The Democrats were furious Monday over eight senators who caved to support a deal to end the government shutdown that does not include the Affordable Care Act subsidies their party had spent weeks fighting for.
The offending lawmakers include Democratic Senators Dick Durbin, Tim Kaine, Jacky Rosen, John Fetterman, Catherine Cortez Masto, Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, and independent Senator Angus King, who claimed that they’d ensured a Senate vote on extending the tax credits. Their capitulation comes after House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted for weeks that he wouldn’t promise them a vote on anything, and even if he does follow through with a vote, it’s unlikely such a measure will pass the House.
Democratic lawmakers slammed their colleagues for forfeiting health care coverage for an estimated 5.1 million Americans by 2034 and increasing premiums across the marketplace.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders railed against the deal while speaking before the Senate Sunday. “If this vote succeeds, over 20 million Americans are gonna see at least a doubling in their premiums in the Affordable Care Act,” he said. “For certain groups of people, it will be a tripling and a quadrupling of their premiums. There are people who will now be paying 50 percent of their limited incomes for health care. Does anybody in the world think that makes sense?”
Simple random samples (uniform probability for each individual) without replacement follow the hypergeometric distribution. However, humans aren’t random, know when they go up for re-election, and decide accordingly, so the probability for each individual is not uniform. We could expect a much higher probability for this outcome than that of a simple random sample.
I ran the numbers on the “purely random” scenario, and it’s a 5.77% chance that none of 8 randomly selected from a group of 47 would be from a subgroup of 13 (34/47 * 33/46 * 32/45…)
I ran them again under the Totally Accurate Wild Guess of those 13 being 3 times as likely to cave as the others, and the odds of all 8 being from that set is 34.4%.
Ramping it up to 10 times as likely, 71.5%.
The 50% mark happens around 4.73 times as likely.
None of these numbers are meant to convince anyone of anything, they’re just provided for whatever anyone wants them for.
That’s exactly my point. :)