3.  The Political Hazard of Health Care Reform: Gang of Six Hurting in Polls

The Senate's Gang of Six—the three Republicans and three Democrats who tried to craft a bipartisan health reform bill—may be wishing they'd kept a lower profile. Not only have efforts produced little consensus, but recent polls show they've taken deep plunges in approval ratings, and seemingly proportionate with their public exposure, according to Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight.com. Each member of the group (Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Jeff Bingaman, Olympia Snowe, Chuck Grassley, and Mike Enzi) "started out the year in a place of seeming electoral invincibility," Silver writes. Grassley is now down 18 percentage points this year, to a 57 percent approval rating. Snowe and Baucus are doing similarly poorly. But Bingaman, "the quietest of the Group of Six," hasn't felt the blowback nearly as much. (There's no comparable polling on Enzi and Conrad, but Silver expects the pattern would hold for them, too.)

Read original story in Fivethirtyeight.com | Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2009