Fivethirtyeight.com: Special Interest Money Means Longer Odds for Public Option

I wish I could do stats the way this guy can.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/special-interest-money-means-longer.html
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Some 37 senators are listed by Howard Dean's website as supporting the public option so far: 36 Democrats plus Olympia Snowe. To Dean's list I add Arlen Specter as a 'yes' vote, based on a recent public statement.

I decided to build a model to explain and predict whether a particular senator supports the public option. The variables in the model are as follows:

-- The senator's ideology, as measured by his DW-NOMINATE score;
-- Per capita health care spending in the senator's home state;
-- Lobbying contributions received by the senator from health insurance PACs since 2004.
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We can also estimate which particular senators are most likely to have been influenced by lobbying money. The following chart presents the model's estimates of the net decrease in a senator's probability of supporting the public option based on the quantity of insurance PAC money that he has received:
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Nice listing by senator of PAC $ received since 2004
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To be clear, not all of the opposition to the public option is the result of special interest money. Most Republicans probably oppose it on general principle, and there are a couple of Democrats, like Maria Cantwell of Washington, who have yet to come around to it even though they've taken almost nothing (in Cantwell's case, literally nothing) from the insurance industry. But the money is why, even with 59-60 votes in the Senate and a President with high approval ratings, Democrats are facing an uphill battle on the issue.

relatively static quantities to be a good predictor. IMO.