The failure of the Senate on Wednesday to pass a variety of gun control measures is yielding its share of second-guessing. How close was President Obama to seeing the bills meet the 60-vote super-majority required for approval? And was it a good use of his political capital to try?
I won’t attempt to provide definitive answers to these questions, but we can address some simpler ones. What factors predicted how the senators voted? Which were the most surprising yes votes — and which no votes does Mr. Obama have the most license to complain about?
In particular, we will look at the vote on the highest-profile of the gun control measures: the amendment proposed by Senator Joseph Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and also sponsored by the Republicans Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Mark Kirk of Illinois, to institute national background checks. That amendment, which required 60 votes for approval,received 54 votes instead. I ran a simple logistic regression model that sought to explain each senator’s vote on the amendment based on five factors.
Modeling the Senate's Vote on Gun Control
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