Uninsured rate drops sharply in some swing states

Political analysts at the University of Virginia Center for Politics have put up a separate collection of data showing how many votes each state will have in the Electoral College in 2016; how those states voted in the 2012 presidential elections; and whether those states appear to be swing states.

States and the District of Columbia will have a total of 538 Electoral College votes in 2016. 

In seven states that have 9 or more Electoral College votes and are rated as either toss-up states or states that lean Republican, the decreases in the state uninsured rate ranged from a drop of 0.8 percentage points (to 12.5 percent, in Virginia) up to a drop of 7.8 percent (to 6.1 percent, in Ohio). Virginia is the only state on the list in which the drop has been less than 3 percentage points. 

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The size of the drop in a state’s uninsured rate is bigger than that state’s 2012 presidential election victory margin in four of the states: Colorado, Florida, North Carolina and Ohio. 

The size of the drop in the state uninsured rate also seems to be comparable to the size of the 2012 presidential election margin of victory in some other large states that the University of Virginia analysts identify as being likely to vote for the Republican presidential nominee in 2016. In Georgia, for example, the uninsured rate dropped 6.1 percentage points, to 15.3 percent, this year. Mitt Romney’s margin of victory against Obama in 2012 was 7.8 percentage points.

One question will be whether efforts to get states’ uninsured residents engaged with health insurance programs, and equipped with identification documents suitable for applying for public health programs, will have any effect on whether those newly insured residents’ are registered to vote, or whether they actually vote. Another question will be how much they think about their health coverage when casting their votes.

Exchange users did not have an obvious affect on the results of the 2014 midterm elections, but enrollment was considerably lower than it is now, and, at that point, some exchange plan users had still not used their coverage. It’s also possible that any new voters coming into the electorate from the exchange program might be more likely to start out voting in a presidential election than in other, somewhat less-discussed elections.