Harshest Obamacare critics are hardly a diverse bunch

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As the Republicans again pursue a path of destruction targeted at Obamacare it’s worth noting that the most die-hard congressional opponents of the Affordable Care Act represent districts that are very different than most of America.
The 80 House Republicans who in a letter pressured Speaker John Boehner to push for the government shutdown unless the ACA was defunded do not live in those areas with growing diversity that worry GOP strategists.

While the Republican Party is increasingly becoming the rural party, many House members from some of the sparsest areas of the nation did not join the most ardent defund-Obamacare advocates. In fact, nearly half were all from the traditional South (below the Mason-Dixon Live) or Texas. (The map above compares the 80 districts with the 2012 presidential election results, by congressional district.)

Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker, relying upon data from The Cook Report, completed an analysis of the 80 co-signatories' districts and found that they are, for the most part, outliers to the rest of America. It already seems like a long time ago but the letter to Boehner came in late September at a time when some establishment Republicans were predicting disaster for the GOP if the shutdown occurred. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer dubbed them the “suicide caucus.”

These 80 lawmakers come from districts that are, on average, 75 percent white, while the average House district is 63 percent white, according to Lizza. In fact, the demographics show that these districts (no doubt, with the help of gerrymandering) are becoming more white. These territories have fewer Hispanics and blacks than the average congressional district and slightly lower levels of education.

The members themselves of this little group of 80 are the furthest thing from diverse. Seventy-six are male; 79 are white.

Lizza sums up the landscape this way:

“… Suicide caucus members live in places where the national election results seem like an anomaly. Obama defeated Romney by four points nationally. But in the 80 suicide caucus districts, Obama lost to Romney by an average of 23 points. The Republican (caucus) members themselves did even better. In these 80 districts, the average margin of victory for the (House) Republican candidate was 34 points.
“In short, these 80 members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.”