The total number of "no" votes among House Republicans was 144, compared with 87 "yes" votes (and one absence). If you're counting, that makes at least the fourth major violation of the Hastert rule (an unwritten rule allowing only bills with a support of the majority of the Republican caucus to appear on the floor).

In general, the vote was a pretty clear split between the establishment and far-right wings of the House GOP. If you want to see this in graphic form, look at the graphic from GovTrack at the top of the story; the array of dots represents the members of the House arranged from left to right in terms of ideology, and, as you'll notice, the "yes" votes come mostly from the half of the GOP caucus that's further to the left. Another way to look at it, graphically, comes from the VoteView blog of poli sci professor Keith Poole, creator of the DW-Nominate vote aggregation system. Again, you can see how most of the Republicans who voted "yes" pile up at the left end of the GOP caucus, while the "no" votes are mostly to the right of the caucus's cutline.



Image of House shutdown vote

An important consideration—especially when thoughts inevitably turn to the 2014 election, and what implications the shutdown vote may have—is also the lean of the districts represented by the Republican votes. There are 17 districts where Obama got the most votes in 2012, but which are represented by Republicans in the House. Of these districts, only one member voted "no"—and bear in mind there are some very conservative members (Gary Miller, Mike Coffman) in a few of these districts, but the instinct for self-preservation seems to kick in even with them.

The one outlier is Jeff Denham, who represents CA-10, centered in Modesto and which gave Obama 50.6% of the 2012 vote. Denham already has a credible Democratic challenger in the form of Michael Eggman, so it's not as if Denham feels he can coast in 2014 either. Beyond Denham, the next six most competitive districts (based on presidential numbers) with "no" votes are VA-04 (Randy Forbes), NY-23 (Tom Reed), OH-10 (Mike Turner), MI-07 (Tim Walberg), NJ-05 (Scott Garrett), and WI-07 (Sean Duffy), all of which clocked in around 48% Obama last year.

Maybe, out of perverse curiosity, you're wondering who the "yes" votes in the most solidly Republican districts were, eager to see who's at risk in a primary, not a general election. Those members would be Ed Whitfield in KY-01, Steve Womack in AR-03, Adrian Smith in NE-03, the retiring Spencer Bachus in AL-06 … and most endangered of all, Hal Rogers in KY-05 (23% Obama, in the deepest corner of Appalachia), who also happens to be Appropriations Committee chair and a man whose pork will only get pried out of his cold dead hand.

If you're wondering about the most competitive districts not in terms of presidential numbers but rather who had the closest races in 2012, we've got that too. And the "no" voter who fared the worst is none other than Michele Bachmann, who had the third closest race of 2012 in MN-06, although she doesn't really count because she’s read the writing on the wall and has already retired. (The two even-closer victims, Rodney Davis in IL-13 and Dan Benishek in MI-01, both voted "yes.") Bachmann is followed by Jackie Walorski in IN-02, Chris Collins in NY-27, Keith Rothfus in PA-12, and Tom Reed in NY-23 (who, if you look two paragraphs above, gets a double-whammy, in that he also had the third least-red district in 2012).

Another way of breaking down the votes is by what region the Republican votes came from. The ranks of the "no" voters are swelled by southerners, though it's worth noting that the majority of the most conservative members of the House GOP caucus are already from the south while its most moderate members tend to be from the northeast. (For more insight on the unique southern-ness of the tea party mentality—a descendant of traditions going back to Andrew Jackson and, more ominously, John Calhoun—Michael Lind has written a number of interesting articles at Salon about this.)

YES

West: 19

Midwest: 24

Northeast: 18

South: 26

NO

West: 20

Midwest: 35

Northeast: 8

South: 81

Even slicing and dicing by region doesn't tell the whole story, though; for instance, when you say "south," that covers a wide variety of subregions and demographics. Many of the "yes" votes in the south come from its most urbane parts, such as Virginia and Florida, which tend to be more affluent and diverse and function somewhat as extensions of the northeast, while the "no" votes are more rural and downscale. (There are, of course, lots of exceptions: all four members from Arkansas voted "yes," while the members from Atlanta's upscale suburbs, even the ones not running for Senate, all voted "no.") Similarly, when talking about the Midwest, there's a big difference between the votes in Chicago's suburbs versus those in rural Missouri.

If you look at the disparities between those locations, you'll notice that much of it tends to be about class. Along those lines, Richard Florida just published a fantastic look at the relationship between the debt limit deniers and the demographics of their districts, in Atlantic Cities. This piece relied on the 79 signers of the Meadows letter (a declaration of principles that established what Ryan Lizza called "the suicide caucus"), rather than Wednesday night's vote, although the overlap between the signatories and Wednesday's "no" votes is pretty thorough. He finds a reasonably strong correlation between the tea party members in Congress, and lower wages (-.30), lower incomes (-.33), and lower percentages of college graduates (-.36). Their districts have lower percentages of immigrants and LGBT populations, lower urbanization, and more uninsured persons. In terms of occupation, these tend to be the parts of the country with the fewest "creative class" members. As Florida puts it:

The Tea Party represents the lagging sectors of the economy, and, increasingly, the politics of those left behind by America's transition to a new, knowledge-oriented economic future.

In other words, these are the parts of the country that are on the losing end of the changes in the nation's economy. Think back to the Democracy Corps focus groups that were discussed several weeks ago, where tea partiers were revealed as rife with fear over the country's increasing diversity and evolution toward a more knowledge-based economy, which they sensed as stripping away what remains of their accustomed privileges and pushing them toward the margins. That same worldview has also been thoroughly studied and described by political scientist Theda Skocpol ; her recent interview with Salon, worth a read in full, elaborates further.

The representatives in these districts are, in fact, taking their cues from their constituents. They're hoping to stand athwart history and yell "stop," even if means the extreme step of imploding the entire country's economy in order to protect the lives they think they once had and their own dwindling slice of the pie.