Is Ben Nelson in Hock to Big Nebraska?
A Research 2000/Daily Kos poll shows that Nebraskans approve of Ben Nelson’s approach to health-care reform and oppose the public option. That’s not surprising. Nebraskans are conservative. And given that their Democratic senator is painting health-care reform as liberal overreach and the public plan as socialism, it’s no surprise that they’re skeptical of the whole thing. There’s an interesting counterfactual of how Nebraskans would feel if trusted Nebraskan politician Ben Nelson were selling heath-care reform to them as a good thing, but it’s basically irrelevant now. The implication of this poll is that neither Obama nor the Democratic leadership has any real leverage over Nelson. His vote is very much his own, and there’s no plausible mechanism by which casting it against health-care reform harms his reelection prospects. The only exception is if he filibusters, in which case a solid quarter of Democrats and 15 percent independents would be less likely to support him. But even that
