Nate Silver: How Many Votes Does the Public Option Have? How Many Does it Need?

Earlier I suggested that the public option probably does not have the votes to pass the the U.S. Senate. Let's examine this in a bit more detail.

Open Left's Chris Bowers lists 43 senators ( http://www.openleft.com/diary/14574/latest-public-option-whip-count ) who as of last Wednesday, he believes based on official communications would vote in favor of a public option. This appears to be the best and most contemporary whip count of its kind.

There are at least two names on Chris's list of yea votes that I'd regard as less than certain: one is Ted Kennedy, who obviously supports the public option but might not be healthy enough to vote on it, and the other is Diane Feinstein, who has indicated that she's open to either a public option or non-profit co-ops -- wherein lies the whole debate. But let's give the Democrats credit for these two votes and start counting upward. What's their easiest path to 50?

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So for the public option to pass, it probably needs to be included in the initial, unamended bill that hits the Senate floor. This means that it probably needs to be supported by a majority of the Senate Finance Committee. But this is a little bit of a problem, since the public option only appears to have seven solid yes votes in the Finance Commitee when it will need 12:

Likely Yes (7): Rockefeller, Bingaman, Kerry, Schumer, Stabenow, Cantwell, Menendez
Probable Yes (1): Wyden
Swing (4): Baucus, Lincoln, Bill Nelson, Snowe
Probable No (2): Carper, Conrad
Likely No (9): Grassley, Hatch, Kyl, Bunning, Crapo, Roberts, Ensign, Enzi, Cornyn

If you could get a majority of this group of 23 senators to support the public option, then it would have better-than-even odds of being included in the bill that made it to the President's desk. Getting a majority of this group, furthermore, would probably mean that folks like Blanche Lincoln and Bill Nelson had voted in favor, meaning that the bill had at least 50 votes worth of support in the Senate overall.

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So, again, in order for a public option to pass, it probably requires the support of:
1. A majority of the Senate Finance Committee;
2. A majority of the Senate overall.
...and these two things are highly correlated; it is likely that either both are true or neither are.

When Kent Conrad says the public option does not have the votes, I suspect this means that (i) he himself does not want to vote for it; (ii) Max Baucus, the committee chair, is no more than lukewarm on it; (iii) senators like Carper and Lincoln have told him they'd prefer to vote on a bill without a public plan. If Conrad knows this, then the White House probably does too. There's some utility to them in pulling back on the public option now as (i) it signals their willingness to broker a deal while a deal can probably still be had and (ii) it prepares the liberal blogopshere to be let down gently, and perhaps to have rebounded by the time the bill comes up for final passage in the fall and their phone calls and door-knocks could be essential.