Support For Public Option In Connecticut By District

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com did a great job of breaking down some poll numbers for the Public Option on a district by district level and across the nation. I did a quick cut and paste of the numbers just for Connecticut:

The results beg the question of why some more of Connecticut's Congress critters are not leading the charge for the Public Option? They know the people want it and they have to know that it is the right thing to do.

It is an all around political winner and just plain old common sense good public policy.

Some important notes on this from Nate Silver:

We can systematize these results by means of a regression analysis that accounts for the Obama vote share and the poverty level in each district. (Technically, we'll be using a logistic regession, treating each of the voters included in one of these surveys as a separate data point.) This analysis finds that support for the public option nationwide is about 55 percent, against 36 percent opposed, similar results to what I believe to be the most reliable polls on the subject.

What's more interesting, though, is where we project the public option in individual districts. We find that:

-- The public option is estimated to have plurality support in 291 of the 435 Congressional Districts nationwide, or almost exactly two-thirds.
-- The public option is estimated to have plurality support in 235 of 257 Democratic-held districts.
-- The public option is estimated to have plurality support in 34 of 52 Blue Dog - held districts, and has overall popularity of 51 percent in these districts versus 39 percent opposed.

Obviously, there is a margin of error inherent to this analysis when applied to any individual district. The polls that inform this analysis themselves have a margin of error, and there is an additional layer of error introduced by the statistical process that we apply to the data.

There is some pretty good reasoning behind this data to tell the few Blue Dogs trying to stand in the way of the Public Option to suck it up and do the right thing, as well. Go and take a look at the data yourself. The information is a real eye opener as to where there is some really strong support for the Public Option even in some supposedly "conservative" districts.

Will Larson Replace Emanuel?

Via Roll Call, with Rahm Emanuel going to President elect Obama's side at the White House there could be a lot of jockeying for positioning down the line:

So far, the race for Caucus chairman is a two-way matchup pitting Vice Chairman John Larson (Conn.) against Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), who engineered the 20-seat gain as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Van Hollen had a standing offer from Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to do a second tour heading up the party’s campaign arm, but he made clear on Wednesday that he wasn’t interested.

“I’m exploring all my options,” Van Hollen said at a midday press conference. “One option I’m not exploring is continuing as chairman of the DCCC.”

Instead, a senior Democratic aide said, Van Hollen is eyeing a run to replace Emanuel, whom he followed at the DCCC. He will have to defeat Larson, who briefly chaired the Caucus when Democrats were in the minority. Larson essentially handed the post to Emanuel at Pelosi’s urging as a reward for quarterbacking their comeback when Democrats retook the House.

Van Hollen and Larson have begun calling colleagues to lock up support. But the race is just beginning, and others could jump in.

Will CT-01 Rep. John Larson bag the job?