast votes that were “tough on crime” did significantly better
in the 1994, 1996, and 1998 elections—the period in recent history during
which public concern with crime was at its peak. More recently, Green and
Hudak (2009) find that Democrats who supported the Troubled Assets Relief
Program (TARP) when it was first considered by the House (September 29,
2008) experienced a smaller increase in vote share between 2006 and 2008
than did the Democrats who opposed it. Finally, Ansolabehere and Jones
(2010) show that constituents who disagreed with their representatives on
salient roll calls taken in 2005 and 2006 were less likely to approve of their job
performance and to vote for them.
The midterm election of 2010 provides an ideal test for whether individual
roll call votes can affect incumbent electoral performance. During the 111th
Congress, House Democrats passed high-profile legislation to reform health
care, stimulate the economy, and create a cap and trade system designed to
reduce greenhouse gases. These bills helped provoke a popular backlash that
was more severe than most Democrats expected. The economic stimulus bill
served as a major rallying point for the nascent Tea Party movement, and
health care reform only added to the controversy (Saldin, 2010). Cap and
trade received less attention—in part because it did not pass the...