Should Olympia Snowe Represent Her Voters or Her Party?

Olympia Snowe's Tuesday vote in favor of Max Baucus's health-care plan inspired much chatter about her "bucking the party" and whether the GOP will retaliate and strip her of her coveted seniority. But the polling data Ben Smith uncovered yesterday got me thinking about a different tension in politics: an old three-way conflict between representing your party, representing your constituents, and plain old intellectual leadership. Although Snowe's moves are easily characterized as a shift away from her party's power brokers, they could also be seen as a genuine attempt to represent the folks who elected her to office.

According to a recent survey, 57.4 percent of Maine voters are in favor of a government administered option while 37.2 percent are opposed. A whopping 73.6 percent of Maine residents support stricter regulation of insurance companies, and 58 percent approve of the job Obama is doing. An earlier Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll had similar results. That poll found that more Maine residents identify as Democrat than Republican, but a plurality identify as independent. It also found the state is divided on marriage equality, with the results (47 pro, 49 anti) within the margin of error.

So that's the political landscape that Olympia Snowe is representing. Doesn't sound characteristically Republican, right? It's pretty safe to say that it's quite unlike the states most GOPers represent. It's a stark contrast even with, say, Democrat Mary Landrieu's Louisiana, where, according to Rasmussen, only 41 percent of residents approve of the president (they mostly didn't vote for him last year) and 61 percent disapprove of his health-care reforms. Yet while Democrats probably consider Snowe's vote a principled break from her party, a no vote from Landrieu would be considered heresy, a failure to exhibit leadership in the face of unpopularity.

Snowe's health-care stance makes a lot of sense when you consider who put her in office. If Snowe's politics hewed closely with Mitch McConnell or indeed most of her peers, she probably wouldn't have been elected there. Having an R after her name certainly helped with some proportion of voters, but the polling data seems to indicate a population that mirrors Snowe's own politics to a large degree. Those folks still appear to hold her in high esteem, so if she wants to keep her seat then she should probably keep doing what she's been doing. Representing is, after all, a central tenet of representative democracy. It's also a convenient rationale for refraining from making unpopular but important decisions. To represent or to lead is a question politicians have struggled with over the ages. In the health-care debate, we're watching it again play out, tortuously, before our eyes.