I know many lefties like to pretend that history started on 20 January 2009, but I have to insist that they’re wrong. In fact, studying history shows that Democrats in Republican-leaning districts might want to stay away from supporting too many of Obama’s more leftist proposals, including ObamaCare:

There were two controversial pieces of legislation that defined the Clinton Administration for Republican-leaning voters: the assault weapons ban and the first Clinton budget (a.k.a. the tax hike). If we look at the fifteen Democrats who voted against both pieces of legislation, only one lost (she represented a district that gave Bush a 15-point win in 1992). In fact, about half of them saw their share of the vote increase or stay roughly the same from 1992!

Let’s move on to Democratic incumbents who represented Republican-leaning districts who voted for only one of these two pieces of legislation. There were thirty-seven such Democrats. The casualty rate here is a little higher; thirteen of them, or thirty-five percent of them, lost. And of the twenty-two Democrats from Republican-leaning districts who voted for both pieces of controversial legislation, ten of them (45%) lost.

In other words, the problem for Democrats in 1994 was not that they didn’t support Clinton’s agenda enough. It was that they got too far out in front of their conservative-leaning districts and supported the President too much.

If there’s any way for a Democrat to get too far out in front of a conservative district, it’s voting for ObamaCare, especially if said Democrat has already voted for other controversial bills, including (but not limited to) the so-called “stimulus,” or cap-and-trade.